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When Pixar’s Brave arrived in theaters in June, two directors shared full credit for the film: Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman. The project had originated with Chapman — who’d previously directed DreamWorks Animation’s The Prince of Egypt — but at the beginning of 2011, the studio took the reins from her completely and handed them to Andrews, who’d worked on The Incredibles and Ratatouille.
It was a surprising development to say the least, given that Chapman had been Pixar’s first female director of a feature length film, not to mention that Brave featured the studio’s first female protagonist, a fiery Scottish archer-princess named Merida (Kelly Macdonald). But other than a brief comment to the Los Angeles Times in 2011 that the split was due to “creative differences,” Chapman has remained silent on the matter. Until now.
In an essay for a larger New York Times feature about women’s perpetual underrepresentation in all corners of Hollywood, Chapman wrote that the past year and a half had been “a heartbreakingly hard road” for her. “When Pixar took me off of Brave — a story that came from my heart, inspired by my relationship with my daughter — it was devastating,” she writes. READ FULL STORY »
