Pixar's Girl Story
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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.