Animated Approach

Apparently, nobody told Brenda Chapman about outsized Hollywood egos.

The first woman to direct a major animated film, Chapman sits on the floor of her modest office at DreamWorks’ new animation facility in Glendale. She does a pretzel thing with her legs as she talks about “The Prince of Egypt,” which opens today nationwide.

An enormous amount is riding on this animated tale of Moses (dubbed “The Zion King” by the wags who do such dubbing). Its executive producer is Jeffrey Katzenberg, who walked out of Disney in 1994 and formed DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen. And the movie is expected to answer, once and for all, the question: Did Katzenberg really drive the animation renaissance that began at Disney with his “The Little Mermaid” and revitalized the entire field?

“I’m scared to death,” says the 36-year-old Chapman, who co-directed “The Prince of Egypt” with Steve Hickner and Simon Wells. If she nervously awaits the response of audiences, she is also clearly proud of the film, which took four years to make and cost $75 million.

Based on the Old Testament Book of Exodus and rated PG, “The Prince of Egypt” breaks new ground by seeking adult viewers, not the lovable knee-biters who are the standard audience for most animated movies. Chapman hopes the film will allow “audiences to see that animation is more than films just for little kids.” Indeed, she hopes it will hasten the day when animation is used to make all kinds of films--comedies, dramas and action pictures--as well as children’s movies.

What Chapman and her fellow filmmakers are most proud of, she says, “was being able to be true to the integrity of the story and not having to rely on wacky sidekicks and fluffy little animals.” Dealing with such dark themes as the destruction of the non-Jewish first-born sons of ancient Egypt, this is definitely not “the wacky Moses movie,” she says.

Born and raised in Illinois, Chapman is the kind of person who doesn’t interrupt other people, even during the sometimes noisy meetings that move collaborative projects such as this one forward. Indeed, she and a few of her colleagues are so civil that occasionally Katzenberg had to step in so they could be heard.

“Jeffrey will just make everyone shut up, and we get to say what we have to say,” she explains.

“The Prince of Egypt” wasn’t the first time Chapman broke a Hollywood gender barrier. “I was the first woman in story at Disney for over 40 years,” she says.

In the early decades at Disney it was understood that animation was a man’s game, and women were consigned to less creative, poorer paying jobs, such as inking and painting. Disney remained something of a boys’ club until the early 1980s and the beginning of the new era.

Chapman was hired there as a trainee in the story department, to work under John Musker and Ron Clements, directors of “The Little Mermaid” and other latter-day Disney classics. They liked the film she had made as a student in character animation at CalArts in Valencia--”about a little old lady alone on her birthday.”

“That group of men didn’t have trouble working with women,” Chapman recalls. “They gave me my first break and were wonderful to work with, by the way.”

Chapman still has ties to Disney. Her husband, Kevin Lima, is currently co-directing its animated Tarzan movie, due out next year. Chapman and Lima also have a joint project. They are expecting their first child in June. “It was the first time I heard my Mom squeal,” Chapman reports, with a smile.

Co-directors are all but essential for animated movies “because they’re so hard to make and they take so long,” she explains. “In principle, it’s the exact same thing,” she says of directing an animated film and a live-action one. But, in fact, animation makes some unique demands. The directors have to work closely with the “voice talent,” which in “Prince” includes Val Kilmer as Moses and Ralph Fiennes (who does his own singing) as his rival, Rameses. As Chapman points out, the voice actors’ work is complicated by the fact that they often perform alone, without sets or costumes.

“They’re in front of a microphone in their shorts and flip-flops.”

The directors also work closely with the movie’s other actors--the animators--whose best performances are often given in front of their mirrors, as they struggle to get a character’s movements and expressions right.

But the bedrock challenge is creating a whole world from scratch. “We not only design costumes,” Chapman explains, “we have to design the characters that go into the costumes.”

For Chapman, a highlight of the project was a two-week stay in Egypt, with Katzenberg and other key members of the production team, including a visit to one ancient temple by moonlight. Before the trip, she says, they had given the art directors a hard time about how big they were making the Pharoah’s palace and the other Egyptian structures. After they experienced the scale of the tombs and temples firsthand, they said, “You’re not making them big enough.”

As the characters evolved during the project, the filmmakers became more and more emotionally involved with them. Chapman says she was “very, very attached” to both Moses and Rameses. “There was a point where we had made Rameses so sympathetic that we were mad at Moses for being so mean to him,” she recalls. As a result, they worked hard to make Moses “more complex and appealing.”

Like most contemporary animated films, “The Prince of Egypt” incorporates some computer animation--the thousands of “extras,” for example.

Chapman praises such computer animated films as “Toy Story” and “A Bug’s Life,” but, she says, “I just have a love for the organic quality of traditional animation, and they have yet to get that into computer animation.”

If all filmmaking is collaborative, animated filmmaking is especially so. That’s fine with Chapman, who prefers working with a team to working in a vacuum.

As Chapman says, when you see an animated epic, “You can’t point your finger at one person and say that’s the author of the film.”