No Redheaded Stepchild: Brave Innovations Pay Off for Pixar
Over 17 years and a dozen feature films Pixar revolutionized computer animation. Today no other studio even comes close.
Pixar’s films have innovated not just with their technological expertise but in the realms of characterization, plot development, and creativity. With Brave debuting last week, Disney and Pixar raised the bar even higher, reaching astonishing new heights.
Fiery-haired Merida (Kelly Macdonald) is the daughter of King Fergus (Billy Connolly) and Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson) of the DunBroch clan in 10th century Scotland. Merida loves riding through the countryside and practicing her archery. She longs to choose her own fate and bristles at her mother’s attempts to school her in the ways of living like a princess. When Elinor invites the heads of the other clans to DunBroch to compete for Merida’s hand in marriage, the princess rebels, leading to a heated argument.
Merida takes off into the woods, where she follows will-o’-the-wisps to a witch’s cabin. She asks for a spell that will both change her fate and her mother. The result: Elinor transforms into a bear. Merida must then reverse the curse by repairing her relationship with Elinor. Along the way mother and daughter restore the bonds between the four clans and help Fergus face the legendary demon bear Mor’du, who took his leg in a battle years before.
Brave builds on Pixar’s previous accomplishments. The studio rewrote its animation software for the first time in 25 years to make this picture, providing a sumptuous feast for the eyes, along with some of the truest visual effects in animation. CGI water looks like actual water, animated fabric looks like fabric in real life. From the skin of a blueberry to a bear’s fur to Merida’s wild curls, objects’ textures leap off the screen. Many of the wide angle landscape shots look just like live action — the visuals left me speechless.
The voice talent in Brave exceeds any other film in the Pixar canon. The producers cast native Scottish actors like Macdonald and Connolly — who are not big name stars — in principal roles. Their voices along with other Scots in the cast bring authenticity to the film. Even more well-known talents like Oscar winner Thompson and Pixar stalwart John Ratzenberger inhabit their characters to near perfection.
Brave‘s music adds nearly as much to the film’s beauty as the visuals do. Patrick Doyle‘s score blends Celtic instruments with more traditional film orchestration and the original songs tie in well with both the plot and the score. Scottish Gaelic singer Julie Fowlis sings two amazing songs, “Touch The Sky” and “Into The Open Air,” while Mumford & Sons team with young British pop star Birdy for the soaring closing credit number “Learn Me Right.”
Brave breaks new ground for Pixar in other ways. Whimsy and light comedy often characterize the studio’s movies. While you’ll find plenty to laugh at in Brave, the spell-casting witch and bear-hunting violence create a tone darker than any other Pixar release. As a heroine Merida differs from Disney’s other princesses. Rather than sitting around singing and pining for a prince, she takes her fate into her own hands.
The film’s emphasis on family presents a different message compared to most modern fables. These days it seems like most movies geared toward the family have an environmental or anti-capitalist moral, but Brave places a high value on reconciliation and family unity. We see this emphasis in the witch’s curse and the legend of the original clans. Brave‘s message of mending family relationships is refreshing.
Pixar’s latest masterpiece spins a tale as exciting and unruly as Merida’s curly locks. The studio gambled with a dark fairy tale in a mysterious, enchanted setting, but with Brave the dare pays off. The artists at Disney and Pixar have truly outdone themselves with this film.
See Chris Queen’s ranking of the studio’s 12 films: The Pixar Canon: 4 Misses And 8 Hits
And catch-up on more of Chris’s writings on Disney:
My husband I went to see Brave this weekend and loved it. When I went to buy tickets, I overheard a mom and her two young daughters talking, as they left the theater. The mom asked her girls “So, what did we learn from that movie?”. Instantly, one of the girls responded “Listen to your mommy!”.
Brave is beautiful movie and a charming story, but my favorite part was definitely the emphasis on the important of family bonds. It was great seeing a family that worked together and a married couple that mutually adored each other, too.
