Pixar’s Girl Story

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.

Deep in the back of the giant main building on Pixar’s 22-acre campus in Emeryville, Calif., animators work inside toolsheds designed like castles, jungles and Old West jails. In one office, a fake bookshelf opens onto a secret lounge. Guys carry official Pixar laminated cards in their wallets that read, “This card entitles the bearer to one Star Wars reference in a meeting.”

Even weirder: all the adults kind of look like 12-year-old boys. In fact, as I’m walking upstairs toward a display of clay model cars festooned with spy gadgets, a man passes by who looks precisely like the little boy in the movie Up. It turns out he’s animator Peter Sohn. And the boy in Up was based on him.

There are no rooms full of princess costumes to dress up in. No frosting stations. Not one My Little Pony poster.

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.

So Lasseter, who has five sons and no daughters, added the cowgirl Jessie as the third lead in Toy Story 2 and 3. He added a female spy as the fourth lead in Cars 2. But an idea for a story with a female lead never jelled. In 2003 he hired Brenda Chapman, who had been story supervisor on Disney’s The Lion King and was one of three co-directors of DreamWorks’ The Prince of Egypt, and asked her to pitch an idea for a film.

“She just pitched one story. Usually a director will pitch a bunch of stories, but John just glommed onto this right away,” says Steve Russell, who worked directly under Chapman on the idea that became Brave, Pixar’s 13th feature film (in theaters June 22). Lasseter made Chapman the first woman to direct a Pixar movie.

Chapman’s idea was a fairy tale about a princess, which wasn’t necessarily going to be exciting news for Pixar’s feminist critics. Or Pixar’s staff. “Brenda was telling me about it, and my eyes glazed over. Princess, king, mother-daughter, ancient kingdom–all words I didn’t like to think about,” says Steve Pilcher, the film’s production designer. Still, after hearing her full pitch, he signed on the same day. He liked that Chapman aimed to subvert the princess narrative in the same way Pixar’s The Incredibles tweaked superhero stories.

Brave’s medieval Scottish princess, Merida (voiced by Boardwalk Empire’s Kelly Macdonald), almost never wears princess clothes. Instead, she rides a horse and shoots a bow and arrow. Her mom Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson) insists she follow tradition and let the eldest sons of the heads of the kingdom’s clans compete in a series of games for her hand in marriage. But Merida doesn’t tell her mom that she’s going to pick her own husband, as princesses sometimes do in films. This is a fairy tale without a romance. Merida tells her that she isn’t marrying anyone. Then she fights bears. But mostly, like all teenage girls, she fights with her mom.

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?”

Chapman isn’t worried that boys will shy away from a film about a princess, even though industry research indicates that boys have more influence than their sisters in convincing their parents which movies to see. “Back in my day, boys and girls both went to see Cinderella and Snow White and Sleeping Beauty,” she says. “It’s just a change in media and advertising.”

When I ask Lasseter why boys would see Brave, he answers just as a 12-year-old boy would: “Because it’s awesome! It’s got awesomeness in it! It’s got bear fighting in it!”

There’s guts in marketing a princess movie to boys, but it’s just bad business not to give your princess a tiara, wand or frilly pink dress, since that’s what little girls buy. The 10 official members of the Disney Princesses make up the top licensed toy brand for girls in the U.S., with more than $4 billion in global sales. But Ed Catmull–the bespectacled, gray-haired, bearded computer scientist who co-founded Pixar and is now president of both Disney Animation and Pixar–doesn’t seem to care. Pixar, he says, never makes story decisions based on selling toys, even though the two Cars films alone have generated global retail sales of more than $10 billion. “Cars was anomalous. Toy Story as a whole has been very big. But you don’t sell a lot of rat toys,” Catmull says, referring to one of Pixar’s most critically acclaimed films, Ratatouille.

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.

The main conference room for a Pixar film is usually called the war room, but producer and longtime Pixar employee Katherine Sarafian calls hers the wee bunkhouse. “It’s not like we’re fighting a war. We’re making a movie,” she explains. Calm and classy, Sarafian doesn’t curse, so she instituted fines for each bad word used by people working on the princess movie. She doesn’t drink, either, so she had a tea bar that looks like an old stone castle built in the Brave offices. She talked a lot with Chapman over tea–some of it herbal–about the foibles of mother-daughter relationships.

In August 2006, Chapman and Sarafian led a group of Pixar employees on a research trip around Scotland. They took Mark Andrews, the guy who sword-fights on the grass–when he’s not practicing martial arts, playing Dungeons & Dragons or drawing graphic novels–because he had become Chapman’s unofficial consultant on all things medieval, Scottish and violent. “I cared whether they had one-handed or two-handed swords. I was like, ‘They didn’t have crossbows back then!'” he says as he mimes pulling a crossbow with his big hairy arms. When he found out their Scottish guide had served in the British Special Air Service during World War II, he jokingly used his newly learned Scottish phrase for starting a fight–“Square go?”–and immediately got kicked in the balls, falling to the ground. And he loved it.

Brave progressed nicely for a few years after the Scotland trip. Then the thing that happens to nearly every Pixar movie happened to this one: it got stuck. The story wasn’t propulsive. The characters were murky. When a movie hits a wall at other studios, executives give notes that have to be executed. At Pixar, directors receive criticism only from the Brain Trust, a group of fellow Pixar directors and writers. The Brain Trust has been known to suggest that large segments of a movie–even one that’s nearly finished–get “plussed” with major improvements or thrown out entirely, which can swell the budget and push back the release date. Every four or five months, the Brain Trust watched a “milestone” screening of Brave, then sat down over lunch and ripped it apart for two hours.

