BIOGRAPHY

Stay Tooned Artist Profile
 

How often do young adults know exactly what they're going to be when they grow up? Not very often, and if they do, it typically changes within time. Brad Bird is a remarkable exception. At the early age of 11, Bird began experimenting with the basics of animation, and by age 13 he finished his first film. Meanwhile, the rest of us were sitting on the couch indulging ourselves with Bugs Bunny and Wile E. Coyote. Upon Bird's surprise, the short film caught the attention of none other than the Disney animation studios. By 14, Brad was already on his was to a successful career.

Bird was immediately brought to Disney to enter a program (that was still in its infancy stage) to train young animators. Bird received first-rate treatment and soon found famous draftsman Milt Kahl as his exclusive mentor of animation. Kahl was a part of the studios fabled "Nine Old Men" - a term coined by Walt Disney given to the nine artists with superior talents. After years of learning the princples of animation, Bird went to work on his first major project - thanks to one Steven Spielberg. Bird was presented with the chance to produce a single episode for the television series, "Amazing Stories."

Spielberg presented Bird with total artistic freedom to direct a 22 minute animated story. Bird created a basic dog character, but one thing was different - the dog couldn't verbally communicate with its viewers. The piece was called "Family Dog." What's so intriguing about the short is that rarely does the protagonist of an animated story not have the ability to speak. Even Garfield had gave us insight to his evil plans through mental thought. Bird gave us the animated basics with "Family Dog" - a demonstration of perfect story-telling, and in turn gave us an insightful look as to what he was capable of. Doors flew open left and right for Bird after his short aired. The studio wanted a "Family Dog" series. Bird knew there was little potentional there, so he was left work on a little known series called "The Simpsons."

Within the years of 1985-1987, I might add that Bird wrote the screenplay for a live-action film called, "*Batteries Not Included" as well as some minor writing work on a fantasy horror film called, "Little Monsters." Brad was then brought in by Film Roman to work as an executive consultant for "The Simpsons." At the time, "The Simpsons" was still just a creation of short vignettes aired on "The Tracy Ullman Show." The executives loved Bird's directing work on "Family Dog" because it worked on so many levels; it was animation, but was presented in a live-action style that worked for television. So Brad was hired on to put some of that magic into the show that inevitably turned the world upside-down. His work included script and filmmaking consultation that later gave the show its three-dimensional nature.

In 1994, four years after his work on "The Simpsons," Brad used his same magic to help create "The Critic" and then "King of the Hill" in 1997. After his stint on television animation, Bird decided he needed to move onto bigger projects. He pursued a feature film idea called, "Ray-Gunn" which was supposed to be produced by the now defunct Turner Feature Animation Studio. Instead, Brad approached Warner Bros. with a pitch to produce an animated feature called, "Iron Giant." Warner had already jumped into the feature animation pool with "Quest For Camelot" only to find themselves as the butt of the joke as far as cartoons were concerned. Still, Warner granted Bird permission to begin work on his creation based off the famous children's book, "Iron Man," by Ted Hughes. In August of 1999, the world caught a glimpse of animation at its best. "Iron Giant" was released to the public with little support from Warner Bros. because it didn't have the elements of a Disney film that the American movie-goer was so used too. Nonetheless, the film created a following and was given its rightful respects when it dominated the 1999 Annie Awards.

Though Bird was then said to still have faith in Warner Bros and to be in production on his latest creation about a family of superheroes, "The Incredibles" -he joined Pixar to develop another project to be released through them in 2003.
 
 

JULY 1998 INTERVIEW

Interview by Well-Rounded.com

If you look at the credits of the early episodes of "The Simpsons," you'll see the name Brad Bird over and over again. Bird was brought aboard the fledgling Fox animated series just as it was metamorphisizing from shorts on "The Tracy Ullman Show" into a half-hour weekly series. Bird's work those first years of "The Simpsons" helped establish the network as a genuine player and the artist as one of the key members in the new wave of animation who were reshaping the world of cartoons both figuratively and literally.

