Brad Bird | |
|---|---|
 Bird at the 2009 Venice Film Festival | |
| Born | Philip Bradley Bird September 1957 (age 67) Kalispell, Montana, U.S. |
| Alma mater | California Institute of the Arts (BFA) |
| Occupations |
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| Years active | 1979–present |
| Employers |
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| Spouse |
Elizabeth Canney (m. 1988) |
| Children | 3 |
| Awards | Academy Award for Best Animated Feature The Incredibles (2004) Ratatouille (2007) |
Philip Bradley Bird (born September 1957) is an American filmmaker, animator, and voice actor. He has had a career spanning over four decades 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 attended the California Institute of the Arts in the late 1970s, and worked for Disney shortly thereafter.
In the 1980s, he worked in film development with various studios; he wrote the screenplay for Batteries Not Included (1987), 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 traditional animated feature The Iron Giant (1999), 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 computer-animated films, The Incredibles (2004) and Ratatouille (2007) that were worldwide critical and financial smash hits; they earned Bird two Academy Award for Best Animated Feature wins and Best Original Screenplay nominations. He transitioned to live-action filmmaking with similarly successful Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011), he then directed Disney's Tomorrowland (2015). He returned to Pixar to develop Incredibles 2 (2018), which became the second-highest-grossing animated film of all time, and earned him another nomination for the Academy Award.
Bird has a reputation for supervising his projects to a high degree of detail. Some commentators have drawn parallels between Bird's films and novelist Ayn Rand's Objectivism philosophy, an analysis Bird has dismissed. 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 art.
- ^ "Director Brad Bird (R) and spouse Elizabeth Canney pose for a photo at the premiere of Disney's Tomorrowland in Anaheim, California on May 9, 2015". Getty Images. May 10, 2015. Retrieved April 2, 2017.