Cartoon crusader

Brad Bird just wants people to give animated films a little respect

Oscar-winning animator and screenwriter Brad Bird began making his first cartoon at age 11 and finished it at 13. At his parents’ urging, he sent a copy of the completed short to Walt Disney studios, which led to an early apprenticeship there. After stints on 'The Simpsons' and 'The King of the Hill', he went on to write and direct two of our all-time favorite animated films, 'The Iron Giant' (1999) and 'The Incredibles' (2005). His latest feature, the digitally animated 'Ratatouille', chronicles the adventures of a French rat with sky-high culinary ambitions. We spoke to Bird when he was in town last week. This is an extended Web-only version of the interview that ran in this week's issue.

 

Have you ever read a short story by the late Kurt Vonnegut called “Harrison Bergeron?”

 

I’ve heard of it. A friend of mine called Kevin O’Brien who worked on both Iron Giant and The Incredibles told me to read it but I never actually got around to it.

 

It’s set in this dystopian future in which exceptionally handsome or intelligent or graceful people are handicapped in various ways to enforce absolute equality. It’s Vonnegut satirizing the phenomenon of egalitarianism taken to illiberal extremes, which is also what The Incredibles is about. 

 

Well, it’s one of things that it’s about, yeah.

 

I was thinking about the story in relation to the charge that there was a “reactionary subtext” to The Incredibles. I have to confess that at the time I went along with the herd on that one. I’d only recently started this film critic job and I think I was overly preoccupied with whatever the holy writ out of New York was saying. But I’ve seen the movie about 70 more times since then because it’s one of my 3-year-old daughter’s favorites, so I’ve had time to reconsider the issue. I mean, Vonnegut certainly never got called a neocon, so why are you?

 

People have a real hard time pegging me politically, which I’m fine with. Certain liberals got upset with the lines like, “It’s not a graduation! He’s moving from the fourth grade to the fifth!” And conservatives get upset about my position about weaponry in The Iron Giant, and one guy even thought that the movie was pro-Communist, which is completely ridiculous. And I can’t do anything about how people perceive my films except to say, Well, that ain’t what I was thinkin’. Politically, I’m somewhere in the middle. I’m for the individual, which definitely puts me at odds with this cultural tendency to give everyone a trophy just for showing up. I hate that, because I’m sorry, life doesn’t work that way. There are winners and losers, and losing can actually build character, and the nervousness about failure is a priceless thing that can stimulate you to do your best work.

 

In the same movie you have this situation whereby retired superhero Bob Parr works at a big insurance corporation, and the only outlet he has for his altruism is to subvert the interests of his employer by helping clients collect on their claims. You’ve stolen the march on Michael Moore’s Sicko but nobody complained about your crypto-left-wing, anti-corporate bias.

 

See, that’s what I mean. People on the far right and the far left only see their own myopic little agendas and are not awake to many other things that are going on. And I think there’s a tendency to polarize all thought and speech by relegating it all to one of two categories, far left or far right, which doesn’t serve any of us. I’m one of the people who think the whole red state/blue state dichotomy is ridiculous, because if you actually go down to the level where actual people are, it’s pretty much purple. Most people are right around the center, but these straitjacket categories get imposed on the map because it makes good TV, and it’s good strategy for both sides to sell this idea of a compartmentalized society. So I’m glad my films are politically confusing.

 

It’s an interesting point spread of reaction too. If some people are reading a cryptocommunist message into The Iron Giant and others are reading the philosophy of Ayn Rand into The Incredibles, does that mean you’re getting it right?

 

Maybe. I just don’t care to submit to some simplistic orthodoxy. Ask me about individual issues and I’ll tell you where I stand. I align myself with conservatives on some issues—I believe in individual responsibility. But I’m with liberals on a lot of others, like the environment.

 

The Iron Giant does seem to me rather more left than right, though. It’s pro-Beatnik, which in a Cold War context means pro-counter-culture, and it’s anti-paranoia, or what used to be called “anti-anti-Communist.” FBI agent Kent Mansley essentially represents the worst aspects of anti-Communism at the time. 

 

Sure. And there’s no doubt that my sympathies are with Dean, the Beatnik character. I like Dean, and Dean was influenced by people I knew in my younger years, people who were really good at what they did and loved what they did. One was a football coach I had, who was a hippie. He upset the school because he had long hair and a beard, but he happened also to be All-State in college. He was a hippie who loved football, which is a very military game. But his approach to the game was a very Zen approach, and I excelled under him. I had a great season under him and loved football as long as this guy was my coach. The next year I had the complete opposite guy who was all about the rigid, rule-bound way of coaching and playing and all he really wanted to do anyway was recruit people for wrestling, and I was miserable. This guy made me dislike a sport that I love in the course of one season.

 

You were both an animator and a jock? That’s sort of a rare hybrid, isn’t it?

 

Well, I wouldn’t have defined myself as a jock, but I played sports and had a lot of jock friends until a few years later when I got into doing plays which made me a “thesbian” and suddenly the jocks weren’t so sure about me. It’s like the Red State/Blue State thing! I mean come on, are we not more interesting than that! ?

