Brad Bird - Ben Hanson's Artist Project
Brad Bird was born on born on September 11th, 1957 to a small family in Montana. Ever since he was a young boy he dreamed of becoming an animator and became completely sold on the idea of working for Disney studios. While in high school, he received top notch animation instruction from a former member of the Disney animation team. Ever since he was little he had an obsession with drawing and soon became intrigued by the idea that he could potentially bring his drawing to life through the power of animation. Ever since that realization his primary medium has been film and short videos. He also writes and is an exceptional storyteller but his first love is for the visual arts and the creative possibility of animated features. He deeply resists the notion of the Animated feature as a genre unto itself, he has stated several times that an animated film can express any emotion and has a wide range of potential and should not be seen as a corollary to film mindless children videos. Brad Bird likes to address the themes of family unity and love while still exploring and pushing his audience to be creative and to really capitalize on their own creative potential.
Brad Bird is a populist artist. He has no grand vision of saving the world through his creations or of pointing out any injustices. He creates his movies and short videos in hopes of heart-warming entertainment. His videos are not schlocky nonsense, however, as he does leave plenty of room for interpretations and for the possibility that each story is a parable that could be applied to several situations. His film The Iron Giant was seen in many communities as a critique on the Cold War, with the giant yet friendly robot demonstrating the true bond for camaraderie between the United States and Russia. Compared to some of the more aggressive artists that we have talked about in class, such as Nancy Spero, his work is fairly soft and made for popular consumption. Where Nancy Spero and William Kentridge create artwork in hopes of changing people’s minds about current issues in our world, Brad Bird just hopes of emotionally connecting to his audience and of softening up our general approach toward each other. When you take the audience size into consideration, Brad Bird’s films such as Ratatouille and The Incredibles have ultimately changed and positively affected more lives than all of the artists studied in class combined.
Where an artist such as William Kentridge may use his animations to point out the horrors and injustices of the world, Brad Bird instead analyzes the world around him and hopes to change it by beautifully and emotionally arranging it in a way that reflects the humor and the hope within every situation. Kentridge’s work may display a corporate fat cat ruining the lives of the workers in an attempt to show the corruption of the world, while Brad Bird chooses instead to satirize the negative aspects of the world and take their feet out from underneath them by showing them to the masses as comical and ultimately weak figures (think of the boss or the villain in the Incredibles or the government agents in Iron Giant). I do not want to portray Kentridge as a glass half empty kind of guy and Brad Bird as a glass half full of smiles and candy canes, Brad Bird is not mindlessly positive and hoping to brainwash America with his rosy outlook. I believe that Kentridge looks back on history and sees stories of pain and loss, and Brad Bird is also fully capable of acknowledging the suffering of the world but he has a spark in him that allows for the rearranging of those past events into compelling stories for the general public. He sees history as a sandbox, and he hopes to translate the pain and reality of the world into comprehensible stories.
“We make films that we ourselves would want to see and then hope that other people would want to see it. If you try to analyze audiences or think there's some sophisticated recipe for success, then I think you are doomed. You're making it too complicated�, this quote was from Brad Bird in an article for IGN. I would certainly recommend seeing and thinking about the role of Brad Bird’s films in America today. He has worked on The Simpsons and still stands as one of the leading voices in the top animation studio in the world, Pixar. He is currently developing a live action movie concerning the San Francisco Earthquakes of 1906, Brad Bird has proven time and time again that his artistic voice is one that America is clamoring for and that his stories stand up as great cultural myths for our day. He finds a great pleasure in pushing his creative boundaries and I think that he has a lot to teach anybody who is interested in studying the relatively culturally complex body of his ever-evolving work.
Sources -
http://dvd.ign.com/articles/594/594806p4.html
http://www.tribute.ca/people/Brad+Bird/3072