Brad Bird

Phillip Bradley Bird (born September 24, 1957) is an American director, producer, writer, animator, and voice actor.

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

Bird was born in Montana and grew up in Oregon.

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 was particularly enamored with animation after a screening of The Jungle Book (1967), 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, titled Ecology American Style, 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.

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

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 (CalArts) 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 (1977); both Lasseter and Bird agreed these feats were possible in animation.

In the 1980s, he worked in film development with various studios; he wrote the screenplay for *batteries not included, and developed two episodes of Amazing Stories for Steven Spielberg, including its spin-off (based on a segment written by Bird for the show), the widely panned animated sitcom Family Dog.

Afterwards, Bird joined The Simpsons as creative consultant for eight seasons.

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

He moved to Pixar where he wrote and directed two films, The Incredibles (2004) and Ratatouille (2007) that were worldwide critical and financial smash hits; both earned Bird two Academy Award for Best Animated Feature wins and Best Original Screenplay nominations.

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

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

As a filmmaker, Bird has been considered an auteur; he is known to supervise his projects to a high degree of detail.

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

His films' themes have been subject to interpretation by some commentators due to their parallels with novelist Ayn Rand's Objectivism philosophy, an analysis Bird has dismissed.

He 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. (née Cross) 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.