Director Brad Bird Wants to Make a Hand-Drawn Animated Horror Movie
There aren’t many high quality hand-drawn animated horror movies available these days, and filmmaker Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Iron Giant, Tomorrowland) hopes to change that fact at some point down the road. During a recent chat with Collider’s Matt Goldberg, the director explained that you don’t often see hand-drawn 2D horror movies that reach Disney levels of quality. When asked if he thinks there’s still a market for old-school animation, Bird believes there is.
“I actually think it’s a lot more valid than other people do. I think the industry tends to like to think in the narrow sort of mindset of a businessman, and businessman absolutes, and movies really exist in a much grayer region of dreams and stuff like that, and instinct is prized in movies; it’s not prized with the businessmen in movies, but movies themselves often reward instinct rather than pie charts. And what has not been done is that there’s been no American animation done on Disney-level quality that has really gone into different genres,” Bird explained during his interview with Collider.
The director also feels that, in the right hands, these movies could generate terror.
“[T]here’s never been a horror movie in animation executed at Disney-level quality and hand-drawn. I’m not talking about CG; I’m talking about hand-drawn, but it doesn’t take a lot to imagine how cool that would be. If you think of the scariest parts of Snow White or Pinocchio or Fantasia with Night on Bald Mountain, you could do something really scary in animation, and I think if you did it right, if you did it with all the art that Spielberg did Jaws, I think that it would be an amazing experience because there’s something intuitive about when people are drawing directly with their hands.”
Brad Bird has a few other interesting things to say about horror and hand-drawn 2D animation so check out his full interview with Matt Goldberg over at Collider. It’s good stuff.
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