Pixar’s First Woman Director
There was nothing ‘Brave’ about how Brenda Chapman was treated by the company.
Brave (2012) was Pixar’s thirteenth film.
Prior to its release, Pixar had made twelve full-length feature films. Twelve slots for “directed by” and nine credits for “co-directed by” leave us with twenty-one Pixar director credits. All twenty-one slots were filled by men.
Thirty-two story credits. Thirty-one filled by men. (Quick shoutout here to Jill Culton, who worked on story for Monsters, Inc. (2001) and has gone on to direct for Dreamworks). Twenty-nine credits for screenwriting. All filled by men.
And of those twelve films, only three, A Bug’s Life (1998), The Incredibles (2004), and Toy Story 3 (2010), pass the Bechtel-Wallace test.
Enter Brenda Chapman.
A Well-Qualified Candidate
In her book The Queens of Animation: The Untold Story of the Women Who Transformed the World of Disney and Made Cinematic History, Nathalia Holt discusses Brenda Chapman. Chapman graduated from CalArts in 1987 and was hired at Disney. The man who interviewed her told her she was on a six month trial run, implying she was only being hired because executives like Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg wanted more…
