Creator / Brad Bird

"It's not a genre! A Western is a genre! Animation is an art form, and it can do any genre. You know, it can do a detective film, a cowboy film, a horror film, an R-rated film or a kids' fairy tale. But it doesn't do one thing. And, next time I hear, 'What's it like working in the animation genre?' I'm going to punch that person!"

— Brad Bird on the DVD commentary of The Incredibles

Phillip Bradley "Brad" Bird (born September 24, 1957) is a director and screenwriter from Kalispell, Montana. His experience lies mostly within the realm of animation, and he's also known as one of the directors to actually bob and weave his way around the concept of the Animation Age Ghetto, due to most of his works looking aesthetically cartoony, but having a maturity and depth that rivals most live-action pieces.

Bird got his start working as an animator on Animalympics, Disney's The Fox and the Hound and Martin Rosen's The Plague Dogs, and moved on to work with Steven Spielberg in his Amazing Stories anthology series, notably with a short titled "Family Dog" (which later got turned into a TV series). He got his big break after he managed to grab the attention of Tracey Ullman, and began work alongside Matt Groening on a crude animated series that premiered on The Tracey Ullman Show, called The Simpsons.

Bird's later claims to fame include two films that captured his love of the classic comic book stories, The Iron Giant and The Incredibles, the latter of which was the beginning of his tenure at Pixar. His next animated film was the Pixar-produced Ratatouille. He then moved into live-action by directing Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, the fourth installment of the Mission: Impossible film series, which is his live-action debut. The film has received extremely positive reviews, particularly for its action scenes. His most recent live-action project is Tomorrowland, a film for Disney inspired by the area of the Disney Theme Parks, and in 2018 he directed the long-awaited Incredibles 2. His next project will be Ray Gunn, a science fiction mystery film to be produced at Skydance Animation.

Other credits include:

• *batteries not included: Co-writer and executive producer
• The Critic: Executive consultant
• Garfield on the Town: Animator
• Jurassic World: Voice of the monorail announcer
• King of the Hill: Creative consultant and storyboard artist during seasons 1 & 2

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Tropes demonstrated by Brad Bird and his works include:

• Associated Composer: Michael Giacchino has scored all of his films since The Incredibles.
• Author Appeal: Optimistic mid-century science fiction, with several of his animated films being set in the 1950s and 1960s and Tomorrowland being all about asking what happened to that brand of futurism.
• Berserk Button: Bird has vowed to punch out the next person who calls animation a "genre", as he believes it is a medium that can tell any kind of story.
• Creator's Oddball: In addition to being his first live-action film, Ghost Protocol is his only film where he didn't write the script, and his only film to be in a pre-existing franchise.
• Crossdressing Voices: Originally, Edna Mode of The Incredibles was to be played by a woman, though Pixar struggled finding an actress they liked. Eventually Lily Tomlin was asked, but when she heard Bird do his impression of how he wanted the voice to sound like, she suggested he do it instead.
• Descended Creator: For The Incredibles, as he was the only one who could properly do Edna's accent.
• Deconstructor Fleet: It would appear that Bird loves to take his childhood to pieces and play with the bits.
  • Reconstruction: But then he puts them back together better than ever.
    • The Incredibles: In the first few minutes, he shows the negative effects of superheroes/villains on society, buries them Watchmen-style, then shows how difficult normal life is for supers like the Silver age. Then he gives them a villain to fight and shows that heroes aren't the problem.
• The '50s: Two of his movies take place in the fifties and deal with specific sentiments of the period. The Iron Giant involves the looming fear of the Cold War and also invokes a bit of the classic sci-fi made during then. The Incredibles, while not explicitly set in the 1950s, borrows heavily from the aesthetic, namely what people living in the decade thought the future would be like, while also criticizing the value of the nuclear family.
• Hot-Blooded:
  • Making-of videos show him at his most passionate (which you really need to be for filmmaking).
  • His praise of Pixar's software engineering department, whom he considers their true unsung heroes, borders on Large Ham:
  "If I were one of these people, I'd be like 'HEY!! I JUST MADE A MIRACLE HAPPEN!!'"
• Objectivism: Bird's films have been seen to veer close to this leaning, though far too humanist to fall into Randian. It should be noted that Bird has gone on record as identifying as more of a centrist, though he'd later lean more towards liberal, and that a review from the New York Post in 1999 accused Bird of being a "Communist sympathizer", arguing that the Iron Giant's treatment of Cold War paranoia was him saying "Maybe the Soviet Union weren't the bad guys after all." Bird denied this in a 2015 interview.
• Signature Style:
  • When Bird writes stories for families, they often tackle themes that aren't typical for animation (such as death, the nature of souls, how laws and morality are sometimes disconnected) and almost always have bittersweet endings (The Iron Giant saves Hogarth and the town of Rockwell but gets physically destroyed, The Incredibles defeat Syndrome but still have to fight an unjust law, Gusteau's is shut down but Remy has opened Anton Ego's mind, etc.) with moods that are more muted than the typical family film. Two of the first films he worked probably had something to do with that, being very dark for the medium.
  • His animated films feature classically animated (i.e., full, Disney-quality animation) characters with broad, graphic designs. Unlike most CGI movie characters at the time, the characters in his first two Pixar films actually looked as though they were drawings first before being modeled in the computer. The style also carried over to his third Pixar film, though by that point stylized and dynamic character designs had already become the norm for CG animation.
  • He has a distinct way of directing dialogue that succeeds at the difficult task of making the animated character and the voice appear one and the same. He supposedly does this by telling his actors to give performances that will directly inspire the animators.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: All his films are heavily on the idealistic and heartwarming end.
• Take That!: Has this to say about other studios who try to be like Pixar:
  Everyone in Hollywood says they wish they could do it like Pixar, but they really don’t. There’s no secret at Pixar, but there is a belief in letting people pursue something with passion and take chances, and most of Hollywood, really, doesn’t like that. It’s too scary. Some studio executives will say they love obsessive creators who take risks, but really most of them would rather play it safe. Projects cost a lot of money and people would rather follow patterns they know and make things safe and accessible. Hollywood wants there to be a math formula for making hit films. To make something really great and different and interesting means taking risks and following these ideas in your head.
  • He's also done this to Disney of all companies on a number of occasions during his time in making The Iron Giant, as seen in the Blu-ray's documentary.