Watch Brad Bird's talk at TIFF

If you missed Brad Bird's recent appearance in Toronto at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, you can watch it below.  I was there, and it was an excellent talk.

Brad Bird, Ayn Rand and Frustration

Brad Bird

I haven't seen Brad Bird's new film, Tomorrowland, yet, but once again various reviewers are connecting Bird to novelist Ayn Rand's work, something that Bird denies.  This article in Slate by Forrest Wickman says that Bird is drawing more inspiration from Walt Disney than from Rand.  I think that both are missing a key point, possibly because nobody in the discussion has ever worked in the film or animation business.

The criticism of Bird is that his films contain characters who are innately superior to the majority.  This strikes many as elitist, though common sense tells us that we all know people who have an aptitude for something, whether it's music, math, sports, languages, drawing, etc.  It's interesting that the idea of talent has become so controversial.

Many claim that Bird expects his characters to be treated differently than those without their talents, and there's some truth in this, but not in a way that Ayn Rand would endorse.  I am no Rand expert, but what I know of her writing is that it is elitist; those who are superior should not be dragged down by the inferior and should it happen, then the superior are justified in withdrawing their talents from society.

As the Slate article points out, the idea of the elite going on strike is nowhere present in Bird's work.  Rather than springing from elitism, I think Bird's work springs from artistic frustration and I think his career should make that obvious.

In The Incredibles and in Ratatouille, the characters are trying to exercise their talents in ways that are beneficial.  A key scene in The Incredibles is when Bob witnesses a mugging while being dressed down by his boss.  His frustration doesn't stem from his inability to exercise his powers, but from the altruistic need to help someone who is being victimized.    In Ratatouille, Remy risks his life repeatedly to get closer to cooking, something that would benefit people if only they didn't let their prejudices get in the way.  Both are frustrated by a world which stops them from being who they are, even though the world would benefit.

Now look at Bird's career.  He was an animation prodigy, being tutored by Disney animators at the age of 14.  His time at Disney after Cal Arts did not lead to any films of note.  It was a low point in the company's management history, where no one with vision (artistic or economic) was willing to take a chance on the kind of animation that Bird wanted to do.  At that time, Disney had Bird, John Lasseter and Tim Burton on staff and essentially wasted them all.  Talent went unrecognized and unfulfilled.

Bird tried to get several projects off the ground, such as his animated adaptation of Will Eisner's The Spirit and his own Ray Gunn without success.  He didn't get to direct his first animated feature, The Iron Giant, until he was in his forties, twenty years after leaving Cal Arts.  In moving into live action, he wanted to make 1906.  He took the Mission Impossible film as a way of gaining credibility, but even after the success of that project, he couldn't get 1906 into production.  Instead, he directed a film with a link to a Disney theme park.  While fans are no doubt happy to hear that Bird will be working on a sequel to The Incredibles, he's going backwards at the age of 57, having to revisit an earlier success.  As he's closer to the end of his career than the beginning, there are a limited number of films he has time to make. How many of them will be the films he wants to make as opposed to what Hollywood will allow him to do?

Forget Ayn Rand and look at the animation business.  It's filled with artists who would say that they're not doing their best work or are stuck labouring on projects that they have no great love for.  It's true across the industry, which is why so many artists are involved in side projects that are an escape from the frustration of their day jobs.  Bird has been more successful than most, but he still can't get his chosen projects onto the screen.  The Incredibles and Ratatouille are fantasies where characters overcome obstacles to fully realize their talents.  Unfortunately for Bird and the rest of us, it rarely happens in life.

Brad Bird quote

"There are great animators just as there are great actors I gave a talk once using [digital] animation from the [1996] movie Dragon Heart. I showed two sequences and asked the audience which they believed; they said one sequence but not the other, as they said it looked fake. I said, "Yes, but why?" They couldn't tell me. The interesting thing was, it was the same technology and the same [animation] model; the only thing different was the animator. You can be convincing without being real."

Brad Bird is everywhere right now, promoting Tomorrowland.  This interview has a fair amount to say about animation.

Bye Bye Bird

Deadline Hollywood reports that Brad Bird's next project is another live action film and he's still developing his own live action film, 1906.  I think that we've seen the last of Bird as an animation director.

