75 Facts About Brad Bird

Phillip Bradley Bird was born on September 24,1957 and is an American film director, animator, screenwriter, producer, and voice actor.

Brad Bird has had a career spanning forty years in both animation and live-action.

Brad Bird developed an interest in the art of animation early on, and completed his first short subject by age 14.

Brad Bird attended the California Institute of the Arts in the late 1970s, and worked for Disney shortly thereafter.

Brad Bird directed the 1999 feature The Iron Giant, adapted from a book by poet Ted Hughes; though critically lauded, it was a box-office bomb.

Brad Bird moved to Pixar where he wrote and directed two movies, The Incredibles and Ratatouille that were worldwide critical and financial smash hits; both earned Bird two Academy Award for Best Animated Feature wins and Best Original Screenplay nominations.

Brad Bird returned to Pixar to develop Incredibles 2, which was released in 2018 and became the second highest-grossing animated picture of all-time.

The bulk of Brad Bird's filmography has attracted widespread acclaim; with the exception of Tomorrowland, all of his movies have high aggregate scores from viewers and critics.

Brad Bird is known as an advocate for creative freedom and the possibilities of animation, and has criticized its stereotype as children's entertainment, or classification as a genre, rather than art.

Brad Bird was born in Kalispell, Montana, the youngest of four children to Marjorie A and Philip Cullen Bird.

Brad Bird's father worked in the propane business, and his grandfather, Francis Wesley "Frank" Bird, who was born in County Sligo, Ireland, was a president and chief executive of the Montana Power Company.

Brad Bird started drawing at age three, with his first cartoons clear attempts at sequential storytelling.

Brad Bird was particularly enamored with animation after a screening of The Jungle Book, and a family friend who had taken animation classes explained how the medium worked.

Brad Bird's father found a used camera that could shoot one frame at a time, and helped him setup the device for making films.

Brad Bird began animating his first short subject at age 11; that same year, his family connection introduced him to composer George Bruns, who set him up a tour of Walt Disney Productions in Burbank, California.

Brad Bird has characterized his parents as generous and supportive of his interests.

The studio responded with an open invitation for Brad Bird to stop by whenever in town, which led him to make several visits to the studio's California headquarters in the ensuing years.

Brad Bird worked closely with Milt Kahl, whom he considered a hero.

Brad Bird began another film, titled Ecology American Style, which was more ambitious and in color, but the workload was intense.

That year, he was awarded a scholarship by Disney to attend the newly formed California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California; Brad Bird has joked he was a "retired" animator by the time he received this offer.

Brad Bird's classmates included prominent future animators such as John Lasseter, Tim Burton, and Henry Selick.

Brad Bird later used A113 as an Easter egg in his films; it has since become a fixture of media made by the school's alumni.

Brad Bird arrived at the studio in the midst of a transition: much of the studio's original creative staff were retiring, leaving the studio to a new generation of artists.

Brad Bird felt as though he was standing behind the studio's original principles.

Brad Bird left Disney after only two years; he received credits on The Small One and The Fox and the Hound, and went uncredited on Mickey's Christmas Carol and The Black Cauldron.

Brad Bird was dispirited with the state of the American animation industry, and he considered his departure from Disney as the end of his long-held love of the form.

Brad Bird was hopeful of receiving financial backing from other studios, but ended up frustrated by Hollywood's development system: "for every good project I've made, I've got equally good projects that are sitting [un-produced by] various studios," he said in 2018.

Brad Bird relocated to the Bay Area, eager to become a part of its burgeoning film scene, which birthed films like Apocalypse Now and The Black Stallion.

Brad Bird tried for several years to adapt Will Eisner's comic book The Spirit to feature animation, but studios declined, unwilling to take a risk given Disney's dominance.

Brad Bird briefly attempted a computer-animated film at Lucasfilm with Ed Catmull, presaging his later work with Pixar.

Brad Bird had hoped to develop the concept into theatrical shorts, like those from the golden age of American animation, but the market simply no longer existed.

Brad Bird co-wrote the screenplay for "The Main Attraction", the show's second episode, with Mick Garris.

Family Dog was later spun-off into its own half-hour sitcom, against Brad Bird's urging and without his involvement, as he felt the idea would not work.

Brad Bird was perturbed to see Burton's role in designing the characters overshadow his deeper contributions to the concept.

Brad Bird was later brought on to co-write the screenplay for Batteries Not Included, a comic sci-fi film that stemmed from an Amazing Stories outline.

Brad Bird helped with Captain EO, 3-D short film starring Michael Jackson viewed at Disney theme parks.

In contrast, Brad Bird favored using more filmic techniques, utilizing extreme angles, long panning shots, quick camera cuts, pushed perspective, and so on.