He got an early start. Hired by Disney while still in his teens and sent to Cal Arts Institute on a full Disney scholarship, Bird soon found himself bristling under the authority of the corporate mouse. "I was vocal about the lack of quality and was accused of ‘rocking the boat while I was there, and then we parted ways," Bird says today. Soon after, Bird was taken under the wing of Stephen Spielberg, and wrote, directed and co-produced the animated "Family Dog" segment that aired on the director's TV series "Amazing Stories." He also wrote the first draft for the script that became the feature film *batteries not included. After that, it was Fox, Fox, and more Fox. Bird moved from the "The Simpson" to the short-lived "The Critic" and the hit "King of the Hill." After a few years at Fox, Warner Brothers came calling, and Bird flew from the small screen for a shot at the big one.

His new movie, The Iron Giant, is adapted from the 1968 children's book "The Iron Man," by the late British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes (who was once married to the patron saint of suicidally depressed poets, Sylvia Plath). Pete Townsend of the rock band The Who originally adapted the book for a 1989 album and 1993 stage play that he hoped to turn into an animated musical film. That didn't happen, but it's unlikely Townsend could have turned out a better picture than Bird has with The Iron Giant.

WRE met with Bird for a half hour at the Ritz Carlton in Atlanta. He was a short, rather ordinary looking guy with puppy dog eyes, who was frank in his criticism of current animated films and Hollywood in general. We liked him and his movie, maybe even more so because it was such an unexpected surprise...

Q: I'll be honest. I was not expecting much from this movie...

A lot of people say that.

Q: ...but this is one of the best animated movies I've ever seen. I was familiar with the story, and I'm a Pete Townsend fanatic. I thought his album was pretty weak, actually, and I was worried about what kind of direction you were going to take with the movie. How'd you get involved with this?

I saw it at an open house at Warner Brothers, where they had artwork on display of all the animation projects they had in development, They had like 40 or 50 in development. I saw it and was just struck by the image of a big metal guy and a little boy. About six months later, they asked me if there was anything they had in development that I wanted to know more about. I mentioned that one and asked to read the book. So I read the book and liked it, but I kind of had a different direction that I wanted to go. So I pitched to them the idea that what if the iron guy had a soul.

Q: Did you meet Ted Hughes prior to his death in 1998?

No, I did not. I was supposed to. I went to England and had dinner with Pete [Townsend] and [Producer] Des McAnuff. [Hughes] was supposed to come to dinner, but he couldn't make it that night. He wanted to get together the next morning, but I was already heading out. We sort of just left it that we were going to get together later, but we never did.

Q: So he never saw any of the film?

He read the script. He wrote back a letter to my producer, Allison [Abbatee] saying how much he loved that we deviated from it, and that he was very surprised with it and very happy.

Q: How big a role did Pete Townsend have in the picture? He takes an Executive Producer role, but that can be kind of a vague term to a lot of people. What was his involvement level?

I think Pete came [to the project] to do a musical based on the book. When I pitched my story, he sort of agreed that the musical aspect was not as crucial ... or not something that suited the direction that I wanted to go. So he stepped back a bit, but he's been very supportive of the project. I think he's happy with how it's turned out.

Q: So it was his plan to feature the music from his album?

Well, I never read that treatment or anything, but I think the intention was to do kind of what he did on the album and on the stage, though I've never seen the stage production. I think he was used mainly...you know....putting the Hughes book in a rock musical form. I think it would have been very different movie than the typical Disney type musical. But the story, the direction I wanted to go in, was not best done as a musical. But he was cool enough and Des was cool enough to agree with that.

Q: Why the title change from The Iron Man to The Iron Giant? It's such a small detail, but you've gone ahead and done it anyway.

Actually, that wasn't our idea. The title change came with the book. Because in the U.S., Iron Man is a [Marvel] comic book character. So, the book in the US, when it's printed here, is also The Iron Giant. So we just decided to call ours The Iron Giant as well. I don't have any problem with Iron Man, but I also think Iron Giant is a fine title.

Q: Iron Giant certainly says he's big, while Iron Man might not.

Right. It could be the Tin Man, it could be a little iron guy.

Q: Warner Brothers has not had a real good track record with feature animation, critically or commercially...

Space Jam was successful. But that was kind of a blend.

Q: It did okay, but it didn't match the expectations. It didn't do Disney numbers.

No.

Q: Did this cause you any concern to hook up with a studio that hasn't had a breakout animated film?

