Animation Director To Live-Action Director

Talented people remain talented, even when their careers hit road bumps:

... Seven years after Brave won the Academy Award for animated feature and grossed $539 million at the worldwide box office, Chapman, 57, is set to unveil her follow-up at Sundance, a family fantasy called Come Away, which marks the filmmaker's live-action debut. Chapman's career turn comes as some of the same gender bias issues that cropped up at Pixar are resurfacing in an Oscar race devoid of female directors, and as Lasseter, who left Disney and Pixar in 2017 after admitting that he had committed unspecified behavioral "missteps," is ensconced in a new role at Skydance Animation. ...

Brenda Chapman has been a force in theatrical animation for decades. She broke into the business on the television side in the middle 1980s, when there were few women in the business. She moved to Disney Features soon thereafter, animating and assisting on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, then moving to the Mouse's story department where she contributed to The Little Mermaid, Rescuers Down Under, Fantasia 2000. On the blockbuster hit The Lion King, Ms. Chapman served as story supervisor.

Disney exec Jeffrey Katzenberg departed the House of Mouse in 1994 and soon co-founded DreamWorks, SKG, where he led the animation division. Brenda finished up her contract with Disney and moved to DreamWorks where she became one of the lead artists at the new animation division. She co-directed DWA's first animated feature The Prince of Egypt

In the early oughts, Ms. Chapman was invited by Joe Ranft to come to Pixar, where she worked on Cars and developed the feature Brave. She was named director of the project, but after Ranft's premature death in a car accident, there were differences with creative top-kick John Lasseter and she finally stepped down as Brave's director. Story personnel reported the picture did not change in substantial ways after she exited, and Brenda was on stage as co-recipient of the 2013 Oscar for "Best Animated Feature".

(Mr. Lasseter, of course, was riding a wave of success at the time, being the creative chief at both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. Half a decade later, however, he left the Disney Company under a cloud and currently leads the animation division at Skydance Animation.)

Brenda Chapman, says she won't be returning to Pixar ... even absent Mr. Lasseter ... and now has a live-action motion picture on her resume. How well this initial effort performs in the marketplace remains to be seen, but the force of Ms. Chapman's talents have propelled her a long way over the past thirty-five years, and she has a considerable distance yet to go.