Changes suggested by the Brain Trust are not mandatory. Chapman was free to listen or not. Disney execs aren’t allowed to interfere. The final film is always the director’s cut.

But Lasseter can fire the director. He has replaced a director halfway through production three times: on Toy Story 2, Cars 2 and Ratatouille. When you ask Pixar employees what exactly happened in the case of Brave, everyone gets circumspect, which is a circumspect way of saying they get vague. There were creative differences. Management problems. Things were taking too long.

The short version is that Lasseter replaced Chapman, his first female director.

And he hired Andrews. The sword-fighting guy.

In January, after 18 months on the film, Andrews bounds to the middle of the Pixar screening room at 9 a.m. for the daily shot briefing, where he reviews updates on five-second snippets of the movie. Andrews, who was head of story on The Incredibles and directed the Pixar short One Man Band, is charming and energetic. Like Sarafian, he grew up in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley. He’s grown his hair long and straggly to seem more like a Scottish guy in the Middle Ages, to the dismay of Pixar publicists. (“I got in my hotel room at the Grand Californian at Disney World,” he says, “and there’s a pair of scissors on my bed and conditioner. There was a note that said, ‘Either/or.'”) He has a George W. Bush–like tendency to bestow nicknames on co-workers–“Papa Bedouin,” “Tab-Tab,” “Mr. Popper,” “Stinkowitz.”

Surrounded by about 20 animators sitting on couches, Andrews is explaining how the characters should move. He pops up from his chair to act out a sword fight, then a horseback ride, then the princess’s dad dismounting. He’s close to working up a sweat. “Look at Touch of Evil when Orson Wells gets out of the f—ing car and it’s all intimidation and we don’t like him. It’s all this f—ing fat and blubber coming at you,” he yells in his gravelly voice. Then he describes what he wants out of a shot framing the beautiful, red-haired princess. “We want the most bitchin’-ass, f—in’ pose! That’s a badass poster in itself of this princess heroine!”

Sarafian sits in the front row. She is eight months pregnant and sipping tea. Assistants are typing up everything Andrews says, but they remove all the curse words before they distribute the notes, at Sarafian’s request. Andrews owes the curse jar nearly $1,000; Sarafian has decided that the money will go toward gifts for the crew that she can hand out at the wrap party.

At dinner that night, she talks about singing in the choir at the Armenian Orthodox Church where her dad serves as priest. Andrews says he’s an atheist. “Who’s God? Dad? There is no God,” he says. Then he rethinks. “What about Odin? There might have been an Odin.” After Andrews finishes his chicken entre, leaving the vegetables untouched, he orders the same entre again and eats that too. It’s his signature restaurant move.

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.

“Where we’re going to land is a hybrid,” Sarafian says. “Heart and original story from Brenda, with the energy and entertainment and adventure that Mark brings. That’s the goal.” Chapman and Andrews will be credited as co-directors.

Catmull (he’s Papa Bedouin) acknowledges that director firings and last-minute script changes are traumatic. He also thinks Pixar’s willingness to make things difficult for itself accounts for its financial and creative success. Pixar averages a worldwide gross of $603 million per film and has 29 Academy Awards. Yet of all those movies, only Toy Story 3 went smoothly, as Lasseter acknowledges. Brave has been rough, but no more so than most of them, including the first Toy Story. “Woody was a jerk for a while,” Lasseter says. “He was king of the toys, and he was too into being the favorite toy.” After test screenings for a completely finished WALLE, director Andrew Stanton decided that instead of having WALLE save Eve, he’d reverse it; the entire third act was redone with an injured WALLE.

“What’s the success rate of live-action films? It’s 10% to 20%,” says Catmull in his office as he plays with a Slinky. “In live action you shoot more than you can use and hope to God you have enough to make it good. In animation you can keep working on it.”

It helps that Pixar works like an old-time studio. The directors, writers and animators are office employees, not free agents. The company is now working on three other movies (one is a prequel to Monsters, Inc., one is about the inside of a girl’s mind, and one is about dinosaurs), and everyone helps on every film, whether it’s to attend a Brain Trust meeting or do last-minute animation–or step in for a fired director. Live-action films suffer from a lack of this kind of community, Catmull says. “If you’re a star who’s got an agent, you don’t want a community.”

He thinks Pixar has another edge because it’s a technology company as much as it’s a movie studio. Brave is being made with the first rewrite of Pixar’s animation system in 25 years. Computer programs have always liked to make perfect geometric shapes that bounce against one another. (Hence movies about toys, robots and cars. Even Finding Nemo was mostly flat surfaces.) They’re not as good at making long, wild, curly red hair that swooshes against pine trees and lichen-covered rocks. Brave is richer and more colorful than any previous computer-animated film. “When Walt Disney started, people didn’t know how to make films,” Catmull says. “They were figuring out how to add color, how to sync sound. When Walt died, they stopped advancing the technology. And they also went downhill in their films. I think that’s related.” If you can animate new shapes and beings, you can tell new stories.

The next morning, Andrews is meeting with Brave’s simulation team, which handles the characters’ hair and clothing, Wearing a baseball cap that reads top gun, Andrews focuses his laser pointer between Merida’s knees. He doesn’t like the way her dress is bunching up unnaturally in these frames, as though there’s something underneath it. The animator presses a button that instantly reveals the shift she’s wearing under the dress and why those wrinkles are naturally occurring when she moves. Andrews still wants it smoothed over. “I’m just saying to fiddle with that, so you can say, ‘F— that f—ing Andrews.'”

Sarafian sighs. “I thought it would be nice to run a cuss-free show,” she says. “But that didn’t work out.”