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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
With "The Iron Giant," cartoon whiz Brad Bird brings an elegiac Ted Hughes fable to life -- and he's not embarrassed about making you cry.
Aug 5, 1999 | Mention Brad Bird to animators or production artists and two words tend to crop up: "funny" and "brilliant." With a handful of credits to his name, Bird is known within the cartoon world as a visionary. In 1986, a decade before dysfunctional families became the mainstay of the American independent cinema, Bird wrote and directed a droll abused-mutt saga called "Family Dog" for Steven Spielberg's TV anthology "Amazing Stories." (This mini-masterpiece is available on MCA Home Video's "Amazing Stories: Book Two.") Almost immediately, Bird became as respected for what he wouldn't do as for what he did. He refused to join the team that spun "Family Dog" into a series -- he recognized that his woebegone mongrel's fluid, uncannily expressive way of moving could never be duplicated on a weekly schedule. To the astonishment of the producers, including Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, he jumped to the Fox network. Bird knew going in that the shows he became part of at Fox -- starting with "The Simpsons" (which began on "The Tracey Ullman Show" in 1987, and premiered as a series in 1989) -- depended more on verbal humor than on visual design. Without the taint of compromise, Bird had a ball directing two Krusty the Clown episodes and serving as executive consultant on "The Simpsons" (and then on "The Critic" in 1994 and '95 and "King of the Hill" in 1997).
Growing up in Corvallis, Ore., Bird plunged into animation at age 11, and three years later sent his version of "The Tortoise and the Hare" off to Disney. He became the protégé of Milt Kahl, one of "The Nine Old Men" who set the standard for classic Disney animation. (Kahl's credits ranged from "Ferdinand the Bull" in 1938 to "The Rescuers" in 1977.) Disney eventually awarded Bird a scholarship to the animation program of the California Institute of the Arts -- a spawning pond for phenoms, including Tim Burton and Pixar's John Lasseter -- and gave him a job as an animator. But Bird felt that in the drowsy Disney of the late '70s and early '80s, he was a troublemaker with nowhere to go. He left, and soon hooked up with Spielberg. Now, as the director of "The Iron Giant" (for Warner Bros.), he may boast the first non-Disney animated feature to approach a critical and box-office success akin to "Beauty and the Beast."
"I hope the kids come to 'The Iron Giant,'" said Bird during a recent interview, "but I really hope the adults come, whether or not they have kids." Indeed, grown-ups will savor the wit and beauty of this modern fairy tale about a huge robot from outer space who washes up on the shores of "Rockwell, Maine," in 1957 and befriends a youngster named Hogarth Hughes. Bird and his collaborators take an odd, elegiac fable that the late British poet Ted Hughes wrote in 1968 (in the period when he was concentrating on children's literature, after the suicide of his wife, Sylvia Plath, the mother of his kids) and turn it into a piquant variation on the best of all fish-out-of-water films: "E.T." The beguiling visuals meld a computer-generated Giant with humans who are drawn in an angular, caricature-like style a lot bolder than what you see in most Disney films; the ticklish period touches include a crawling-brain movie glimpsed on late-night TV and the beatnik stylings of a scrap collector and scrap artist named Dean.
When I voiced the reservation that the movie may lean too heavily on the heart-tugging aspects of "E.T.," Bird good-naturedly replied, "E.T. doesn't go kicking ass. He doesn't make the Army pay. Certainly you risk having your hip credentials taken away if you want to evoke anything sad or genuinely heartfelt. There's no more naked position to be caught in than trying to get people to feel something beyond comedy. But I think ultimately, for me, a film will never achieve a certain height if you don't attempt to engage the heart as well as the mind. I was and am willing to look foolish in an attempt to get you to feel something."
One of the wonderful things about "The Iron Giant" is the movie's sense of scale. "Size Matters" is what the ad said for the remake of "Godzilla" last year -- but it didn't in that movie, and here it does.
