Brad Bird on animation

Brad Bird is an American director, screenwriter, animator, producer and voice actor. He is best known for his animated feature films, The Iron Giant, The Incredibles and Ratatouille.

I admire him a lot, I really like his work, the way he tells the smallest things with no words at all and makes his stories believable in every way. When I discovered the amazing Cornelis van Dijkhuizen made a video compiling different interviews and created this motivational speech, I was baffled. I have copied the whole text for you, and I really advise that you take a look to it when you feel down or with no motivation for doing things. Brad's words with the composition of Cornelis will make you shred a tear... or a couple.

We want tons of good ideas. And we’ve got, you know, 80 minutes here to knock everybody out. And I don’t mean like doing tons of shit and, and cutting every two seconds like films that sort of yammer and yammer… You know, it’s not that.

This is Brad Bird, writer and director.

Animation is not a spontaneous art form. It has to be very carefully done, very meticulously done. But if you do it right, people are not aware of the complexity. The filmmakers I most admire recognize the value of teasing. People are in such a rush to get the action sequences going fast that they forget that there’s pleasure to be had in the sneaking around-part. So I have a few sneaking around-sequences. The kind of film making I most admire takes a moment to savor things. I think that a good filmmaker slows down. 

I didn’t know anything about this world. It was easy for me to write a clueless cooking-guy. As part of my writing process I usually try to jump deep into the movie, somewhere characters are having problems, because it forces me to have one character talk to the other and you find things out quickly. The mistake a lot of people make is thinking that you can force ideas to come. Every idea comes about in its own way. If you try to over-control the process, you limit the process. 

There’s a tendency in a lot of CG-films to kind of over-light things to make them pretty. I think that there’s beauty in darkness. Turn out the lights, let’s go! 

The mistake that people often make with animated films is they love the gravity-defying aspect of it. But if you defy gravity and the later on need to feel danger, you have a really hard time convincing that audience. 

There’s expectations for animation. Saturday morning, they have these very strange shows completely designed around conflict and yet no one ever dies or gets really injured, or… There’s no consequence to it. It’s better if kids realize that there’s a cost. It’s more dramatic and it’s closer to life, you know. This is not one of those films where we’re going to put a pillow around every experience. People think of animation only doing things where people are dancing and a lot of histrionics. But animation is not a genre. People keep saying “the animation genre”. It’s NOT a genre! Animation is an art form. It can do any genre. Y’know, it can do a detective film, a cowboy film, a horror film… an R-rated film or a kids fairy-tale. But it doesn’t do ONE thing. Next time I hear, “Oh, what’s like working in the animation genre?” I’m gonna PUNCH that person! You’re constantly trying to get the audience into the state of feeling. How things FEEL rather than how things ARE. You are trying to get to a very primal, very simple, I think, nourishing thing. Indulging in the human aspect of being alive.