Brad Bird

The Firing That Saved a Career

Brad Bird was kicked out of Disney in the 1980s for being too loud. It wasn't a matter of bad manners, but of an ambition that didn't fit into the hallways of a company that then preferred the safety of old formulas. That young animator trained at CalArts believed animation was cinema with a capital C and not just a simple product for selling toys.

In the end, time proved him right in the harshest way possible.

After working as a creative consultant on The Simpsons during its golden years, Bird was given the chance to direct his first feature film. In 1999 he released The Iron Giant under the Warner Bros. banner. The film ignored the rules of the Broadway musical that dominated the genre and embraced an aesthetic of the Cold War. It was a commercial disaster because the studio didn't know how to sell a story about a robot who decides not to be a weapon.

But the industry took note of that failure.

Steve Jobs and John Lasseter called him to join Pixar when the studio was looking for fresh blood beyond its circle of founders. Bird agreed on one clear condition: he wanted to film a story about a family of retired superheroes struggling with the mediocrity of middle-class life. He got The Incredibles to gross more than 630 million dollars in 2004 and took home his first Oscar.

The Camera That Doesn't Exist

His arrival at Ratatouille in 2007 was an emergency rescue. He replaced the original director midway through production and rewrote much of the script to focus on artistic passion and the fear of failure. Bird understands cinematic space in a physical way, even when the sets only exist inside a computer. Because for him, the camera must move according to the laws of real physics.

In 2011, he made the leap to live action with Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. Many doubted that a cartoon director could handle Tom Cruise hanging off the world's tallest building in Dubai. Bird applied the precision of drawing to live action and delivered the highest-grossing installment of the franchise up to that point with 694 million dollars.

Not everything was gold medals.

Tomorrowland was a major setback in 2015. Disney invested 190 million dollars in an optimistic fable that didn't connect with global audiences. It was a hard blow that sent him back to the safe haven of animation to meet market demand. So he returned to his best-known characters to win back the favor of the major studios.

The Safe Haven of Technique

In 2018 he released Incredibles 2 and broke the financial ceilings of animation with box office earnings of more than 1,200 million dollars. Despite the box office success, Bird has always sought projects that don't rely on nostalgia. His interest lies in technology applied to storytelling and in absolute control over framing.

His departure from Pixar for Skydance Animation was confirmed in 2022 to develop Ray Gunn. This project revives an idea the director had spent decades trying to finance at different studios. It is a detective story with an old-school science fiction aesthetic set in a retro future.

The estimated budget for this production exceeds 150 million dollars.