She has indeed left Pixar over this and burned the bridge behind her while on the way out. This was just released apparently only a few hours ago, altho much speculation in this and a few other threads here over the past year and nine months could have been cobbled together to spin a similar tale. Here are the many links to Brenda Chapman and her ups and downs:
"Chapman now opened up to The New York Times about what happened, blaming everything on sexism. “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 said. “To have [my story] taken away and given to someone else, and a man at that, was truly distressing on so many levels.” She went on to say that the industry has always leaned in favor of male filmmakers, stating: “Sometimes women express an idea and are shot down, only to have a man express essentially the same idea and have it broadly embraced.” " - Imbd this week.
hollywoodreporter.com/news/f … man-362772
Many people have asked why this happened, and the studio had cited ‘creative differences’, they might just as well have added the term ‘irreconcilable’. Why? Because there have been many other 'about face’s in Pixar’s movie dev’t history: we know of TS2 going from dvd release to theatrical with 9 months to go and the chaos that caused, JimHillMedia claims that there were major problems with early in-house screenings of Nemo and Stanton’s Wall•E, Ratatouille’s directoral change is well known here, wasn’t there a directoral shuffling in Cars2 and wasn’t the first script(rumored to not be in-house) of TS3 thrown out because it was nonemotive? My take on this is that the Brain Trust and whoever else from outside of Brave who was in that screening room saw the glorified screenreel and said it wasn’t up to snuff. At this point you do what Stanton did to Wall•E: he swallowed hard and threw out much of the last 2 acts. Chapman either was going too slow with decision making, making the wrong decisions in their view or just flat out refused to make the demanded changes.
If you’ve ever read the life of Steven Jobs, he apparently pulled the same tactic on many male developers in Apple that Chapman claims has been done “sometimes” to some women in the film industry: discrediting their ideas and then lifting them for themselves. Can every slight be attributed to sexism?
Yeah, it’s gonna be too bad that we won’t hear her in the dvd most likely (altho maybe she quit right after making the commentary?). I have always been fascinated about several moments in the Rat movie and how Pinkova or Bird came up with them and because Pinkova left we never did get to hear his take. Lots of people in this thread wanted to know how she came up with the story idea, and this is covered here along with lots of other info about her:
pixarportal.com/blog.php?id= … -two-brave
pixar-planet.fr/en/documents … apman.php3
Wow, I didn’t know there was a hyphenated version of this website over in France, actually it’s probably independent.
From Pixar’s point of view, they gave an opportunity to an accomplished person to do major things at their studio and then probably because of major criticism about too many ‘buddy’ films, they let her loose with a ‘chick flick’ and now it has backfired. Instead of co-opting more women and girls, Pixar now has to deal with the fallout of the sexism accusation. Would they have been better off not hiring her in the first place? I’m just throwing this out there.
Unfortunately, she did not have a fairy tale ending at the studio we like so much and is off to LucasFilm.
I’m not an elitist, and I prefer individual films to companies. I just have a special love of Pixar, because I don’t believe they’ve made a bad movie, and I love almost all of theirs. And, well, both of my biggest obsessions are Pixar-produced. 