“Frozen” was the highest-grossing animated film until it was surpassed by the 2019 remake of “The Lion King,” and Ms. It soon became clear that she is a strong storyteller who is good at “killing your darlings’’: cutting narrative fat. Lee found herself standing up at meetings with the Disney boys’ club to make her voice heard. Without even realizing it, the 5-foot-3 Ms. Separated from her husband at the time, she asked her mother to move temporarily to Los Angeles to help take care of her daughter, and eventually she persuaded the father of her daughter to move to California as well. There she met a fellow student named Phil Johnston, who asked her to come to Disney in 2011 for what was meant to be eight weeks to work on an animated film called “Wreck-It Ralph.” At 30, she decided to take a gamble and pursue her dream of a career in movies, going back to school to get an M.F.A. She started her career in New York, working at Random House as an art director in both reference and audiobooks.
This is particularly remarkable since she was not a trained animator and had only ventured out to Hollywood a couple of years before, as she turned 40, the age when many people in the dream factory start lying about how old they are. Lee was the first woman to direct a Disney animated feature film. Lee is also busting up sexist stereotypes about female directors, such as lingering fears that they can’t be trusted with big budgets or tell sweeping heroic stories. While she is blowing up sexist stereotypes in fairy tales, Ms. “It really came out that Elsa is not ready for a relationship,” she says. Lee says that early on, she put both characters through intense Myers-Briggs personality tests. I ask her about the Twitter campaigns for Elsa to be gay. “I always go back to when I saw ‘His Girl Friday’ for the first time, because the relationship was incredible, with the wonderful mess of life,” she says. She is more inspired by the snappy back and forth of saucy women and the men who enjoy them on Turner Classic Movies. She long ago grew weary of Hollywood movies where the female characters were there either for a sexual reason or to reflect what’s at stake for the male characters. Lee isn’t interested in any more Prince Charming characters who simply look good and show up at the right time. “I call these my ‘compassion and armor,’” she says, with her radiant smile, noting that she splurged on them when she was nervous about “Frozen 2.” Lee is often in jeans but today she is wearing a long royal blue Theory jacket and Christian Louboutin white ankle boot stilettoes that have “Love” scrawled on the side and silver spikes sprinkled on the toes. We talk in a writers’ room filled with snacks and storyboards for their latest project, “Raya and the Last Dragon.” Ms.
Mickey’s blue sorcerer’s hat sits atop the building. Lee, 48, recalls at Walt Disney Animation Studio, the kingdom she now runs as chief creative officer. “I grew up in the ’70s and had a mom that was the single mom and very independent, so that wasn’t the life I was living,” Ms. She says that the classic Disney fairy tale model was taken for granted for generations, so many women just automatically strove for it. Lee says, she played up the tension between fear (Elsa) and love (Anna), cognizant of the fact while they were working on the first “Frozen,” “you were really seeing an escalation - and exploitation - of fear in the world and it was overwhelming.” Rather than the usual fight between good and evil, Ms. In “The Snow Queen," the original shambolic Hans Christian Andersen saga that inspired “Frozen,” the queen was an older, sexy, diabolical diva, keeping a boy captive. In “Frozen 2,” premiering this week in Hollywood, female self-reliance and sisterly love is once more the theme. The writers also avoided the usual malevolent female characters, like menacing matriarchs and tormenting stepsisters.
0 kommentar(er)
