Brad Bird
Director
b. 1957 · USA
Bird began animating as a teenager under the mentorship of veteran Disney animator Milt Kahl before studying at CalArts alongside a cohort of future Pixar collaborators, building deep technical animation skills years before his directorial debut.
He made his feature debut with The Iron Giant's sincere Cold War parable, then returned to retrofuturism's optimistic register years later with Tomorrowland — two films united by a director unusually unembarrassed about earnestness.
He went on to direct several of Pixar's most acclaimed films, including The Incredibles and Ratatouille, both of which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, cementing him as one of animation's most respected directors.
Advertisement
Filmography on RetroBMovies
Related Articles
Retrofuturism: Tomorrow, As Yesterday Imagined It
From Metropolis's deco spires to Tomorrowland's abandoned World's Fair optimism: how the future our grandparents imagined became a genre of its own — atompunk, dieselpunk, raygun gothic and the used future, in fifteen films.
Waking Up From the Dream: Science Fiction in the 1990s
CGI crosses the uncanny threshold, cyberpunk gets a second wave, and an entire decade of science fiction starts asking the same unsettling question: how do you know any of this is real?