The movie leaves you hoping for resolution, not siding with one over the other. It’s easy to see how Brave intends them to be both rivals and perfect complement for each other. Elinor may seem at first like a prim nag - always telling Merida to tone it down and mind her manners - but eventually the virtue of her elegance and refinement becomes clear, and her compassion shines through. Merida is everything you could want in a heroine: strong, confident, clever, a crack shot with a bow and arrow, and a tangle of wild red curly hair. It’s not that the characters are lacking. Instead of finding a similarly unexpected angle on its first movie with a female protagonist, Pixar instead falls back on well tread territory, with princesses, angsty teens, and parents and children who just don’t see eye-to-eye. This is the company that turned an almost-octogenarian into an action hero in Up. This is especially disappointing considering that, if anyone could grasp the complexities of the way mothers and daughters relate to each other, it should be the folks at Pixar, whose past movies can be earnest, heartfelt, suspenseful, and hilarious, often simultaneously.
Unfortunately, Brave doesn’t always live up to the potential of its rich subject matter. (You basically have to go all the way back to Dumbo and Bambi to find a Disney cartoon where mothers figure prominently - and it doesn’t work out so well for them.) Yet the relationship between a mother and daughter is one of the most profound, lifelong bonds - and also one of the thorniest - and it’s worthy of examination. Usually, in children’s stories (and animated Disney cartoons in particular), it’s the absence of a mother that’s the character’s defining quality. Of course, it backfires, and she winds up casting a spell that turns her mother into a bear, and she has to work to reverse her spell while maintaining her independence.Īlong with the negative view of princesshood, Brave is unique in that the mother/daughter bond is the center of the story. When Merida’s mother and father, King Fergus (Billy Connolly), decide that it’s time for her to marry a prince of another clan - the typical end-goal for most fairy tales - Merida sets off to find magic that will change her destiny and win her freedom. While her mother, Elinor (Emma Thompson), tries to teach Merida virtues befitting her royal stature, Merida prefers to gallop off into the wilderness, honing her archery skills and climbing rugged cliffs. The princess in this case is Merida (Kelly Macdonald), Scottish princess of Clan DunBroch. Perhaps the most courageous thing about Brave, then, is how it shows princesshood not as a station to aspire to, but a burden to be freed from. Princesses have become something of a cottage industry for Disney, a company more than willing to take fairy-tale fascination to new levels of dress-up.
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