Brad Bird, American director, screenwriter, animator, producer and actor
Phillip Bradley Bird (born September 24, 1957) is an American film director, animator, screenwriter, producer, and voice actor. He 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. 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, and developed two episodes of Amazing Stories for Steven Spielberg, including the influential 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 movies, 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 picture 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 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.