Brad Bird
Philip Bradley Bird is an American filmmaker, animator, and voice actor. He developed an interest in the art of animation early on, and completed his first short subject by age 14. Bird sent the film to Walt Disney Productions, leading to an apprenticeship from the studio's Nine Old Men. He attended the California Institute of the Arts in the late 1970s, and worked for Disney shortly thereafter.
In the 1980s, Bird worked in film development with various studios. He co-wrote Batteries Not Included, and developed two episodes of Amazing Stories for Steven Spielberg, including its spin-off, the widely panned animated sitcom Family Dog. Afterwards, Bird joined the animated sitcom The Simpsons as creative consultant for eight seasons. He directed the animated film The Iron Giant ; though acclaimed, it was a box-office bomb.
Bird moved to Pixar where he wrote and directed two successful animated films, The Incredibles and Ratatouille. They earned Bird two Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature wins and Best Original Screenplay nominations. He transitioned to live-action filmmaking with similarly successful Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, he then directed Disney's Tomorrowland. He returned to Pixar to develop Incredibles 2, which became the second-highest-grossing animated film of all time during its theatrical run, and earned him another nomination for the Academy Award.
Bird has a reputation for supervising his projects to a high degree of detail. He advocates for creative freedom and the possibilities of animation, and has criticized its stereotype as children's entertainment, or classification as a genre, rather than an art.
Early life and education
Philip Bradley Bird was born on September 24, 1957, in Kalispell, Montana, the youngest of four children to Marjorie A. and Philip Cullen Bird. His 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. Bird's fascination with filmmaking began at an early age. He started drawing at age three, with his first cartoons clear attempts at sequential storytelling. He 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. Bird's father found a used camera that could shoot one frame at a time, and helped him setup the device for making films. He 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. Bird met the Nine Old Men—the animators responsible for the studio's earliest and most celebrated features—and proclaimed he would join them one day.Bird has characterized his parents as generous and supportive of his interests. His mother once made a rainy drive two hours each way to the only theater playing a reissue of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs for Bird's education. After two years, Bird had completed his first short, a fifteen-minute adaption of The Tortoise and the Hare. On his parents' advice, to "start at the top and work your way down", he sent the film to his idols at Disney. The studio responded with an open invitation for Bird to stop by whenever in town, which led him to make several visits to the studio's California headquarters in the ensuing years. This opportunity—an "unofficial apprenticeship" of sorts—was "never offered" to anyone previously. He worked closely with Milt Kahl, whom he considered a hero. He began another film, which was more ambitious and in color, but the workload was intense. Instead, Bird focused on other interests in his high school years, including dating, athletics, and photography. "Animation is the illusion of life, and you can't create that illusion convincingly if you haven't lived it," he later remarked. The family relocated to Corvallis, Oregon in his youth, and he graduated from Corvallis High School in 1975.
That year, he was awarded a scholarship by Disney to attend the newly formed California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California; Bird has joked he was a "retired" animator by the time he received this offer. Instead, he considered attending the acting program at Ashland University. After a three-year break, Bird chose CalArts and moved down south. Bird's classmates included prominent future animators such as John Lasseter, Tim Burton, and Henry Selick. Like many students, they were dazzled by the special effects in Star Wars ; both Lasseter and Bird agreed these feats were possible in animation. First-year students met in the room labeled A113—a small, sterile classroom with no windows. 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. The first use of A113 was in the pilot episode for the short-lived television series Family Dog. The pilot episode was a part of the series Amazing Stories, which aired February 16, 1987, and was titled "Family Dog". He used it for the license plate number on a van.
Career
Development deals and collaborate with Spielberg (1978–1989)
Within two years, Bird accepted a job as an animator at Walt Disney Productions. 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. What was left of the original staff got along with the newcomers, but Bird clashed with the middlemen in charge. While animating at Disney, he became a part of a small group of animators who worked in a suite of offices inside the original studio called the "Rat's Nest". There, Bird openly criticized the state of the studio, and characterized senior leadership as unwilling to take risk. He felt as though he was standing behind the studio's original principles. This volatile attitude prompted his firing by animation administrator Edward Hansen. He 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.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. Still, he pulled together funds to make A Portfolio of Projects, a demo reel of potential animated projects, ones he felt the medium was capable of. 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 various studios," he said in 2018. He 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. He 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. He briefly attempted a computer-animated film at Lucasfilm with Edwin Catmull, presaging his later work with Pixar. "He had all these ideas for making animated movies, but he didn't have a technical bone in his body and he didn't have any tolerance that you would need to have at the time to put up with some of the awfulness of the early technology," said Alvy Ray Smith. Bird's next credit was as an animator on the dark animated drama The Plague Dogs ; he was also fired by the film's director, Martin Rosen, during its production.
One piece from his test reel, Family Dog, attracted the attention of director Steven Spielberg. Family Dog centered on a pet's perspective of his dysfunctional suburban family, and its original pencil test featured designs by Bird's classmate Tim Burton. 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. Instead, Bird moved back to Los Angeles and joined Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, and became involved with his television program Amazing Stories, an anthology series which debuted in 1985. He co-wrote the screenplay for "The Main Attraction", the show's second episode, with Mick Garris. Spielberg enjoyed the script, and invited Bird to pitch other ideas. Bird storyboarded another Family Dog segment, which was decided to be adapted into an episode of Amazing Stories. The episode, which aired in 1987, was a ratings success. The experience was exciting for Bird; "Not only was Steven one of my favorite filmmakers, but he was powerful enough to clear space that allowed us creative freedom," he later remarked. Family Dog was later spun-off into its own half-hour sitcom, against Bird's urging and without his involvement, as he felt the idea would not work. He was also perturbed to see Burton's role in designing the characters overshadow his deeper contributions to the concept.
He 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. The film opened in fourth place domestically, and was overall a box office hit, generating $65.1 million on its $25 million budget. Bird also helped with Captain EO, a 3-D short film starring Michael Jackson viewed at Walt Disney theme parks. These successes brought Bird more opportunity, but he continued to spend many years in development hell with studios. He 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 his personal life, he wed Elizabeth Canney, an editor on Batteries Not Included. In 1989, Bird's sister Susan, with whom he was very close, was killed by her estranged husband in a murder-suicide. The event was traumatic for Bird; he felt emotionally "kind of gone in that period. I don't really have a lot of memories from it." He had enough funds to support himself for a time, so he simply rested: "I just kind of didn't do anything," he confessed.