We saw Brave yesterday afternoon and, since then, my four year old daughter has been drawing pictures of castles, wearing blanket capes, and tending to her stick horse, who has been re-named Angus. My husband and son are planning another archery day for our homeschooling group, and I am looking forward to purchasing the movie soundtrack. I can see that this is going to be our Scottish summer! Definitely my favorite Pixar release–absolutely beautiful.
We saw “Brave” Saturday and loved it!! After the disappointment of “Cars 2″ last year (and I’m a big fan of the original “Cars”), “Brave” has entered into my long list of Pixar favorites. Such a gorgeous movie and a lovely story. Folks need to stay through the credits for a cute bonus scene.
I generally love Pixar movies but have not seen this one. Can someone who has seen it reply? In another thread, a comment describes “Brave” as yet another in a long, tedious line of male-bashing movies. According to that commentor, every single male character is portrayed as a knuckle-dragging idiot. Is that a reasonably accurate assessment? I’d like to take my grandkids to see a movie but if that assessment is true, I’ll spend my money elsewhere.
Larry, I didn’t think that was the case for every male character. King Fergus comes across as a good husband and father. The male characters do provide the bulk of the comic relief — I mean, they’re cartoons after all, so we should expect some cartoonish behavior — but I’m pretty sensitive to how men are portrayed on TV and film, and I didn’t really have a problem with it.
I think it’s more an issue of how the main character’s father, and the other men especially, come across in the trailers. I’m curious if the female characters ever descend into the levels of stupidity/ridiculousness from the men that are represented in the trailers. I know finished film =/= marketing material, but it’s not making a very strong case for itself.
I wouldn’t say it’s so much a case of male bashing as of focus. The main focus (and the main conflict) is the mother-daughter relationship. From Merida’s point of view, the men coming to win her hand are all going to be dolts because the whole thing was Mom’s idea. The male characters are all secondary, so not as much effort was put into their characterization. Merida’s father is the most developed male character, and while he can be clueless at times, Merida has a closer relationship with him than with her mother (at least, until the end of the movie).
Our family consensus (1 woman (me) and 3 guys) was 4.5 stars. Good, but a bit predictable and lacking the emotional punch of Up and Toy Story 3.
Something’s off in Disney/Pixar’s marketing department, because they did the exact sam thing with Tangled. Both movies’ trailers looked like they were generic Action Girl, Idiot Men movies. Tangled’s trailers made Flynn look like a buffoon (with scenes not even in the movie!), rather than the heroic rogue. The reviews for Brave are showing the same thing–instead of the perfect feminist heroine from the trailers, Merida’s actual story focuses on the importance of family and responsibility. Of course, lefty reviewers don’t like that.
@ #4 – Larry J
This is my worry about the movie as well. From the other comments here, it seems it’s not a male-bash fest, so I am thinking of giving it a try.
Are Disney/Pixar publicists working the Comments..?
“Why, this doesn’t seem to be male bashing at all… Based on these posts, it sounds quite uplifting and reinforces all my values… Perhaps I’ll take my 2.5 kids to see it during the critical second weekend of release…”
Disney stock is at an all-time high. Tell your bosses to buy an ad on PJM, like everybody else.
I went this past Saturday to see it with my 8 year old daughter – we both loved it!
As for “male bashing”, I don’t see it that way.
The central character in the movie is the young Merida. The story is told from her perspective, and as such the male suiters she is initially being forced to choose from are all going to be the types she has no interest in. If they had been the tall dark and handsome types, then it would have just been another Disney movie.
The males themselves are shown elsewhere within the movie as having quite admirable qualities.
At the risk of giving away too much:
The father is the one who initially instructs Merida in archery – and expresses the opinion that it is important she know how to defend herself (a point of view my own daughter is already learning from me!).
Then there is a scene wherein the four clans remember the very manly assistance they had provided each other at a critical past event. Yes, Merida is instrumental in reminding them of these events – but she is being groomed to be a queen one day and that is the role she has to face up to and fill whether she wants to or not.
Then there is the scene wherein her father places himself in the path of perceived danger while pushing his daughter behind him – he clearly is willing to face the life threatening risk in her place.
No, I would not say it was a male bashing movie at all.
