Tam Valley’s Brenda Chapman Basks in Post-Oscar Glory

Two years ago, Pixar execs removed Tam Valley filmmaker Brenda Chapman from Brave, the animated feature she created about a strong-willed Scottish princess named Merida. Chapman, a 20-year Hollywood vet who helped launch Dreamworks Animation in 1994, worried the firing was a fatal blow to her career.

“I really thought, ‘Oh my god this is it for me,” Chapman said. “I thought it was going to kill my career. But it was quite the opposite – I got so much support. And now this!”

This – garnering an Academy Award last month for Best Animated Feature for her co-direction of Brave, the first time a woman has won an Oscar for an animated feature – saw Chapman standing on the Dolby Theatre stage at the 85th Academy Awards in Hollywood, looking into the audience at her 13-year-old daughter Emma, a Mill Valley Middle School eighth-grader and the muse for Merida, and speaking directly to her.

“We’ve been head to head for a long time – she was always a daddy’s girl,” Chapman said. “But I was able to look at her and say, ‘this is because of you!’ And I knew that she was so proud of me. I wanted to honor her strength.”

Chapman, 50, said the time leading up to the Oscars was fraught with anxiety, as she didn’t know if she would get a chance to speak if Brave won.

“It was kind of stressful up until that very moment,” she said. “(Co-director) Mark (Andrews) did try to give me a few seconds at the end to speak. That meant so much to me.”

Brenda and Emma went to the Oscars together at the insistence of Kevin Lima, their husband and father, respectively. Lima is also a renowned film director, best known for helming Enchanted and 102 Dalmatians. Lima is directing Mumbai Musical, Dreamworks’ “first-ever Bollywood-style animated musical adventure inspired by the great Indian epic tale of The Ramayana but told from the point of view of the monkeys.”

“I will never live down that I did not say my husband’s name when I thanked him,” Chapman said with a laugh.

The Oscar win has incited a deluge of calls and emails from friends, longtime industry colleagues and plenty of professional suitors.

“I’ve been buried in emails and I’m still getting flowers,” she said. “I’m a little overwhelmed. Every time I get through some, they start coming again – I’m drowning in goodness.”

While Chapman continues to bask in the love, she also intends to leverage her renewed stature in the industry to make sure what happened to her doesn’t happen to others. She hopes to work through the Directors Guild of America to do so.

“This sort of thing happens to animation directors all the time, and it very rarely happens to live-action directors,” Chapman said. “That is not appropriate. I don’t want it to happen to anyone. It was very hard.”

Chapman, who works as a story consultant with Lucasfilm and part-time at Dreamworks, is shifting to full-time at Dreamworks’ facility in Redwood City in May.

“They want me to develop a project with the eye to direct it,” she said. “I will also be helping out on other projects as a story eye. That’s my passion.”

The native of Beason, Illinois (population 189) went to California Institute of the Arts and started at Disney in 1987.

In 1998, Chapman co-directed DreamWorks' The Prince of Egypt, making her the first woman to land a directing role in an animated feature for a major studio. She moved to Mill Valley when the late animation great Joe Ranft recruited her to bring more of a female viewpoint to the film Cars 10 years ago.

“I think I got up here a little late to do anything about that,” Chapman said. “But that brought me up here. I liked the climate in Mill Valley, loved the downtown and also the schools are so good here.

The family settled in Tam Valley – “the crunchy part of Mill Valley,” Chapman said – and they love the proximity to the great trails of Tennessee Valley and Tennessee Beach.

“It’s just incredible up here – I pinch myself.”

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