I don't know. I've had a tendency to kind of align myself with collapsing regimes. I think that's because collapsing regimes are the only ones who are open to suggestions, while Disney, you know: "We make things this way and you will do it this way or you will not direct at Disney!" So that kind of situation is good for Disney as a company, but it's not very good for me, because I want to do movies differently than Disney does them. So, before Disney, I was at Turner, and Turner was another sort of thing the whole time I was there. It was closing down or they were unable to make a decision. So I think that the downside of it is that people don't feel secure about themselves the way Disney feels secure about themselves. But the upside is that they are open to being convinced about going into a different direction, and that was the case here. Because Warners did not have a good experience trying to emulate Disney both in the kind of material they were doing and the way the films were produced -- Disney's structure is very middle management heavy, where there's ten VPs for every artist, and I think it's maybe not the greatest environment for somebody trying to do something different. At Warner's they tried to emulate Disney in those two senses and it didn't work for them, and I think for many ways Quest for Camelot bought us the opportunity to do this film. Also, they were tough on us for the budget, we had a lot lower budget than Quest for Camelot, and A LOT lower budget than Tarzan or Prince of Egypt.

Q: So what was your budget?

I'm not supposed to say. I will say this though: We could make three of them for the cost of Tarzan or Prince of Egypt. We had a schedule that was about as half as long. But in exchange for this, they gave us tremendous elbow room. If we had a good idea, we could simply act on it. We didn't have to submit it to a bureaucracy. And to me, that was worth every bit of the tradeoff. We were racing the entire time we made the film, because our ambitions were high and our schedule was tight, but we were exhilarated by the fact that we could really do the movie that we wanted to do and a lot of us knew we might never get that opportunity again.

Q: A lot of trades say this is it: If this movie doesn't make it Warner Brothers' animation division goes in the crapper.

Oh, I don't know. I would hope Warner Brothers would not look at the viability of an entire art form resting on a few films. But I would give the glass a half full answer and say that if this movie does well, more well produced movies with different stories than the kind Disney does will come in the wake of it, whether they are made at Warner Brothers or somewhere else. There has been a tremendous separation between doing well produced animation and interesting material. If you do material that deviates from the formula, you gotta do it for a buck-ninety eight and send it to Korea. If you do something that is elaborate, full animation, it seems like you also have to do stories that have been told a hundred-thousand times before and slap five broadway songs on it and have annoying comic sidekicks...

Q: Gee, who are you referring to?

(laughs) Uhh, I'm just saying...well, you know... uhhh, I think a lot of films follow that model, and if we succeed at deviating from that...I mean this is the first opportunity I've gotten to take high quality animation and do interesting material. If we succeed at that, I think it will lead to a lot of other exciting films.

Q: The film's artwork seems to be dated on purpose. The whole picture doesn't really have that high gloss look, it looks like it was made in the 50s.

Well, we drew on influences from the 50s, whether they be Saturday Morning Post covers, or comic books of the period, but some of the up to the minute...you mean, we didn't have a scene with a thousand cranes flying over a sparkling river is that what you mean?

Q: Well, that but...

Well that was as much a function of how we had to move quickly as it was...you know...also, our story is not that kind of story. I would have loved to have more time and money, but...

Q: No, no, I'm saying it served its purpose and was refreshing. I liked Tarzan, but there was a lot coming at you, to the point of almost being overwhelming. And here it seemed like the story came first.

I think "I’ve had a tendency to align myself with collapsing regimes...because [they’re] the only ones who are open to suggestions, while Disney, you know: 'We make things this way and you will do it this way or you will not direct at Disney!'" There is a tendency -- not only in animation, but in live action films -- to act as if the audience has a remote and they're going to change the channel. So there is this franticness to them, where some loud noise is always happening or about to happen, the cuts are coming faster and faster, the action is speeded up, as if the audience has this incredibly short attention span. And filmmakers are not that secure about their stories. They have to keep throwing crap at you in order to keep you interested. But to me, movies are like music. If you repeat one constant pace, it very quickly loses its impact. You feel much more exhilarated accelerating to 100 MPH from 15 MPH than you do simply staying at 100. At it's also exhilarating. in a different. way to hit the breaks. But if you just stay cruising at Mach 5, it doesn't feel like you're moving after a while. And there's this sameness that is deadening. So I tried very much to slow down in certain spots in this film, and have quiet moments where it's all about anticipation and something about to happen. A stillness. All of my favorite old Disney films have those moments. If you're saying the movie's old fashioned in that sense, well, thank you very much.