Because there were no other ideas in that film! To be the kind of director I want one day to be, you've got to be concerned with both the performances and the visual scheme and how they work together. That's why I wanted to shoot "The Iron Giant" in CinemaScope, even though I was warned that you don't ever want to shoot tall things in that kind of wide-screen. Steven Spielberg didn't shoot "Jurassic Park" in CinemaScope; I actually think that was because it is harder to compose, and he didn't need one more hassle to deal with. But I thought you could use CinemaScope to give scale to the Iron Giant, if you weren't trying to show the Giant all at once, if you could see a part of him and then follow things. People basically see in the dimensions of CinemaScope -- we see more at the sides. There's something immersive about the experience. Also, a lot of movies in the late '50s were shot in 'Scope, so I thought it was appropriate for a movie set in 1957. I wanted to advertise with the old CinemaScope logo -- we even had a mock-up of a poster saying we were in CinemaScope and Technicolor. But 20th Century Fox, which developed CinemaScope -- what, 50 years ago? -- was being a jerk about letting us use the logo, even though we were going to give them money. I got really angry at Fox because I did "King of the Hill" and "The Simpsons" with them, plus we were going to pay them. So what is this -- an offshoot of the Ted Turner-Rupert Murdoch feud? Get over it, you guys!
You don't use CinemaScope just for scale, but also to isolate expressive moments -- like the way the giant cocks his head when he begins to appreciate his young friend Hogarth.
The shot where the car is pulling away from the forest? Yeah, people react to that. I wanted to have something that was a little bit haunting to Hogarth right there. Hogarth has been trying to tell his mom about the giant, and his mom is at the end of her rope and not listening to him. Hogarth may be sitting next to his mom, but his contact is with the giant, way on the other side of the woods, who cocks his head at him as he and his mom drive away. That's why I dissolve to a crude image of the giant with his head cocked that Hogarth is drawing at his desk at school.
One movie-savvy friend said he was amazed that you pulled it off without "doing the old King Kong routine" -- cheating the size of the giant in different scenes.
But we do fudge a bit. The giant's size is not absolutely the same all the way through. But one thing I've learned about movies is that you can cheat all over the place as long as you cheat in the right spots. We had to when we were focusing in on him and Hogarth. The giant is meant to be 50 feet tall -- but sometimes he's 60, sometimes he's 40. But he should not, if we've done it right, feel smaller or larger at any time.
One thing that links "Family Dog" and "The Iron Giant" -- apart from the fact that each of the title critters can be triggered into a fierce attack mode -- is the use of perspective. The dog's-eye view in one, the giant's-eye view in the other.
One of the things I love most about movies is that they feel dreamlike, and dreams always have a perspective. And I think perspective is a great deal of what separates films from other dramatic arts. If I were doing a film about a basketball player I'd shoot everything 7 feet off the ground.
How did "Family Dog" come about?
Basically, I'm a dog guy, although I do have cats now. As we say in "Family Dog," cats are low-maintenance. But I grew up with dogs, I relate to dogs. You've heard that women are cats and men are dogs? Well, I think that's kind of true, and I relate to dogs on that level -- I wear my emotions on my sleeve; my desires are sort of simple. Eat. Lay down. Sleep. Let me out to play. Happy!
Your dog is also misunderstood.
He's misunderstood and always right in the middle of things. And as the youngest child when I was growing up I was always right in the middle of things without having a tremendous voice in what we did. We had four children and two parents, a unique upbringing. We had two dogs, and I watched how they dealt with things and imagined what it was like to be them. One was a poodle, but a macho standard poodle; he never felt more uncomfortable than when my mom, a couple of times, shaved him up into little poof balls. He was continually getting into trouble, fooling around with other dogs, leaping over fences and chasing sheep. He was a rogue, but he was wonderful. He caught on to me early and we were great friends; one of the earliest cartoon characters I did was based on him.
When I first got the idea for "Family Dog," I asked a guy I had known from school, Tim Burton, now the director, to design the characters because I loved the way he drew and I loved his take on suburbia -- slightly nightmarish and still sort of affectionate. And of course, years later, I have to live down everyone referring to it as "Tim Burton's 'Family Dog.'" Still, he's a very talented guy with an amazing point of view.
Was John Lasseter in the same class at CalArts?
In fact, John uses the A113 thing I started in "Family Dog" -- he put it in "Toy Story" and "A Bug's Life."
The A113 thing?
A113 was our classroom number. On "Family Dog" I put it on the license plate of the thieves' car. And I put it into every single one of my films, including my "Simpsons" episodes -- it's sort of my version of Hirschfeld's Nina.
