Brad Bird

Philip Bradley Bird born September 24 1957 is an American filmmaker animator and voice actor He has had a career spanning over four decades in both liveaction and animation 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 studios 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 cowrote Batteries Not Included 1987 and developed two episodes of Amazing Stories for Steven Spielberg including its spinoff based on a segment written by Bird for the show 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 1999 though acclaimed it was a boxoffice bomb Bird moved to Pixar where he wrote and directed two successful animated films The Incredibles 2004 and Ratatouille 2007 They earned Bird two Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature wins and Best Original Screenplay nominations He transitioned to liveaction filmmaking with similarly successful Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol 2011 he then directed Disneys Tomorrowland 2015 He returned to Pixar to develop Incredibles 2 2018 which became the secondhighestgrossing animated film of all time during its theatrical run and earned him another nomination for the Academy Award In 2026 he is set to partner with Skydance Animation to direct Ray Gunn a scifi noir film hes wanted to make for over thirty years 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 childrens entertainment or classification as a genre rather than an art Description above from the Wikipedia article Brad Bird licensed under CCBYSA full list of contributors on Wikipedia