Here is a fable unhampered by the need to revise it into something darker, a lot to ask of a modern adult audience weaned on grit and grimness. Brave begs the indulgence of the kid inside all of us, and does so without a shred of irony or cynicism. It concerns me less that a story might be standard if I am genuinely enjoying the journey. What Brave has is not a daring and original plot, per se, but an earnest sense of delight and joy in the telling of a tale. It’s clear that Disney/Pixar was determined to stick to a clear-cut fairy tale format, and were only comfortable with slight deviations. The story dutifully hits its marks, sometimes more formulaically than one would hope.
What follows is magic, curses, mayhem, lots of arrows, and yes, a few giant bears. Incensed at learning of plans to marry her off, an upset Merida seeks out a solution from a forest witch, a bid that has always worked so well for characters in her situation. She’s also a bow-and-sword wielding, comfortable-dress-wearing tomboy to boot, more enthralled with riding around the highlands on her trusty stallion, Angus, than practicing how to be a proper future Queen with her mother. So, both the over-excited tiny girl knight inside of me, and the grumbling, jaded critic that is my adult guise, are pleased to inform you that Brave is very, very good.Īs you may have gleaned by now, Brave tells the story of plucky Princess Merida, firstborn to a king of vague Olde Timey Scotland. That is a tremendous price to ask of any movie, especially a high-budget movie, and one from a studio that must hit so many parts of the ambiguous (and dubious) “family” demographic. The little girl inside of me who was once Joan of Arc for Halloween (ask my mother about the grey Eileen Fisher sweater I stretched out because it ‘looked like chainmaile’), who once built a sword out of PVC pipe, foam, a dead tennis ball, and duct tape, and who devoured Tamora Pierce’s Lioness Quartet like a starving person, needed Brave to be so many things.
While it’s needless to explain that we’re fans of Pixar for their general quality and content (we can politely forget about the Cars franchise), it meant something different, something special, to have a female-oriented (and female-sourced) vehicle as their next big feature. Like myself, and our chief editor, many readers of our site may have found themselves attaching undue importance to Disney/Pixar’s Brave.
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