Brad Bird and Andrew Stanton

I never saw Brad Bird's Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and I won't be seeing Andrew Stanton's John Carter. The analyst in me is still interested in the contrast between the two.

Brad Bird
Made a sequel to a successful franchise
The film starred one of the few actors who can still "open" a film
Made a film that had similarities to his animated film The Incredibles

Andrew Stanton
Made a film based on a 100-year-old book with no preceding movie
The film starred someone who has never before received top billing in a feature
Made a film that was not similar to his animated films Finding Nemo and Wall-E.

John Carter is being touted as a flop that may not hit $30 million for its opening weekend. While Bird emerged from Mission Impossible as somebody who is bankable in both animation and live action, Stanton is already being declared a live action failure. I found this paragraph from Deadline Hollywood interesting. I have no idea how valid it is, but the fact that this is the perception in at least part of Hollywood doesn't bode well for Stanton's future in live action. The ellipses are in the original; the paragraph is quoted verbatim.

"To summarize: this flop is the result of a studio trying to indulge Pixar… Of an arrogant director who ignored everybody’s warnings that he was making a film too faithful to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s first novel in the Barsoom series “A Princess of Mars”… Of the failure of Dick Cook, and Rich Ross, and Bob Iger to rein in Stanton’s excessive ego or pull the plug on the movie’s bloated budget … Of really rotten marketing that failed to explain the significant or scope of the film’s Civil War-to-Mars story and character arcs and instead made the 3D movie look way as generic as its eventual title… Disagree all you want, but Hollywood is telling me that competent marketing could have drawn in women with the love story, or attracted younger males who weren’t fanboys of the source material. Instead the campaign was as rigid and confusing as the movie itself, not to mention that ’Before Star Wars, Before Avatar‘ tag line should have come at the start and not at the finish. But even more I think John Carter is a product of mogul wuss-ism as much as it is misplaced talent worship. More detail to come."

Deadline Hollywood is not the only one examining John Carter's box office failure. The N.Y. Times wades in as well.

Brad Bird and Ignorance

No, I'm not implying that Bird is ignorant. But a great many of the reporters who interview him about Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, which Bird directed, definitely are. Here's an article in the N.Y. Times about Bird and it contains this paragraph:

"Plenty of live-action directors have successfully taken on animated movies, including Gore Verbinski (“Rango”) and Tim Burton (“Corpse Bride”). But the flow almost never goes in reverse — if you can name a successful example you have movie historians beat — making Mr. Bird’s chance at bat a fascinating one for Hollywood to watch. A similar attempt will come in March, when Andrew Stanton, the director of Pixar’s “Finding Nemo” and “Wall-E,” unveils his live-action space saga, “John Carter.”"

So the writer has no knowledge of film or animation history. He doesn't know that Tim Burton's first job was as a Disney artist. He has no knowledge of Walt Disney(!), let alone Frank Tashlin, Gregory La Cava or George Pal. And he's unaware of Rob Minkoff or Frederick Du Chau.

I don't have exact numbers, but I think that more animation film makers have moved to live action than the reverse.

It's going to be painful reading this swill in the coming weeks.

UPDATE: A writer in the Philippines knows more about animation directors crossing over into live action than the N.Y. Times.

Some Links

Steve Stanchfield of Thunderbean Animation is profiled at Greenbriar Picture Shows. Steve has lovingly put together a series of DVDs of public domain material from various studios. Where most public domain releases are done on the cheap, Steve puts enormous effort into finding the best materials and creating extras. I heartily endorse his products.

Spline Doctors has posted a podcast with Pete Docter and Bob Peterson of Pixar.

Brad Bird is interviewed by Nancy Cartwright at AWN.com.

The ASIFA Hollywood Archive presents artwork from Ray Patterson's time at the Mintz studio in the 1930's.

Brad Bird and Chuck Jones Podcasts

The Museum of the Moving Image is located in Queens, New York, in a building that was once a working film studio owned by Paramount. During World War II, the building was used by the Signal Corps for the creation of instructional films (many including animation) for the military.

The museum, which I've visited, is definitely worth the trip to Astoria. In addition to the brick and mortar building, the museum has a web presence that features many interesting articles and dozens of podcasts with movie professionals.

There are three interviews that are animation related: two with Chuck Jones (here and here) recorded on successive days in December 1994, when he was once again working for Warner Bros. creating short films, and one from 2005 with Brad Bird, recorded after the release of The Incredibles.

