Brad Bird: ‘Incredibles 2’ Is NOT A Kids Movie

Brad Bird took a break from Twitter for a couple years while he finished Incredibles 2, but now that the film is out, he’s diving back into the social media service, where he’s responding to some of the people who are tweeting at him.

For the most part, he’s been happy to oblige people’s questions, but he’s not having any of it when it comes to people who inaccurately label his latest film as a kiddie flick.

One mom questioned why Bird included adult language in what she termed a “kids movie” — for the record, Incredibles 2 is rated PG for “action sequences and some brief mild language” — to which Bird responded: “With all due respect, it is NOT a ‘kids movie’. It is animated, and rated PG.”

The unspoken words are, of course, that animation is not a genre, and that not every animated film is made explicitly for children. As Bird has said in the past:

“People think of animation only doing things where people are dancing around and doing a lot of histrionics, but animation is not a genre. And people keep saying, ‘The animation genre.’ It’s not a genre! A Western is a genre! Animation is an art form, and it can do any genre. You know, it can do a detective film, a cowboy film, a horror film, an R-rated film or a kids’ fairy tale.But it doesn’t do one thing.”

A dad on Twitter similarly took issue with the film, complaining that it bored his four-year-old daughter, to which Bird responded, “Are you really asking me to write to suit your 4 year old’s (age appropriate) attention span? Do you judge 2&1/2 hour Marvel or Lucasfilm movies the same way?”

Bird followed up with another tweet this afternoon asking everyone to stay calm. That’s probably the best advice — well, at least until film industry workers start talking nonsense about animation during awards season.