Q: There's no hip hop music, or modernized heavy score, no love song theme at the end. I've got the soundtrack and it's really obscure material...

That's the soundtrack. There will be another CD, the score for the film, which to me is very lush and huge sounding. I love the score.

Q: Yeah, but there's always pressure, like with Disney, they always have that big love song...

Oh yeah! You got to have the five songs! You have to have those five songs! You've got to have the "I want song," where the character sings what he or she wants [begins singing] "I want a firm mattress..." and they get the firm mattress just before the end of the movie. Then there's the anthem song. Then the love song, which is reprised over the end titles with contemporary R&B artists. Then there's the comedy score, where the wacky people sing about how wacky they are. Then there's the often gay villain song. And there's a sameness to them that's cookie cutter. And I think even the Disney animators are really hoping this film does well so they can have legal precedence set for them to break free.

Q: What's the secret to convincing adults that animated films are not just extended cartoons that appeal only to children?

I think the only hope lies in making films that adults will enjoy. As I've said before, there are films definitely geared for adults now. I think both TV programs I worked on, "King of the Hill" and "The Simpsons", were squarely aimed at adults. But I think "[Today’s] filmmakers are not secure about their stories. They have to keep throwing crap at you in order to keep you interested. But to me, movies are like music. If you repeat one constant pace, it very quickly loses its impact...There’s this sameness that is deadening."
there has been the misunderstanding in Hollywood that if you do high quality production value, familiar stories like Disney does is the only way you can do it. And it's kind of a Pavlovian response, because every time you see high quality animation, that's the kind of story they're telling. If someone deviates from that, like Yellow Submarine or Animal Farm, or Ralph Bakshi's early work [Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic], it's always done with really inferior artwork. It doesn't move smoothly. All the characters move the same, they don't have distinctive patterns of movement.

So it's as if the only good film directors did westerns and all the other genres were handled by hacks. There would be the misunderstanding of a lot of people that westerns were the only films that could be good because they were the only films that were really well produced. But if you took Disney-level artists and went somewhere different with them, you could also do a compelling science fiction film, a really ultra scary horror movie that's animated, any other form. You just have to start really pushing the quality aspect of it. My argument has always been that an adult audience likes really good animation, but if the only thing that really good, well produced animation does is fairy tales, then you'll never get the opportunity to prove it, because fairy tales are fine for some adults but other adults go "Eh." If you're going to do an adult script, you can't keep producing them for a buck-ninety eight, because then the people who really like well produced stuff are going to go "Eh." It's a cliche, but you've got to build it and really hope that they'll come.

Q: You mentioned something that you had a shortened amount of time to get this out. But I read this whole process started for you in 1996...

...Late 1996.

Q: That cuts the time frame to about two-and-a-half years. So the normal animation process from green-light to release is five years?

Not from green-light. From the start of development. Like Mulan was five years, but three years were preparation and two years were actually doing animation. We were about half what a big animated feature is.

Q: That's still twice as long as the normal live action movie.

Depending on the live action movies. Not Star Wars. Not Eyes Wide Shut.

Q: Those are exceptions, and two-and-a-half years, still, that's a long time. Does that stretch of time ever get to you?

Sure it does. I have a lot of stories that I want to tell and some part of me goes, if you tell these all in animation, you'll die before you have one-tenth of them done. On the other hand, I get a lot of very strange reactions from people because because they like the film and they anticipate it is going to do well, and they say "Surely you're going to get out of animation now, you're free!" and I go, "But I really like animation." People assume that if you're a serious filmmaker, you must want to get out of animation as soon as possible. I want to do both. I want to do them until I die.

Q: Do you have another project picked out?

Yeah, I pitched one to Warner Brothers, it's animated, that they really liked.

Q: So that's what's next?

I'm hoping. We're developing it. Whether or not they green-light it is up to them.

Q: You talk about getting creative freedom. On the "The Simpsons" and "King of the Hill," did you run into many problems with Fox looking over your shoulder?

I think that the only good experiences that I've had in the film industry until Iron Giant were in the shadow of 800 pound gorillas. Steven Spielberg. gave me my first chance to direct and really allowed me incredible freedom that I haven't had to that degree until this project. But on the "The Simpsons", the 800 pound gorilla was Jim Brooks, who cast a very large shadow over the land of television, so no executive at any network is going to mess with Jim Brooks. So Jim Brooks granted the freedom to the writers and artists on the "The Simpsons" to go where no TV series had gone before and I totally credit the freedom that we enjoyed to Jim Brooks. Not that the guys who ran the show didn't have their struggles with Fox. They did.