Jones was 82 at the time of these interviews and he tended to ramble. Several familiar Jones tropes are here, such as his quoting Mark Twain and his screeds against producers. While there are no major revelations in these interviews, it was nice to hear his voice again and to spend time with him.

Bird continues to impress me with his stage presence and his thoughtfulness. The interview with him is excellent.

Don't limit yourself to just the animation-related interviews. There is a wealth of material here including interviews with well-known and lesser-known personalities dating as far back as 1989.

Brad Bird and Management

I've come to the conclusion that the hardest job to do well is management. Managing your career - figuring out which jobs to take, when to leave a studio, whether to relocate - is difficult and made more difficult if you're in a relationship, have children, etc. These are the decisions that keep people up at night.

Managing a staff is also difficult. In the animation business, the people who end up supervising are good at their craft, but what knowledge do they have about keeping people happy and productive while still hitting the deadline and the budget? In every industry there are managers who have lousy people skills or the wrong priorities and end up with cost overruns, shoddy quality and a high staff turnover as a result. Anyone who has ever had a job knows what I'm talking about.

So here's a really interesting interview with Brad Bird, conducted for McKinsey & Company, a corporate consultant that specializes in innovation. Unfortunately, you're going to have to register to read it (Rick May suggests the bugmenot.com username pjs@mailinator.net and password 142), but the interview is excellent because it asks Bird about things that other interviewers would never think to ask, such as how Pixar stays innovative and how Bird works with his crew and gets things on the screen.

"When I directed The Iron Giant, I inherited a team that was totally broken—a bunch of miserable people who had just gone through a horrific experience on a previous film that had bombed. When the time came for animators to start showing me their work, I got everybody in a room. This was different from what the previous guy had done; he had reviewed the work in private, generated notes, and sent them to the person.

"For my reviews, I got a video projector and had an animator’s scenes projected onto a dry-erase board. I could freeze a frame and take a marker and show where I thought things should be versus where they were. I said, “Look, this is a young team. As individual animators, we all have different strengths and weaknesses, but if we can interconnect all our strengths, we are collectively the greatest animator on earth. So I want you guys to speak up and drop your drawers. We’re going to look at your scenes in front of everybody. Everyone will get humiliated and encouraged together. If there is a solution, I want everyone to hear the solution, so everyone adds it to their tool kit. I’m going to take my shot at what I think will improve a scene, but if you see something different, go ahead and disagree. I don’t know all the answers.”

"So I started in: “I think the elbow needs to come up higher here so that we feel the thrust of this action.” “I’m not seeing the thought process on the character here.” “Does anybody disagree? Come on, speak up.” The room was silent because with the previous director, anyone who dared to say anything got their head chopped off.

"For two months, I pushed and analyzed each person’s work in front of everybody. And they didn’t speak up. One day, I did my thing, and one of the guys sighed. I shouted, “What was that?” And he said, “Nothing man, it’s OK.” And I said, “No, you sighed. Clearly, you disagree with something I did there. Show me what you’re thinking. I might not have it right. You might. Show me.” So he came up, and I handed him the dry-erase marker. He erased what I did. Then he did something different and explained why he thought it ought to be that way. I said, “That’s better than what I did. Great.” Everybody saw that he didn’t get his head chopped off. And our learning curve went straight up. By the end of the film, that animation team was much stronger than at the beginning, because we had all learned from each other’s strengths. But it took two months for people to feel safe enough to speak up."

"In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.

"Before I got the chance to make films myself, I worked on a number of badly run productions and learned how not to make a film. I saw directors systematically restricting people’s input and ignoring any effort to bring up problems. As a result, people didn’t feel invested in their work, and their productivity went down. As their productivity fell, the number of hours of overtime would increase, and the film became a money pit."

(I want to thank friend and storyboard artist Jim Caswell for pointing me to this interview. One of the ironies of Jim's life is that he works at home, so he doesn't have to deal with the day-to-day nonsense of office life, yet he reads more books about business and management than any other artist I know.)

Various Linkages

The first issue of Dean Yeagle's comic book version of Roald Dahl's Gremlins, pictured at left, will hit the comic shops on March 5.

In this Variety article, Brad Bird talks about writing animation and live action as well as naming some of his storytelling heroes.

