Brad Bird, the man (and two-time Oscar winner) behind giants like Ratatouille and The Incredibles (and ironically and more literally, The Iron Giant!), is set to direct his first live-action film.

This project, titled 1906, was rumored to be in the works back in February 2007, and Bird was in negotiations to direct back in June 2007 (see GoD Pixar feature), but now it has been confirmed.

The Hollywood Reporter states that the movie, which will be a studio tag-team between Warner Bros. and Disney/Pixar, will take place in San Francisco and revolve around a murder and the son of the victim, a college student, out trying to solve the crime and figure out who killed his father. In the process he ends up uncovering all kinds of deep, dark secrets within the city. All of this eventually plays into the big backdrop of the story, being The Great Earthquake of 1906.

Sounds like the complete other side of the world for Brad Bird to be stepping into and a weird project for Disney/Pixar to be co-producing, but I have a lot of faith here. I think that Bird is an amazing storyteller and an extremely talented director and it will be very interesting to see what he does with flesh and blood as opposed to computers and voices!

At the moment, Bird is rewriting the original John Logan script — which was based on the novel by James Dalessandro — and the film is looking at a possible 2009 release, but with something that sounds as big as this does just getting moving, who knows when we might actually get to see it.

What about everyone else? Are you sold?