Q: What's the biggest difference between directing a sitcom and a feature?

There are several. I think it gets exponentially more difficult with length. I think that a half hour show is more than three time as difficult as a 7 minute short and a 90 minute film is more than three times as difficult as a half hour program. The longer something gets, the more elusive the rhythms are. Things that you are sure that you are going to need, once you put them down on film, don't seem necessary at all. And the rhythms of a good feature film are a challenge because you are trying to not have the same pace but always keep people engaged. You need to vary the film. I go to see a film like Armageddon, and it seems like you could walk in at any point and it's exactly the same kind of filmmaking, whether it's two people talking or a planet blowing up. They're all shot in two second takes that seem to be almost randomly chosen. It gets down to that MTV kind of movie making that I really don't admire. All of my favorite directors vary their rhythms are are willing to stay with a long shot and let it unfold if that's what called for.

Q: The original book was set in England. This movie is set in Maine in the 1950s. But one of the driving points is that it talks a lot about guns and violence. Did you ever think about setting the movie in contemporary America?

There were pressures to do whatever seemed more commercially viable to different people. I felt that the 1990s would have made a lot things look unbelievable, that they couldn't locate a 50 foot metal thing with all the technology they have now. I also think there is something very specific about the Cold War that is wonderful and there are very few films that are distinctly set in the exact period they are made that age well. You tend to need more distance. There are exceptions to this of course, Hard Day's Night and several of Woody Allen's films. But I'm happy with this time period. There were discussions brought up about setting it now, and putting a hip hop thing to it. [Starts rapping loudly] Raw! Iron Giant! Giant! Gi-Gi-Gi-Giant! He's big! He's Bad! He's the Iron Giant! Giant! You know people would have loved to do that, because it seems like it'll sell.

Q: You could have gotten Will Smith.

[Laughs] Yeah! He's the Wild, wild giant!

Q: He's got a big iron giant in his movie, too.

Does he? I haven't seen it. I haven't had time to see anything. I've seen Eyes Wide Shut and Star Wars. That's it.

Q: Wow.

I know. It's terrible. I've got to start getting out again. I want to see Red Violin, I want to see Blair Witch, there's a whole bunch I want to see.
 
 
 

AUGUST 1999 ARTICLE

Article by Bob Miller, published in the Issue 4.5 of Animation World Magazine, in August 1999:

Imagine: An American animated feature with no song-and-dance routines. No goofy sidekick characters. No foppish villains. No fart gags. And no condescending to the audience.

This is the kind of film many in the animation industry dreams to work on, in an atmosphere where the studio allows creativity to flourish, under the guidance and vision of an experienced, talented director. No committee approvals. No micro-management. Just teamwork, bringing to life a compelling, entertaining story.
 
 

A One Man Army

It's a revolutionary approach in today's animation industry, one that Brad Bird had to sell to skeptical executives at Warner Bros., who had been burned by the dismal failure of Quest for Camelot.

"I'm interested in showing that animated films are films first, and animation second," Bird says. "We want to have something for adults, as well as children. Animation is storytelling. Storytelling can be anything. Hopefully, The Iron Giant is a step in that direction.

"I just pitched them the idea of, 'What if a gun had a soul?' They saw the dramatic possibilities in that idea. I pitched them the story line, the way I saw it, and they went for it."

Bird notes The Iron Giant differs in many ways from contemporary animated features. "It's wide screen rather than being 1:8:5. It's a story that not very many people know and certainly this is a very different version from the book [The Iron Man, by British author Ted Hughes], even if you have read it. It takes place during this century, in the not-too-distant past, using the Cold War as a backdrop.

"It's also like the old Walt Disney films, in that they had moments of quiet and moments that were very character-based. Slower-paced moments as well as faster-paced moments.

"Something that bothers me about film in general these days -- and this goes for animation as well -- is this notion that something has to be in your face every second. There has to be activity or sound effects or cuts or music blaring. It's almost as if the audience has the remote and they're going to change channels. It's an attitude of panic, for short attention spans, rather than assuming the audience doesn't have a short attention span and can get engaged in the story, and get involved in the quieter pleasures of character and milking the moment."

