Top 30 Brad Bird Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Speaking personally, I want my films to make money, but money is just fuel for the rocket. What I really want to do is to go somewhere. I don’t want to just collect more fuel.”

— Brad Bird

2. “Look, it’s a mainstream animated movie, and how often are those considered thought provoking? It’s meant to be a great time at the theater, but it’s also designed to work on more than one level.”

— Brad Bird

3. “When you assemble animation teams the way you do a live-action film, you’re often struggling a bit to get a cohesive team together, so if you have a team that works well together, you’re hoping for another film so that you can refine the team.”

— Brad Bird

4. “If you move something 10 pounds through space and then stop suddenly, there’s a little overshoot. When you transfer weight from one leg to another, there’s a certain way that it happens.”

— Brad Bird

5. “My kids love anime, but I don’t show them the really graphic stuff.”

— Brad Bird

6. “Well I’m still working on The Incredibles. So I’m going to take a little time off. I’ve got a couple of tricks up my sleeve. I’m not ready to talk about them yet, but expect the unexpected.”

— Brad Bird

7. “When caricaturist, Al Hirschfeld, did a drawing of a celebrity, it often looked more like the person than the person did. That’s our goal in animation.”

— Brad Bird

8. “We make films that we ourselves would want to see and then hope that other people would want to see it. If you try to analyze audiences or think there’s some sophisticated recipe for success, then I think you are doomed. You’re making it too complicated.”

— Brad Bird

9. “I admit I’m enthusiastically demanding.”

— Brad Bird

10. “You have to be emotionally attached to what you are doing.”

— Brad Bird

11. “Communities need to hear the liberating power of the gospel.”

— Brad Bird

12. “I got my heroes secondhand, from television and movies, to a certain extent.”

— Brad Bird

13. “Ten-year-old boys move differently than middle-aged women, who move differently than athletic guys, who move differently than government bureaucrats.”

— Brad Bird

14. “I absolutely think that hand-drawn animation is valid and I actually hope to do one in the future with a large budget.”

— Brad Bird

15. “Well what’s funny is, again, people say they believed what was going on, but again, Bob’s hands are about three times bigger than his feet. So these are very caricatured.”

— Brad Bird

16. “I had about the biggest, longest wish list anyone could have, and 99 percent of what I wanted to get on the screen we got on the screen within our schedule and within our budget and within our resources.”

— Brad Bird

17. “I don’t know. You’re made of metal, but you have feelings, and you think about things, and that means you have a soul. And souls don’t die.”

— Brad Bird

18. “To make something really great and different and interesting means taking risks and following these ideas in your head.”

— Brad Bird

19. “Anything that makes movie-going a magnificent experience, I’m all for.”

— Brad Bird

20. “But I don’t just see the movie when I see the movie, I see all the great people who worked on it and all their hard work, because they could not have worked any harder.”

— Brad Bird

21. “Oh, I’m just Ego’s assistant. It’s not anything big.”

— Brad Bird

22. “Even in hand drawn animation, humans are widely considered to be the most difficult to execute, because everybody has a feeling for how they move.”

— Brad Bird

23. “The problem is that every time people have deviated from the Disney playbook in hand-drawn animation, they’ve done so with staff that are nowhere near Disney-level talent or Disney-level budgets.”

— Brad Bird

24. “I was not a big comic-book reader.”

— Brad Bird

25. “We all have impossible dreams and we do what we can to pursue them...”

— Brad Bird

26. “I have three kids and a wife, and any moments that aren’t dedicated to working on this film in some way, or family, are immediately reserved for sleep.”

— Brad Bird

27. “I think it’s the most extraordinary studio around. I would love to do my next project with Pixar.”

— Brad Bird

28. “If there are similarities, it’s simply because the same thoughts that occurred to other people also occurred to me. I’d be astonished if anyone could come up with any truly original powers that were at all interesting any more.”

— Brad Bird

29. “Without naming names, I think other movies look more realistic but they feel less real.”

— Brad Bird

30. “I think if you have a really big, heavy person, there’s a feeling of an invisible puppeteer jerking them around in space. They don’t feel like they are moving themselves.”

— Brad Bird

31. “Oh yeah, I’m still employed at Pixar and I love it here.”

— Brad Bird

32. “If you look at a lot of animated movies, they don’t pay attention to how things move through space.”

— Brad Bird

33. “And it’s not only films, I’m pretty unaware of anything that’s going on in popular culture right now.”

— Brad Bird

34. “You’re buying for the benefit of the cottage experience at a fraction of the price.”

— Brad Bird