80 Facts About Nicholas Bird

Nicholas Bird has had a career spanning forty years in both animation and live-action, and is best known for his films The Incredibles franchise, Ratatouille, The Iron Giant, and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.

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

Nicholas Bird sent the film to Walt Disney Productions, leading to an apprenticeship from the studio's Nine Old Men.

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

Nicholas 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.

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Nicholas 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.

Nicholas Bird transitioned to live-action filmmaking with 2011's similarly successful Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, but his 2015 effort Tomorrowland significantly underperformed.

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

Nicholas 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.

Nicholas 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.

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

Nicholas 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.

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

Nicholas 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.

Nicholas Bird met the Nine Old Men—the animators responsible for the studio's most earliest and most celebrated features—and proclaimed he would join them one day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nicholas 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.

Nicholas 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.

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

Nicholas 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 .

Nicholas 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.

Nicholas 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.

Nicholas 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.

Nicholas 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.

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

Nicholas 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.

Nicholas 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 Nicholas Bird's urging and without his involvement, as he felt the idea would not work.

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

Nicholas 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.

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

Nicholas Bird grew irritated with notes from middle management: executives he felt "would analyze your work and dictate everything you'd need to do to make it 'more pleasing to an audience'—and in the process would only make stories smaller and more like everything else, " he complained.

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

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

Nicholas 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.

Nicholas 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.

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

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

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

Nicholas 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.

Nicholas 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.

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

Nicholas 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.

Nicholas 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nicholas Bird grew comforted by the "creative and supportive" atmosphere at Pixar, unlike many of the L A studios he had worked for; he convinced a core team to join him up north, including artists Tony Fucile, Teddy Newton, and Lou Romano, all of whom had contributed development artwork for The Incredibles for much of the past decade.

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

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

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

Midway through the aughts, Nicholas 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.

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

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

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

Nicholas 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.

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

In 2019, Nicholas Bird announced he was working with frequent collaborator Michael Giacchino on an original musical film that will contain about 20 minutes of animation in it.

In 2022, it was announced that Nicholas Bird will revive his long-dormant project Ray Gunn for Skydance Animation.

Nicholas 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.

Nicholas 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.

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

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

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

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

Nicholas 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 Nicholas Bird vehemently denies, suggesting it a monumental misreading of his work.

One of his sons, Nicholas Bird, was the voice of Squirt in the Pixar film Finding Nemo and Rusty McAllister in The Incredibles.

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