Bird also points out, "We don't have the obnoxious celebrity sidekick, the goofy sidekick. We don't have five tunes. And we don't have a foppish villain."

Bird admits that the executives at Warner Bros. had concerns that the film had few characters to exploit as merchandise. "I know that they were concerned about that, and they did make suggestions that I add more characters and pets and sidekicks to make it more merchandisable in their eyes. I just said the story wasn't about that. If they were interested in telling the story, they should let it be what it wants to be."

Bird credits the studio for seeing things his way, naming Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Courtney Vallenti, and earlier in the production, Billy Gerber (who has since moved on to another position at the studio). "If you gave Lorenzo and Courtney a good argument, they'd listen to it."
 
 

A Quest For Something Better

Bird also had to overcome the stigma of the previous animated film, Quest for Camelot, whose cost overruns and production nightmares made Warners reconsider their commitment to feature animation.

"In some ways, there was a stigma," Bird says, "and in some ways it gave us an opportunity. They were trying to do a very big thing to set up an animation company from scratch. They and everyone else tries to follow the Disney model, not only in terms of the story, but also the method by which it was produced. The Disney model is sort of a micro-managed thing, where every single decision is combed over by a huge number of people. It works very well for Disney, but I don't think it worked very well for Warner Bros. They had more management than they had artists, almost, during Quest for Camelot. It was a troubled production. I don't think Warner Bros. was ultimately very satisfied with the result.
 

"When we came along, we had to have a significantly smaller budget and shorter production schedule than Quest for Camelot. They did leave us alone if we kept it in control and showed them we were producing the film responsibly and getting it done on time and doing stuff that was good. So we were definitely watched closely. But when we were delivering, they were good enough to stay away and let us make the film. That was one of the most wonderful things about this film. They truly let us make it.

"This film was made by this animation team. It was not a committee thing at all. We made it. I don't think any other studio can say that to the level that we can.

"The tradeoff is that we had one-third of the money of a Disney or DreamWorks film, and half of the production schedule. We have a few rough edges on our film, but we also have a lot of heart."

How did Bird reduce costs? For one thing, he reduced the bureaucracy. "Bureaucracy is quite an expensive thing," he says. "We didn't have that. We simplified certain things. We spent a lot of extra effort on the planning. A lot of the shot planning was being very elaborate in our animatics.

"We solved a lot of our problems in that part of the process. What that helped us do, is when it came time to do the actual scene, most of our questions had been answered. So we didn't waffle a lot. We knew where we were heading. Even though we were changing the film all the time, we weren't waiting until a later stage of the process to answer certain questions.

"We were under a tight schedule on a tight budget, but if we had a good idea, I didn't have to check it with a number of people. I could just put it in. It was the strangest feeling. I kept glancing around my shoulder expecting somebody to stop me. But nobody would say, 'No.' Which never happens," Bird says with a laugh.

"When you empower your animation team to really make the film with you, so they don't feel like worker drones, that brings out the best in everybody, because they feel very invested in the film. We weren't the most experienced animation team on the planet. Three-quarters of the team came from Quest for Camelot, but a lot of them were ill-used on that project. They weren't super-experienced, but they were very talented, and if you pointed them in the right direction, they could deliver. So I'm very proud of the work of the team, because everybody rallied. Even though we didn't have the time or the money to do what we did, we did it anyway."

Bird names some of those who especially helped him realize his vision: "Allison Abbate did a very good job of producing it. Tony Fucili was our supervisor of animation, and he's certainly experienced and a wonderful talent. Steve Marcowski headed up the animation of the Giant. I also want to credit Tim McCanlies [co-writer of the screenplay with Bird, based on Bird's story]. We had a great story team, headed by Jeff Lynch. Michael Caine did a great job on the music. Everybody really pulled together."

To design the Iron Giant, Bird recruited filmmaker Joe Johnston (Rocketeer, October Sky), who had drawn key designs for the original Star Wars trilogy. "Joe's a friend of mine and my wife," Bird says. "We've known him for years and I was able to lure him to do a little bit of moonlighting. He did the very first designs of the Giant, and Mark Whiting, our production designer, and Steve Markowski, our head Giant animator, added several things to it and refined it. Joe did a great job."