Brad Bird worked on the show for its first eight seasons, and directed the episodes "Krusty Gets Busted" and "Like Father, Like Clown".

Brad Bird called his work at The Simpsons a "golden opportunity," recognizing that the material was more to his sensibility than the work he had done for Disney.

Brad Bird continued to shop around film ideas to studios throughout the decade, but grew frustrated with his lack of progress in his dream of directing a feature.

Brad Bird was momentarily signed to direct a live-action comedy, Brothers in Crime, at New Line Cinema, but it did not pan out.

Brad Bird pored these themes into a screenplay for The Incredibles, which he pitched to studios beginning in 1992.

Brad Bird developed an original sci-fi feature titled Ray Gunn, with a script co-written by Matthew Robbins.

Brad Bird signed a production deal with Turner Feature Animation in January 1995, but the studio felt Ray Gunn would be too intense for its target demographic of young children.

Brad Bird read the novel and felt "enchanted" by it; he felt drawn to Hughes' rationale for writing the story, which was to comfort his children after the death of his wife, Sylvia Plath.

Brad Bird connected with its themes, relating it to his sister's passing from gun violence.

Brad Bird penned the screenplay with Tim McCanlies, which centers on a young boy named Hogarth Hughes, who discovers and befriends a giant alien robot during the Cold War in 1957.

Brad Bird was quickly faced with assembling a team with little time to spare; most big-budget animated films of the era were workshopped for years, whereas Bird only had two.

Brad Bird was disappointed by the failure of Giant; he visited multiple cineplexes only to view the film in empty auditoriums.

Brad Bird released the first fully computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, in 1995.

Brad Bird was stunned by the film, and in 1997, the two began to negotiate Brad Bird joining Pixar.

In March 2000, Brad Bird went to Pixar's Emeryville, California campus and pitched his ideas, including The Incredibles, to Lasseter.

Brad Bird was excited to return to the Bay Area, where had lived intermittently two decades prior.

Brad Bird purchased a home in Tiburon, across the bay from Pixar's Emeryville headquarters.

Brad Bird won his first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and his screenplay was nominated for Best Original Screenplay.

Brad Bird was hired on in July 2005 to assess the mistakes and turn the project around in a short time.

Brad Bird disliked having to take over Pinkva's passion project: "It was a rough position to be in because I always come down on the side of the creator," he later said.

When Brad Bird took over, much of the design work had been completed, but Brad Bird wrote an entirely new script that eschewed much of its original dialogue.

Midway through the aughts, Brad Bird was attached to direct an adaption of James Dalessandro's novel, 1906, which chronicles the tumultuous earthquake that struck San Francisco a century prior.

Brad Bird paused when Pixar management asked he take over Ratatouille, and returned afterward.

Brad Bird attempted to re-write 1906 to work within the confines of a feature's length, but struggled.

Brad Bird was long open to the idea of Incredibles sequel, should the story suffice.

Brad Bird began writing its screenplay in earnest the next year; he attempted to distinguish the script from the breadth of superhero-related content released since the first film, focusing on the family dynamic rather than the superhero genre.

Brad Bird has expressed interest in developing an animated Western or horror film.

In 2019, Brad Bird announced he was developing an original musical film that would include music by frequent collaborator Michael Giacchino and contain about 20 minutes of animation in it.

In 2022, it was announced that Bird had signed a deal with Skydance the previous year to revive his long-dormant project Ray Gunn and reassembled frequent collaborators Michael Giacchino, Teddy Newton, Tony Fucile, Darren T Holmes, and Jeffrey Lynch for the film.

Brad Bird says he was influenced by dozens of filmmakers, singling out early moviemakers Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd, to mid-twentieth century auteurs like David Lean, Alfred Hitchcock, Walt Disney, and Akira Kurosawa.

Brad Bird himself has observed that his career was "very long, very delayed and full of disappointment," mainly because he aspired to "lofty" self-set expectations.

Brad Bird has been characterized as controlling with an exquisite attention to detail.

Brad Bird's "demanding, often punishing" direction which has prompted some to consider him difficult to work with.

Brad Bird is outspoken about the potential of the art of animation, and has asked the public not refer to his films as cartoons.

Brad Bird has taken exception to the classification of modern animated fare as solely for children or families; suggesting it discriminatory and belittling.

Brad Bird has expressed a love for hand-drawn animation and lamented its current absence from the industry.

Many critics have analyzed his films and suggested they reflect Russian-American novelist Ayn Rand's Objectivism philosophy, which Brad Bird vehemently denies, suggesting it a monumental misreading of his work.

Brad Bird maintains properties in Tiburon, California, and Los Feliz, California.