Brenda Chapman, a former Pixar director and the original creative force behind Brave who was later replaced as director, has come out for the first time to explain her thoughts on what happened. In a piece for a New York Times series on How Can Women Gain Influence in Hollywood?, Chapman blames the “Hollywood Boy’s Club” who don’t want to “give up some of their seats for the ladies”. She went on to talk about her feelings on being replaced: “When Pixar took me off of Brave – a story that came from my heart, inspired by my relationship with my daughter – it was devastating… To have it taken away and given to someone else, and a man at that, was truly distressing on so many levels”.

In the past few years Pixar and Disney have both famously replaced male directors off projects they had developed — Bolt and Ratatouille (and like Chapman, both directors would soon after leave those studios as well). Chapman even mentions this in her piece, “Animation directors are not protected like live-action directors, who have the Directors Guild to go to battle for them. We are replaced on a regular basis”. Based on the information available there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that this was anything nefarious but just business as usual in the high stakes world of movie making.