Brenda Chapman was a story artist before she was a director, and her animated films are at their best when they take a family quarrel seriously; The Prince of Egypt shows how far that can go. The difficulty in judging her is that the credit is nearly always shared.
Fi1m perspective
The two men at the centre of The Prince of Egypt (1998) are brothers, and the film never lets us forget that the one with the staff and the one with the crown grew up in the same house. That is the thing Brenda Chapman does, so far as one hand can be traced through the work of three directors and a building full of animators: she takes the family quarrel seriously and lets it hurt. Val Kilmer and Ralph Fiennes act the parts rather than merely voice them, and the whole thing is told with a seriousness children's films of its era rarely risked.
She was drawing stories long before she was directing them. She joined Walt Disney Feature Animation in 1987 as a story trainee on The Little Mermaid, drew storyboards for The Rescuers Down Under and Beauty and the Beast (1991), and was head of story on The Lion King (1994), the first woman to hold that job on a major animated feature. In 1994 she moved to the newly founded DreamWorks Animation, and The Prince of Egypt, made with Steve Hickner and Simon Wells, made her the first woman to direct an animated feature from a major studio. She went to Pixar in 2003 and developed Brave (2012), which she ended up co-directing with Mark Andrews after creative differences removed her as its sole director. Come Away (2020) was her first live-action film.
The Prince of Egypt is the film we can judge her on, and it stands up. The pictures are as fine as anything in hand-drawn feature animation, and the plagues are the set piece. We went in expecting a Sunday-school illustration and came out having been frightened by a cartoon, which we had not planned on; the film draws the ruin of a city with weight and does not wink at us while it does it. "We wanted to do something that reached more adults," she has said of it, and the brothers do. The songs, built to a template, and the two comic priests who keep wandering in from a lighter film do not. Those are the studio's habits rather than hers, but a director shares the blame for what she lets through.
Our 91 for Beauty and the Beast belongs to the film, not to her; she was one of several story artists on it, and our review does not single her out. Roger Allers worked alongside her on story twice, and it is fair to say the Disney films of those years were made by rooms rather than by individuals. That is the awkward truth about Chapman: her best work is buried in shared credits, and the one film built to be hers was finished by another hand as well as her own. We have not reviewed Brave and will not judge it here.
What we can say is that The Prince of Egypt is worth an evening, for the brothers and for the plagues, and that when the priests arrive you may safely put the kettle on.
Biography
Brenda Chapman is an American animator, screenwriter, storyboard artist and director. She studied at the California Institute of the Arts and began her career at Walt Disney Feature Animation as a story trainee on The Little Mermaid (1989). She contributed story work to Beauty and the Beast (1991) and served as head of story on The Lion King (1994).
Chapman joined DreamWorks Animation at its founding and co-directed The Prince of Egypt (1998) with Steve Hickner and Simon Wells, becoming the first woman to direct an animated feature from a major studio. She later moved to Pixar, where she co-directed Brave (2012) with Mark Andrews and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
Her other credits include story or storyboard work on The Rescuers Down Under (1990), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) and Chicken Run (2000). She is married to animation director Kevin Lima.
