Brad Bird, the Incredibles director who waited three decades for Ray Gunn

Brad Bird

Photo: Boungawa / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 24, 1957 Kalispell, Montana, United States
Occupation	Film director
Known for	Ratatouille, The Incredibles, Incredibles 2
Awards	2 Academy Award · Annie

Brad Bird has made some of the most profitable family films Hollywood has ever released, and for nearly all of that time he has been arguing that animation is not a synonym for children’s entertainment. The film meant to prove it, a hard-boiled detective story about the last human private eye in a futuristic city crowded with aliens, sat in development for decades, passed from one studio to another and survived a switch from hand-drawn to computer animation. Its name is Ray Gunn, and it finally exists. Whether the wait paid off is the argument critics have just started having.

The impulse is older than the career. Phillip Bradley Bird, the youngest of four children, came into the world in Kalispell, Montana, and grew up partly in Corvallis, Oregon. When he was eleven, a family connection to the Disney composer George Bruns got him a tour of the studio, where he met the veteran animators known as the Nine Old Men. He went home, made his own short version of The Tortoise and the Hare and mailed it to Disney, following his parents’ advice to start at the top and work his way down. In the years that followed he worked closely with Milt Kahl, one of those veterans and the animator he considered a hero.

Bird, born on September 24, 1957, finished Corvallis High School in 1975. A Disney scholarship later sent him to CalArts, into a generation that also produced John Lasseter, Tim Burton and Henry Selick. Disney then hired him, credited him on The Small One and The Fox and the Hound, and fired him after about two years. He landed at Steven Spielberg’s Amblin, where he created Family Dog for the anthology series Amazing Stories and co-wrote the 1987 film *batteries not included. Television gave him his next foothold: he spent the first eight seasons of The Simpsons as an executive consultant, a show built on exactly the idea he kept pushing, that a cartoon could talk to adults. He also designed one of its best villains, Sideshow Bob.

His first feature, The Iron Giant, made at Warner Bros. Feature Animation from Ted Hughes’ novel, followed a small-town boy who befriends a colossal robot that refuses to become a weapon. It was drawn largely by hand, earnest and ignored. Released in 1999, it took about $31.3 million worldwide against a budget of roughly $50 million, and it needed years of home video and television reruns to become the classic it is now taken to be.

Pixar, home of his CalArts contemporary Lasseter, brought Bird in in 2000. The Incredibles, his story of a suburban superhero family forced into retirement, grossed $631.4 million in 2004 and won him the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. He voiced the film’s tiny, imperious costume designer, Edna Mode, himself. In 2005 he took over Ratatouille from its original director, Jan Pinkava, and the story of a Parisian rat who wants to cook brought him a second Oscar in the same category. Both screenplays were also nominated for Best Original Screenplay, though neither won.

Then he went looking for a camera. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, his first live-action film, with Tom Cruise back as Ethan Hunt, became the highest-grossing entry in the franchise up to that point when it opened in 2011. Tomorrowland, an original science-fiction film he co-wrote with Damon Lindelof and shot with George Clooney, went the other way in 2015: a box-office bomb estimated to have cost Disney between $120 million and $150 million.

That pattern is the part of the Bird story that rarely gets told straight. The filmmaker who insists that animation deserves grown-up stories has had his biggest hits inside Pixar and inside a spy franchise, while the two films he made outside both, The Iron Giant and Tomorrowland, lost money on release. After Tomorrowland he went back to the Parr family: Incredibles 2, in 2018, grossed more than $1.2 billion worldwide. Bird is also known inside the industry for close, exacting supervision of every detail, and he has explained it in his own terms: animation, he has said, is “the illusion of life, and you can’t create that illusion convincingly if you haven’t lived it.” The irony now is that the first reviews of his long-promised adult film are split, and at least one faults it for the very thing he spent decades avoiding: playing it safe. The Guardian gave Ray Gunn five stars; Screen and The Hollywood Reporter were negative, and What’s on Netflix called it a “mesmerizing yet safe” noir.

Ray Gunn has been with him since the 1990s, when Turner Feature Animation planned to produce it before it was shelved after The Iron Giant. Bird later told Warner Bros.: “Either let’s make it or let me try to make it somewhere else.” Pixar was never on the table, because he wanted an older audience. He signed with Skydance Animation in 2021, the revival was announced the following year, and by late 2023 it was reported to have moved from hand-drawn to computer animation. The finished film, a 119-minute noir reported to cost more than $150 million, has a screenplay Bird wrote with Matthew Robbins, a score by Michael Giacchino, who has scored every Bird feature since The Incredibles, and Lasseter among its producers. Sam Rockwell voices the detective, Scarlett Johansson plays the pop star Venus Nova, and Tom Waits and Matt Berry fill out the city’s alien underworld. Bird himself voices two henchmen. It had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on October 10, 2026.

Bird married Elizabeth Canney in 1988; they have three sons, Nicholas, Michael and Jack.

The next steps are already set. Ray Gunn opens in select US theaters on December 4, 2026, including rare 70mm engagements for an animated film, before reaching Netflix worldwide on December 18. In the meantime, the franchise that paid for his independence is moving on without him in the director’s chair: Peter Sohn is directing Incredibles 3, due in 2028, from a script Bird is writing, with Bird also serving as executive producer. For the first time in his career, the most commercial thing with his name on it and the most personal one are arriving from different hands, and the personal one finally belongs to him.

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Tags: animation, Brad Bird, Ray Gunn, Michael Giacchino, The Iron Giant, Ratatouille

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