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
12-year-old Ted Wiggins lives in Thneedville, a walled city where everything is artificial, with no living plants . Ted has a crush on environmentalist Audrey, and decides to impress her with a "real tree". His grandmother Norma tells him the legend of the Once-ler, who knows what happened to the trees. Leaving Thneedville in search of the Once-ler, Ted discovers that the outside world is a barren, contaminated wasteland. He finds the Once-ler, who agrees to tell him the story of the trees over multiple visits. Returning home, Ted encounters Thneedville's greedy mayor, Aloysius O'Hare, whose company sells bottled oxygen to the polluted city. Explaining that trees, and the oxygen they produce freely, pose a threat to his business, O'Hare pressures Ted to stay in town, but Ted continues to visit the Once-ler.
