Brave

[hobie16]

Time Magazine has Pixar's Girl Story.

[DonutGoddess]

Time Magazine has Pixar's Girl Story.

Hobie, I only get the image again when I click on the link.


I have asked for the day of the premier and the night before off from work. Woohoo!!

[hobie16]

Hobie, I only get the image again when I click on the link.

Hmmmmm. it might be blocked unless your a subscriber. I'd post the whole article but Zazu would bust me for copyright infringement. Here's some excerpts:

Until I visited Pixar's offices, I did not know that 12-year-old boys were allowed to run major corporations. Yet I am walking through the lobby, and the room to my right is full of plastic bins dispensing every kind of cereal, free. Men pedal scooters past me. On Friday mornings an employee named Mark Andrews stands on the front lawn in a kilt, challenging co-workers to actual sword fights.
[...]
Pixar has a girl problem.

All 12 of its unfathomably successful movies--which have made more than $7 billion at the box office, not counting toys, clothes, Disney rides, video games and TV shows--have male leads. Very male leads: cowboys, astronauts, robots, cars, Ed Asner. Pixar has been aware of this problem since its first feature film, Toy Story, back in 1995. "After we made Toy Story, my wife Nancy said, 'Can you make strong female characters for me and your nieces?'" says John Lasseter, Pixar's chief creative officer. He, too, looks a lot like a 12-year-old boy, wearing his regular workday uniform of a Hawaiian shirt and jeans, sitting in his huge L-shaped office lined with shelf after shelf of toy cars and trains.
[...]
Chapman, who's a redhead like Merida and part Scottish, took conflicts with her then 5-year-old daughter and fairy-tale-ized them. In one scene, which has since been cut from the film, Merida and her mother take a break midargument to hug and say good morning before they resume fighting, just as Chapman and her kid did. "I have this amazing daughter, and she is really strong-willed, and I'm strong-willed," Chapman says. "She competes with me for her dad. I was thinking, What's she going to be like as a teenager?"
[...]
Even though Pixar can't sell tiaras off Brave, Lasseter was attracted to the movie's premise precisely because of its fairy-tale elements. (Steve Jobs, who bought Pixar from George Lucas in 1986 for $5 million, responded enthusiastically to early story reels.) When Chapman pitched Brave in May 2004, the possibility of an ugly breakup was looming between Pixar and Disney, which was nearing the end of its contract to finance and distribute Pixar films. Lasseter was already planning how he was going to compete against Disney, which had fired him as an animator in the 1980s. A fairy tale like Brave fit into his strategy. "I was confused about why Disney wasn't doing great fairy tales," he says. "They were making movies that were more cynical, like other studios, instead of making something sincere." He is referring to the Shrek-ification of kids' movies. Shrek is Pixar shorthand for all things un-Pixar: pop-culture references, snark, speed, adults-only humor, meta-jokes acknowledging that the movie is a movie.

But in 2006, Disney bought Pixar for $7.4 billion and made Lasseter the head of Disney Animation, where he immediately oversaw two sincere fairy tales: The Princess and the Frog--a hand-drawn rendition of the Grimm tale, starring Disney's first black princess--and Tangled, a musical retelling of Rapunzel. So some of the pressure was off Brave. Which allowed it to enjoy the usual insanely slow Pixar process--about four years for production.
[...]
His final version of Brave is brawnier than Chapman's original pitch: more bows, more arrows, more bear fighting. Andrews loves action films. He left his job as second-unit director of Disney's upcoming sci-fi movie John Carter to direct Brave. Brave has a lot of action. A major character's leg is amputated and a woman sustains an ass pinch before the opening credits. Chapman, who still works at Pixar and watches occasional reels of Brave, seems leery of some of the changes. "Even when I was on it, there was sometimes so much action that I said, 'Pull it back.' The last version I saw had a lot of action, but I know it's all shifting," she says.

It's the March 5 issue. Available in dentist's office waiting rooms everywhere.

[shilohmm]

Hmmmmm. it might be blocked unless your a subscriber.

Googled for it and you are correct. Pity; looks interesting. :( I suppose I could toddle over to the library and read it.

A major character's leg is amputated and a woman sustains an ass pinch before the opening credits.

Sounds like we would have liked it more if Chapman were still in charge. The girls and I are action fiends, and the possible gore won't bug us, but we're a lot less tolerant of random sexism. Physical bullies are so much easier to fight. ;) Punch out a guy who punched you, and people will cheer. Punch out a guy who pinched you and people will scorn you; but if you merely pinch him back, he'll probably like it, and giving him verbal what for is just rewarding him with your attention.

[BRWombat]

...

It's the March 5 issue. Available in dentist's office waiting rooms everywhere.

But not for another three or four years. Maybe that's just my dentist.

[hobie16]

Brave has a good preview available.

[GaTechGal]

Awesome. I can't wait.

[BRWombat]

That's the best preview yet. I'm getting excited for it!

[hobie16]

The art of Merida. Can you say "scraggle?"

[GaTechGal]

I've seen my niece make that EXACT same face when my sister-in-law brushes her hair. I was a little more gentle and taught my daughter to brush her own hair while she was still young so we wouldn't have those arguments.