Seeing grief through the eyes of children
Marin filmmaker Brenda Chapman explores loss with classic characters
As a veteran animation director and story artist who’s worked on celebrated Disney, DreamWorks and Pixar movies, Brenda Chapman has never shied away from portraying children’s fears and losses onscreen. In her first liveaction film, “Come Away,” opening Nov. 13, an imaginative “Peter Pan” and “Alice in Wonderland” prequel, the Marin County filmmaker delves into the subject of family grief and resilience in a deeper, more honest way than ever before.
That’s saying a lot, given that Chapman was the story supervisor on the original 1994 “The Lion King,” in which young Simba famously witnesses his father’s death.
Chapman also codirected “The Prince of Egypt,” a 1998 animated musical retelling of Moses’ biblical story that contends with orphanhood, slavery and even plagues.
More recently, Chapman wrote and directed “Brave” for Pixar, which won a 2013 Academy Award. Inspired by Chapman’s pushpull relationship with her own teenage daughter, the spirited princess Merida in “Brave,” Pixar’s first female protagonist, faces losing her mom forever if she can’t successfully reverse the spell that transformed her into the ferocious bear Mor’du.
But that Pixar hit, with its feisty, wildhaired heroine, ended up being an accomplishment tinged with pain for Chapman. During production, John Lasseter, then Pixar’s chief creative officer, replaced her with a male colleague.
Still, Chapman beamed onstage accepting her Oscar for best animated feature that year though her relationship with the Emeryville studio, which she joined 10 years earlier to work on “Cars,” had soured.
Personally, it hurt, she told The Chronicle. Professionally, it underscored for Chapman the fact that even her favorite film projects could go deeper, be less patronizing to young audiences, in terms of dealing with the emotional sting of life’s inevitable losses.
“Even with Mufasa’s death in ‘ Lion King,’ you had to surround it with all this humor and get it out of the way pretty quickly,” Chapman said. “‘ Come Away’ really appealed to me because I thought, ‘ Now I’ll have a chance to explore how tragedy affects a whole family and how children use their imaginations, and use fantasy and play, to cope with the truly difficult things in life.’
“And, I thought, maybe I’ll actually have a little more wiggle room to explore those ideas in liveaction.”
“Come Away” portrays the classic characters Peter Pan and Alice as young siblings in a late 1800s English family. Peter ( Jordan A. Nash), Alice ( Keira Chansa) and their older brother David ( Reece Yates), spend hours letting their imaginations run wild in the idyllic countryside, having sword fights, pirate wars and outdoor tea parties.
Their parents, Jack and Rose Littleton ( played by David Oyelowo and Angelina Jolie) encourage and dote on them — until tragedy strikes, and then Peter and Alice each strive in their own way to save their parents from bottomless grief. Rose starts drinking heavily to numb her pain ( a nod to Alice’s magic “potion”), and Jack falls back into a gambling habit.
The screenplay’s central idea came to writer Marissa Kate Goodhill after a college course in fairy tales that opened her eyes to these classic stories’ Gothic undertones as well the discovery that “Peter Pan” creator J. M. Barrie had a brother who died when he was young. He even wore his deceased brother’s clothes in an attempt to rouse his mother out of her griefstricken oblivion.
Chapman said Goodhill’s script beautifully combined the real and the fantastical, and the contrasting coping mechanisms of Peter, who wants to stay a child forever, and Alice, who chooses to return to reality after her rabbithole adventure. “I ended up thinking, “Why hasn’t someone done this before?’ ”
Casting BritishNigerianAmerican actor Oyelowo and Jolie as Peter and Alice’s parents, and having their onscreen children played by young biracial actors, shakes up conventional expectations of how classic children’s characters have long been portrayed.
“Race isn’t mentioned anywhere in the script,” Chapman said, but she admits that when she thought of Oyelowo for the role, “I stopped and thought, ‘ Will that work?’ And then I immediately realized, ‘ Why not?’ It opened up this world of wonderful opportunities to let the story speak to children who don’t normally get to see themselves onscreen.”
Children like Oyelowo’s own four kids, who range in age from 8 to 19.
“My wife is white, my family is biracial. Angie has a very diverse family herself, so to make a film that not only reflects family as a value we both share, but the specific families we actually have, was something I found to be incredibly beautiful, progressive and timely,” Oyelowo said. “It was a point of celebration for us both.”
Oyelowo and Jolie have been friends since “meeting at a birthday party several years ago,” he recalled, connecting “over the challenges of raising kids in Hollywood, and we ended up having these great playdates, 10 kids running around, tearing everything up.
“I once showed her a film I did called ‘ Nightingale,’ and she said, ‘ I’m so jealous. No one ever offers me independent films.’ It’s remarkable. Despite having six children, and being seen famously packing them all over the world, Angie never really gets to play mothers onscreen.”
That’s part of the reason Oyelowo, who is also a producer on “Come Away,” suggested Jolie for the role.
“She signed on quickly, and it was wonderful sharing this point of connection” as parents, he said. “We both
really appreciated having a story that deals with something we’ve seen our children have to deal with, which is some of the tougher stuff in life.”
Oyelowo also shared that his family was currently going through a grave loss. His father, who lived with his family in Los Angeles for the past four years, recently died of cancer and was buried on Nov. 2.
“The children loved him deeply, so not only am I feeling this loss, but I’m watching it through their eyes. One of the greatest tools they have is their imaginations, their ability to go to a place within themselves whereby the pain is not as overwhelming in a way than it otherwise might be,” he said.
“I love that with ‘ Come Away’ we’ve made a film that doesn’t deny a family the opportunity to have a conversation about both the reality of loss and the healing beauty of the imagination, that love and loss can coexist.”