The story - of a rebellious princess who battles an imperious queen and is beset by magic spells - is a twist for Pixar but as familiar to its parent company Disney as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Beauty and the Beast and The Princess and the Frog. There were whispers that Chapman had got lost in the thickets of story, that the movie needed a hand - a man’s hand - to make it more of an action film, less a Mother’s Day card. Presto: Gender equality in the world’s premier animation house!Įxcept that Chapman was removed halfway through in favor of Mark Andrews, a Pixar veteran who served as co-writer and second unit director of John Carter.
As director, Pixar boss John Lasseter brought in Brenda Chapman, who had co-directed DreamWorks’ The Prince of Egypt in 1998 and who had a scenario based on her complex relationship with her own young daughter. Before Brave, Pixar’s old-boy network had never designed a feature film around a female character, never put a woman in charge of it. (LIST: Corliss’s all-TIME Top 25 Animated Features)Īnd, until now, no women directors. The studio might be a boys’ treehouse with a warning sign nailed to the front: NO MOMS ALLOWED. Virtually every one of Pixar’s CGI masterpieces (or, in the case of Cars and its sequel, Mater-pieces) is a buddy film limning the virtues of camaraderie. Up in the San Francisco suburb of Emeryville, where the Pixar kids play, movie mothers are nearly invisible. They should bring a class-action suit against the Walt Disney Company and picket its Burbank headquarters. The millions of actual stepmoms, among all the postnuclear families in the world, must think of these portrayals as libel. The female authority figure is usually a stepmother - in Disney animated features, the inevitable phrase would be “wicked stepmother” - who offers Snow White a poisoned apple, forces scullery work on Cinderella and, in Tangled, locks Rapunzel in a high tower for her entire childhood and most of her adolescence. Follow princesses have a rough time with the women who run their lives.
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