In the January issue of Flip, Steve Moore editorializes about the current state of the industry:

"Since the animation boom of the 1990's, an animation industry culture has developed that permeates mainstream animation in the world today. The artists making the films all know each other, move in the same social circles, know the same films, music, and pop culture trivia. The result has been a cross pollination of ideas, where artists of today plagiarize each others' plagiarization of the past. The result is, the audience gets a third hand experience. The animated character are even less genuine, less alive. The characters in one film move and speak and behave like characters in the other films. They express humor, love, anger, and angst all the same way. The indusrty-at-large has become homogenized. Creatively in-bred."

The same page has some letters from people who studied under Eric Larsen at Disney, including this quote from Larsen: "Animate in your head first, then draw it next." Those letters are in response to an earlier article by Dan Jeup about his experiences learning from Larsen.

Animated News has the release dates for seven animated features coming in 2008.

Hans Perk has completed posting the animation drafts for Disney's Alice in Wonderland.

Musician David Byrne talks about different business models evolving in his industry. While music and animation are very different businesses, it's always encouraging to hear that there are ways around corporate ownership and control of creative work.

Along the same lines, Andrew O'Hehir of Salon interviews independent film maker John Sayles about his latest project Honeydripper.

"You know, it would be great to just be an artist and sit back and make these little creations and have somebody else figure out how to get people to see them. But you're probably not going to get to do that. You're probably going to have to be a marketer, a showman, whatever. It's part of the job."

Ratatouille: Food for Thought

Now that Brad Bird has directed three feature films, certain themes are becoming apparent. The first is that society persecutes the talented. Perhaps the Iron Giant shouldn't be thought of as talented so much as alien, but certainly The Incredibles and Remy are talented and all three films feature persecution.

The characters struggle to overcome the persecution, but not because of the persecution itself but because the persecution stands in the way of them exercising their talents. Bird appears to feel that talent should rise to the top and that others should willingly defer to talent. This is where the charge of elitism, and even fascism, are leveled at Bird. What he never shows is how talent has to be developed and refined. The Iron Giant is built with all his capabilities. The Incredibles are presumably born with super powers. Remy is born with a genius nose.

Contrast this with Joe Johnston's film October Sky, based on Homer Hickam's book Rocket Boys. It's about a group of boys in a mining town who are inspired by Sputnik to take up rocketry. The standard path in the town is for boys to graduate high school and enter the mines, so the boys stand out for wanting something different from the social norm. While the town attempts to discourage their efforts, especially when it appears that one of their rockets caused a fire, the film also deals with the boys struggling to figure out rocketry and documents their early failures. As talented as these boys might be, it takes effort to develop their talents.

As an artist, Bird has to know this. There's no way that his first work was as good as what he's doing now. For whatever reason, though, the maturation of talent doesn't interest him. The abilities of Iron Giant, The Incredibles and Remy are fully formed.

For Bird, ambition is not for personal glory, it's simply to reach a position where talent can be exercised. This is an interesting contrast to John Lasseter's characters in Toy Story and Cars. In those films, Woody and Lightning McQueen attempt to lead out of ego and only discover happiness when they forsake ambition. Both directors deal with ambition, but it signifies completely different types of characters.

In Lasseter's world, ambition always pits a character against a rival. Success can only come by overcoming a competitor. For Bird, the talented are either all in agreement (like the supers in The Incredibles), or unique like Remy or the Iron Giant. What would happen in Bird's world if two equally talented protagonists attempted to express their talents towards competing ends?

By avoiding the struggle to develop a character's talents or having a character compete against equally talented opponents, Bird slants his films heavily towards his chosen characters. In much the way the Disney princesses are fated to ascend to their rightful places, Bird's characters also triumph. While the princesses live in fantasy worlds, Bird's live in ours, but his films are just as much fairy tales as the Disney films. Bird's characters don't compromise and aren't diminished by a hostile environment. Their talents are fully exercised and they accomplish everything they're capable of. And if that isn't a fantasy, I don't know what is.

"Why Pixar is Better"

Richard Corliss of Time magazine writes about Ratatouille and why Pixar is better. The article contains several quotes from Brad Bird and John Lasseter and reveals that Jan Pinkava, the original director of Ratatouille, is no longer at Pixar.