Brad Bird

Philip Bradley Bird was born on September 1957 in Kalispell, Montana, the youngest of four children to Marjorie A. (née Cross) and Philip Cullen Bird. His father worked in the propane business, and his grandfather, Francis Wesley "Frank" Bird, who was born in County Sligo, Ireland, was a president and chief executive of the Montana Power Company. Bird's fascination with filmmaking began at an early age. He started drawing at age three, with his first cartoons clear attempts at sequential storytelling. He was particularly enamored with animation after a screening of The Jungle Book (1967), and a family friend who had taken animation classes explained how the medium worked. Bird's father found a used camera that could shoot one frame at a time, and helped him setup the device for making films. He began animating his first short subject at age 11; that same year, his family connection introduced him to composer George Bruns, who set him up a tour of Walt Disney Productions in Burbank, California. Bird met the Nine Old Men—the animators responsible for the studio's earliest and most celebrated features—and proclaimed he would join them one day. Bird has characterized his parents as generous and supportive of his interests. His mother once made a rainy drive two hours each way to the only theater playing a reissue of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs for Bird's education. After two years, Bird had completed his first short, a fifteen-minute adaption of The Tortoise and the Hare. On his parents' advice, to "start at the top and work your way down", he sent the film to his idols at Disney. The studio responded with an open invitation for Bird to stop by whenever in town, which led him to make several visits to the studio's California headquarters in the ensuing years. This opportunity—an "unofficial apprenticeship" of sorts—was "never offered" to anyone previously. He worked closely with Milt Kahl, whom he considered a hero. He began another film, titled Ecology American Style, which was more ambitious and in color, but the workload was intense. Instead, Bird focused on other interests in his high school years, including dating, athletics, and photography. "Animation is the illusion of life, and you can't create that illusion convincingly if you haven't lived it," he later remarked. The family relocated to Corvallis, Oregon in his youth, and he graduated from Corvallis High School in 1975. That year, he was awarded a scholarship by Disney to attend the newly formed California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Valencia, California; Bird has joked he was a "retired" animator by the time he received this offer. Instead, he considered attending the acting program at Ashland University. After a three-year break, Bird chose CalArts and moved down south. Bird's classmates included prominent future animators such as John Lasseter, Tim Burton, and Henry Selick. Like many students, they were dazzled by the special effects in Star Wars (1977); both Lasseter and Bird agreed these feats were possible in animation. First-year students met in the room labeled A113—a small, sterile classroom with no windows. Bird later used A113 as an Easter egg in his films; it has since become a fixture of media made by the school's alumni. The first use of A113 was in the pilot episode for the short-lived television series Family Dog (1993). The pilot episode was a part of the series Amazing Stories (1985–1987), which aired February 16, 1987, and was titled "Family Dog". He used it for the license plate number on a van. The first Disney movie he used it in was The Brave Little Toaster (1987), for which he was an animator.