Bird had to blend the Giant's CG (computer-generated) animation with the hand-drawn animation of Hogarth, the boy who befriends him. "The common rap of CG and traditional animation blends, is that you could always tell where one ends and the other begins," the director says. "If we did that in a film where the whole film is based on a relationship between a CG character and a traditionally-animated character, we were doomed to fail."

Bird's solution?

"Well, we just tried to remove all the things that separate hand-drawn stuff from CGI. Rather than trying to make the hand-drawn stuff have the look of CGI, we thought we should try to make the CGI look hand-drawn.

"We even created a software program to wobble the lines of the Giant just a little bit. Not enough to make them look like they're badly-drawn, but to make them a little less perfect than they would normally be. It's a very subtle effect. You can't see it a lot. A lot of people don't know that the Giant is computer-animated, and that, to me, says that we did our job. If we did our job, you won't feel that there's any difference."

Another approach Bird tried was putting the Giant "on twos" when he was seen with other characters that were animated "on twos" [a new pose every other frame].

"We tried to be as cognizant of that as possible, because it's something that the computer doesn't want to do," Bird relates. "You have to tell the computer to do it. It will always assume that you want everything on ones, because that's the way it's designed. So you have to target where you want to go on twos, and pull those frames out. We did a mixture of ones and twos, which is what our animation is. It's ones for faster action, and twos for slower action.

"We simplified the lighting on the characters as well. The relationship between the boy and the Giant is the core of the movie. The key to us was to make them seem like they're inhabiting the same world."

One plot point the movie doesn't address is, why is the Iron Giant on Earth? It's a subject that Bird is reluctant to discuss in detail.

"The people at Warner Bros. asked that question very early on," he says. "I didn't want to answer it because once you start to answer it, it becomes a Pandora's Box and the whole movie becomes about the Iron Giant's back story. The minute you start to talk about it, you explain a little and it begs more questions which beg more answers which beg more questions. Pretty soon it becomes a movie about a warrior race of robots and not a movie about a boy and a giant metal man.

"It was more important for me to make the Giant emblematic of our own situation on Earth; where he really doesn't know where he came from or why he's here or where he's going, and we don't either. It's the stuff that religious leaders have fought about for thousands of years.

"We did have one sequence that I really would have liked to have in there, where there's indications of

where he came from. It was a dream that the Giant had. It suggested that he came from a whole planet full of them, and there was a war going on, but it was intermingled with scenes that we had seen during the course of the movie: watching Hogarth turn off the power switch at the power station, [watching] the deer and so on. So it was done in an abstract manner. It could have been interpreted several different ways, like a dream is.

"We had some images that suggested that there was a convoy of these robots. He got loose of the convoy and was floating in space for awhile and landed on Earth. But we certainly don't go into it.

"A lot of times you can be more profound when you suggest things and you don't say them. Our intention was to make it bigger by leaving more to the imagination."
 
 

A Sequel?

But isn't the back story something Bird would develop for a sequel?

"Not by me," he responds. "And even the ending was not me saying that I want to do a sequel.

"It was two things. One, it was saying that souls don't die. In an abstract way that was what it was saying. In another way, it was a very mild little homage to the ending of all those monster movies, where they'd say 'The End ... or is it?' At one point I stupidly considered putting that into the title, but I thought it was cheap. So, I didn't.

"That was the intention of it. If anybody reads it as me trying to set up a sequel, I would have no idea where to go with a sequel. I don't think I'd be interested in doing it, myself.

"Let's put it this way: One thing that I really don't like about animation is there seems to be this pathological urge: if you ever do something well, you can't rest until you've done a crappy version of it. I can't think of a character that hasn't been ruined, where they've done several bad versions of it to end the cycle.

"Now I see Disney taking its feature characters and putting them on Saturday morning shows and videos, and I just go, 'Why?' Even though they're pretty well done by TV standards, if you're going to do something for TV, design it for TV. Don't do a cheap version of something you did really well for the movie."

As for a potential Iron Giant sequel movie or TV series, Brad Bird says, "I just hope they get interested in other things. There's a million things to do. Some projects totally lend themselves to sequels and others don't. Godfather II is a great film and obviously the Star Wars films. Particularly The Empire Strikes Back. The original James Bond ones. But I'm not a big fan of the Jaws II kind of sequel where you've done everything that you needed to do with the first one, then you're just going for the money. I hope that they wouldn't do a sequel unless they came up with a fantastic idea, and I hope that they would want to do it as well as we've done it, at the very least."