The most important animated movie ever made, according to Brad Bird: “It’s a goldmine”
If anyone in Hollywood should be taken seriously when they declare an animated film the most important of all time, it’s an animation titan like Brad Bird.
Bird has worked in animation for much of the last four decades, including an eight-season stint as a creative consultant on The Simpsons during its golden years, which included directing, storyboarding, and character designing duties. Then, when he stepped out on his own to direct animated feature films, he helmed four undisputed classics with The Iron Giant, Ratatouille, and the first two The Incredibles movies.
Following a brief jaunt into live-action filmmaking with 2011’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and 2015’s Tomorrowland, Bird is back to his whimsical roots for his next Ray Gunn, a sci-fi noir about the last standing human private detective navigating in a futuristic alien world. Why has he decided to return to animation? Well, it was his first love, and perhaps he feels he better belongs in a world hand-drawn. In fact, he was inspired to pursue Hollywood by an animated classic he declared the most important ever made: Disney’s 1967 version of The Jungle Book.
Interestingly, though, Bird insists that he doesn’t think The Jungle Book is the best because of its merits as a film, as he thinks Disney has made much better directed films, with better sound structures and art direction. However, The Jungle Book has one thing going for it that puts it head and shoulders above every other animated movie.
“It’s a treasure trove of brilliant character animation,” he told a 2019 animation conference in Turin, Italy, “I can name a lot of other films that people talk about more than The Jungle Book, but in terms of characters that are very different from each other, it’s incredible. It’s just an ocean of great entertaining animation acting.”
The bevvy of memorable and unique characters in the film, who are all icons in themselves, is a feat that plenty of animators have also waxed lyrical about over the years. Heck, the animators who worked on later Disney classics like The Lion King, Aladdin, Tarzan, and Lilo & Stitch admitted to referring to The Jungle Book’s designs as their unofficial Bible. Bird specifically pointed to “King Louie, Shere Khan, Mowgli, and Colonel Hathi” as perfect examples of its “unique and very sharply delineated characters”.
In truth, he was such an animation devotee, even as a child, that he noticed right away what separated The Jungle Book from other animated films of its era. “Something inside me snapped,” he revealed during a 2018 appearance on Q with Tom Power, “Because I recognised the distinctness of the vision, meaning that when I saw the panther jumping across onto a branch, it didn’t just look like a cat.”
Suddenly, the young boy was fascinated by whose job it was to study how a domestic cat looks and moves, versus how a big cat moves in its natural habitat, and then turn that research into animation truth.
“It’s the details,” he marvelled at The Jungle Book’s contribution to animation history. “I realised that’s someone’s job on the face of the earth, to figure out how a panther would move, and I thought, ‘That is the coolest job in the world’.”
Fast-forward several decades, and it was his job to figure out how giant robots, a family of superheroes, and a culinary genius rat should look and move onscreen.
