Brad Bird

Finally, um, we are talking today about a big one.

Uh, we are discussing a very famous commercial dud from 1999 that's often cited as one of the year's best movies, uh, the 78th highest grossing movie of the year, and the feature directorial debut of Brad Bird, who would go on to direct landmark Pixar films The Incredibles and Ratatouille, and now serves in Pixar's senior creative team.

It was released on the highly competitive first weekend of August, coming in at number nine behind The Haunting, Inspector Gadget, Mystery Men, Deep Blue Sea, The Thomas Crown Affair, Runaway Bride, The Blair Witch Project, and also debuting that weekend, the box office behemoth The Sixth Sense, going on to make just $23 million on a budget of 70 million.

[lip smacks] Written by Bird and Tim McCanlies, based on the book The Iron Man by Ted Hughes, produced for interesting reasons by The Who's Pete Townsend, and featuring a beautifully Americana score by the late Michael Kamen.

The Iron Giant remembers the wonder of being a child and understands how to convey that in a media-savvy age.

Both a step back and a step forward from the trends of modern animation, it feels like a classic even though it's just out of the box." In Variety, Lael Loewenstein wrote, quote, "A visually appealing, well-crafted film, The Iron Giant is an unalloyed success that works on several levels.

Equally potent as political allegory and as animated family entertainment, Brad Bird's ambitious, intelligent freshman feature, cleverly set in 1950s small-town America, effectively references everything from Cold War ideology to B-movie conventions, but it never loses sight of its central narrative hook: the friendship of a boy and a giant robot." Most of the rest of the reviews follow suit.

The only remotely negative one comes hilariously from my former colleague and noted fascist asshole, Rod Dreher, who in the New York Post wrote, quote, "In most respects, The Iron Giant is one of the better animated children's films in recent memory, which makes its strident political correctness all the more frustrating.

What are you thinking? I'm thinking, because of my explanation, I think The Incredibles wins this one.

I want to dispute it and I want to fight it, but I do like Brad Bird.

I think Brad Bird's a really good director.

It's one of the greatest Pixar movies ever.

It holds up to this day.

We just watched the Incredibles again recently.

Uh, the first one, the Brad Bird movie where Samuel L. Jackson is like a retired super, they're all retired superheroes and there something's going on and Frozone has to get back out in the action.

And so Samuel's character's like wondering where his super suit is.

He's like, I gotta get out.

Yes, yeah.

It's a director whose work we've covered twice on the What a Cartoon! Movie, but this is a major part of Brad Bird's background that also crosses over with several other big, big names in animation, and names that are big to us, but you maybe don't know were also very key to animation.

So definitely one worth covering, uh, that we probably both remember, uh, hazily from our own childhoods.

[laughs]

[laughs]

Yeah, it was like first at bat with this very Simpson-y kind of humor.

And then, I mean, we'll go into the Brad Bird-Simpsons connection.

We've talked about it a lot on 11-plus years of Talking Simpsons, but so much of this reminds me of the early Santa's Little Helper episodes of The Simpsons, the very, all the dog POV stuff.

...

the new Brad, Brad Bird film?

N- nothing you have mentioned is even coming to the New York Film Festival.

Are you, okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You can't talk about Wedding Crashers without talking about Brad the Cooper's performance either.

Uh-

Yes, well, Skydance Animation and Netflix have ended their multi-year animated film pact, and John Lasseter's Comic Motors is leaving streaming for a theatrical rollout over at Paramount next year.

Both sides still plan to see Brad Bird's Ray Gunn through to release, but Cosmic Motors will now hit big screens instead of debuting on Netflix.

The film is Lasseter's first directing credit in roughly 15 years and is based on a Daniel Simons 2007 concept art book about high-octane vehicles in Sci-Fi Galaxy.

Paramount, now under Skydance's control, has been very hungry for theatrical titles, so this pivot does make strategic sense.

As opposed to Mission Impossible, which I think starting off with a high note and every single director going into five was a different director putting their own spin onto things.

JJ Abrams had three, uh, Jon Wu had two, uh, Brad Bird had four, and then you had, um, um, not McG, uh, you had, uh, oh my God.

Um, Corin.

Oh my God.