Brad Bird

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

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. Provided by Wikipedia