 

A colleague of mine pointed out that there’s a strange paucity of female characters in Ratatouille. It makes sense that there’d be only one woman in a five-star kitchen, because women are in the minority there and you incorporate that fact into the plot to make her an underdog. But the rats are exclusively male, too.

 

Yes. Uh, well, no. There are female rats; they just aren’t given any lines.

 

So it’s like they’re not there.

 

Well, the story wasn’t originally my idea. Jan Pinkava, who won an Oscar for “Geri’s Game,” originated it. I was brought onto the project a little more than a year and a half ago. When I got involved Colette was a minor character with only a few lines and I made her a major character, so I feel pretty good with my choices. I didn’t feel the need to populate the rat community with women just for the sake of…

 

I’m not trying to bust your chops here, it’s just that the female characters in The Iron Giant and especially The Incredibles were so central to the story and so well realized. 

 

Well, that one was my idea from the start. For Ratatouille I was brought in later and I didn’t feel the need to politically bring it up to quota with a certain number of women.

 

I see a motif taking form here in this interview.

 

Great. That’s very important to good storytelling.

 

Ratatouille is obviously designed to tap into the widening public interest in fancy food and fine dining. Are you a gourmet or epicure or whatever?

 

No, not at all. I am becoming more appreciative of good food every year, but I didn’t know that much about it going into this project and had to learn a lot. We did go to Paris. I only got in on one trip, but a lot of the crew got multiple trips and really studied the workings of a gourmet kitchen, which is a very particular world.

 

You’re known to have a beef about how little respect animation receives as an art form.

Yeah, you’re not a real director if you make animated films.

 

People who make graphic novels and work in the more artistic side of comics make similar complaints. What is it about storytelling through non-photographic images that gets so little respect?

 

People see it as a childish sort of hieroglyphics. They connect it with the comics on the funny pages, as something that’s only meant to be silly and can’t ever represent anything deep or serious. And while I make no apology for wanting to make a comedy that’s just plain fun on the surface, I think the underlying art film is actually a magnificent art form. Some people inadvertently keep pressing my buttons by saying, “Oh, I’m so happy I had children so that I can go and see your film.” As if they couldn’t see it on their own, without children to act as their beards, you know? It’s a big tent, this art form, and everybody’s allowed in, even the childless! Enjoy it! Take a date! You’ll have a good time even without kids!

 

Do you not feel that animation is making progress on exactly that front?

 

Slowly, yeah. And in terms of things like awards, if you going to use those as barometers, the fact that they now have an animation category is in one respect a step in the right direction because at least they’re realizing they have to acknowledge it. But the separateness of it bugs me. I was actually really honored when The Incredibles was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay along with a field of live-action features. There was no prejudicial distinction and I was very happy about that, not to be shunted off to the children’s table for once. The writing was seen as writing. I hope the same thing will start happening for things like production design and photography. Design is still design even when the sets and costumes are drawings or digital images, and animated cinematography is still painting with light even though the characters and landscapes don’t really exist. If your animated feature is one of the best-looking films of the year, it should be considered along with the other live-action nominees. And direction: animated films are as directed—in some ways moreso—than any live-action film. I still have to pick camera angles, I still have to decide when to cut rapidly and when to slow down…

 

I think people will find that easier to grasp when they see the chase sequences in Ratatouille, which compare favorably to The Bourne Ultimatum.

 

That’d be nice. We worked hard on those.

 

There was this moment in the 1930s through the 1940s when Walt Disney got all the sort of respect you’re talking about and more. Intellectuals and artists and critics all over the world couldn’t say enough positive things about Walt as an artist. Why and when did all that fall apart?

 

Well, I think for a while he was considered a folk artist, but the minute he started becoming truly “the peoples’ artist,” I think they started turning against him because he was no longer their discovery. I think that happened with somebody like Spielberg too. Jaws is a popcorn movie, but it happens to be an excellent popcorn movie, and I think it’s as worthy of being taken seriously—on its striving-for-entertainment level—as any, you know, pompous film about…some, you know…unknown cause.

 

I sense you have a specific film in mind but you’re holding back the title.

 

You know, I don’t want to bad-mouth anybody. I’ll do it off the record.

 

Off the record, then.

 

Off the record, a film like --- ----- just drives me fucking nuts. I’m all for movies that are about social things if they’re powerful and engaging as entertainment, but films that are just simply there to… Here, I’ll give you an example you can actually use. I think Gandhi was decent film, but it came out the same year as E.T. Now, E.T. is about a little rubber alien and it’s clearly pitched at the level of a magical fairytale, but it is a better movie than Gandhi. Gandhi the man was an amazing person, a major great force for all that is good about humankind, but that doesn’t make Gandhi a better film than E.T. It’s not as well cut, it’s not as well conceived, it doesn’t get to your inner places the way E.T. does. Certain movies just have this essential spark, and creating that spark is what filmmaking out to be about, whether its live-action or claymation or whatever

 

What don’t you care for in contemporary animation? What’s the opposite of good?

 

[Sighs] That which is rote. Tired, recycled story lines. Fart jokes. Poo-poo jokes. Celebrity-voiced characters that are not interesting to listen to. Smart-alecky pop-culture references that substitute for actual characterization.

 

Do you have any particular films in mind?

 

No. Well, yes, actually, but I don’t want to go there.

 

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