Really happy to have spoken to Jen Williams on the Bestseller Experiment podcast this week. Not only is she an award-winning fantasy author and founder of the Super-Relaxed Fantasy Club, but she’s a jolly nice human being, too. I’ve been a fan of her stuff for a while, but if you’ve not read her before then check out The Ninth Rain, which kicks off her latest series. I’m convinced she’s invented a new genre: GrimFun – you heard it here first…
In this episode you will discover…
Top tips for building and writing captivating characters
When character should come before plot
The importance of a complex villain and why even aliens have issues
And how you can be super relaxed and meet your heroes
Just returned from enjoying Pixar’s Brave. An entertaining movie, if – oddly for Pixar – an entirely predictable one. The story lacked suspense or surprise, and got by on the charm of its characters and the stunning locations.
This movie was to represent many firsts for Pixar: first period piece, first female protagonist and first female director. But then about a year prior to release it was quietly announced that director Brenda Chapman was no longer working on the project (though she still retains a co-director credit). This is not an unusual move for Pixar. Ratatouille suffered a similar setback with the original director Jan Pinkava being replaced by Brad Bird, but it is perhaps more notable that in this case a woman was replaced by a man.
In a recent piece in the New York Times, Chapman speaks for the first time of the heartbreak of being removed from Brave, and wonders how women can gain more positions of power in Hollywood. Pixar, for all its genius over the years, is starting to come across as a bit of a boys’ club, with no women whatsoever on the famed brain trust and one too many movies about Cars. Surely there must be a some women in the organisation who can add a few x chromosome into the brain trust mix?
I doubt the truth of what really happened will come out anytime soon, and it’s a fact of life that directors and writers are often fired from movie projects, particularly in the perilous world of animation where Directors’ Guild and WGA rules don’t seem to apply. But I wonder if Brenda Chapman’s more personal version of Brave might not have felt so pat, might not have been so obvious? Might it not, for all its flaws, have been more interesting?
Mark Stay Writes 