Age: 68
male
Philip Bradley Bird (born September 24, 1957) is an American filmmaker, animator, and voice actor. He has had a career spanning over four decades in both live-action and animation. Bird was born in Montana and grew up in Oregon. He developed an interest in the art of animation early on, and completed his first short subject by age 14. Bird sent the film to Walt Disney Productions, leading to an apprenticeship from the studio's Nine Old Men. He attended the California Institute of the Arts in the late 1970s, and worked for Disney shortly thereafter. In the 1980s, Bird worked in film development with various studios. He co-wrote Batteries Not Included (1987), and developed two episodes of Amazing Stories for Steven Spielberg, including its spin-off (based on a segment written by Bird for the show), the widely panned animated sitcom Family Dog. Afterwards, Bird joined the animated sitcom The Simpsons as creative consultant for eight seasons. He directed the animated film The Iron Giant (1999); though acclaimed, it was a box-office bomb. Bird moved to Pixar where he wrote and directed two successful animated films, The Incredibles (2004) and Ratatouille (2007). They earned Bird two Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature wins and Best Original Screenplay nominations. He transitioned to live-action filmmaking with similarly successful Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011), he then directed Disney's Tomorrowland (2015). He returned to Pixar to develop Incredibles 2 (2018), which became the second-highest-grossing animated film of all time during its theatrical run, and earned him another nomination for the Academy Award. Bird has a reputation for supervising his projects to a high degree of detail. He advocates for creative freedom and the possibilities of animation, and has criticized its stereotype as children's entertainment, or classification as a genre, rather than an art. Description above from the Wikipedia article Brad Bird, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia
It centers on Horton, a genial elephant, who is convinced by Mayzie, a lazy, irresponsible bird, to sit on her egg while she takes a short "break", which turns into her permanent relocation to Palm Beach. As Horton sits in the nest on top of a tree, he is exposed to the elements, laughed at by his jungle friends, captured by hunters, forced to endure a terrible sea voyage, and finally placed in a traveling circus. However, despite his hardships and Mayzie's clear intent not to return, Horton refuses to leave the nest because he insists on keeping his word, often repeating, "I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant's faithful, one hundred per cent!" The traveling circus ends up visiting near Mayzie's new Palm Beach residence. She visits the circus just as the egg is due to hatch (after 51 weeks in Palm Beach) and demands that Horton should return it, without offering him a reward. However, when the egg hatches, the creature that emerges is an "elephant-bird", a cross between Horton and Mayzie, and Horton and the baby are returned happily to the jungle.