If you’re a confident male, you will put aside any misgivings, especially since the male behavior is hilarious. The men are not buffoons when they confront the demon bear. As for Merida, her talent is archery, not single-handedly fighting a dozen men with her sword. She’s still a girl in need of her mother and father when the chips are really down.
The movie is entertaining, and meant to have a lot of uproarious humor, and male ribaldry is celebrated. Do go see it. If nothing else, you will enjoy the award-winning short “La Luna” that preceedes Brave. That one is a visual delight.
I am a confident male. However, I do wonder how the constant pushing of “grrl power” on TV and the movies might impact my 6 year old grandson. I’m sure my 8 year old granddaughter would love it but I have to think of my grandsons (2 others live in San Diego) as well as her.
I honestly cannot figure out if this movie is worth my time or not – I’ve yet to see a trailer that conveys anything past the whole girl-empowerment angle, to even hint at a shred of the actual story. From Wikipedia’s plot summary, it seems like a jumbled mess of inarticulate happenings (taken with a grain of salt, of course, cause it’s Wikipedia). Most of the reviews I’ve read haven’t been too clear about this, either.
I wish I could believe that Pixar made the “brave” choice with the story and made this a movie about a girl who endangers her kingdom by defying her mother/being selfish, and in the process of trying to fix her mistake, learns some important lessons about the meaning of family and grows as a person. But that’s not the movie that’s being sold right now. And frankly, I’m way too cynical about Hollywood (and Disney!) right now to be anything but suspicious of this.
My generation’s been told time and again we’re supposed to hate the Disney Princess line for brainwashing/socializing us into believing that the ultimate goal in life is getting a man (which is, of course, the last thing a woman should ever want to do). It’s a prevalent line of thinking. To the point where nearly every female friend I have has gone on a tirade, and every male friend has given me weird looks, when I mention how much I love Ariel. What’s the problem, I always wonder. Ariel made a change in her life, taking huge risks in the process and being forced to deal with the consequences of her mistakes, without ever having to pick up a weapon, and without her father being made to look like a lumbering buffoon. Would Disney make that movie today, though? It’s just a guess, but I would have to say no.
I’m all for giving little girls the right messages about what they can do with their lives, but honestly, I don’t trust the people in control of the Narrative to do that anymore. I seriously doubt that anyone at Pixar meant to put any kind of anti-male, anti-authority/parent message into this, you know, the one you can see in the marketing material. I equally wouldn’t doubt that innate biases in some creative team members have ensured that those elements are included in some way. Sure, it wouldn’t be brazen or even intentional, and it might not even be noticeable for most people, but I still don’t trust that this is a positive, pro-family, girl-learns-her-lesson-too sort of movie.
*Sigh* Sorry, it’s late, still at work (because this little girl who loved the Disney Princesses ended up in the US military). I think I’ll stick to The Incredibles for my Pixar family-themed film of choice for now, and borrow the DVD from whoever buys it in my unit in a few months.
No, it wasn’t laced with feminist dogma. There was a theme of girls getting to choose who’ll they marry, but it doesn’t even go as far as “The Fiddler on the Roof” did. The recurring themes in it are about reconciliation and family unity. There wasn’t any male bashing. There were great comedic moments with males, but it wasn’t derogatory. It was just a great movie with a great message. You’d really have to be a knee jerk anti feminist to find fault with it on those grounds.
It looks like HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON, without the dragons…
@ #5 Erin
You touched on many of my own concerns. I can’t stand male-bashing movie and I’m quite tire of the GRRRL Power thing in Hollywood. It’s been done to death already.
But the comments here from those who have seen it have given me hope! Maybe I will check it out.
The trailers are lying (okay, MISLEADING) deliberately. Pixar’s purpose in doing so was to specifically get an antifminist message across to young girls who would be otherwise completely indoctrinated in the corrupted unreality of our reigning ideology. The entire point of the movie is that GRRL POWER is the stupidest and most destructive thing you can introduce to a family.
I was told “tangled” also had misleading feminist trailers.
It wasn’t just girls who get to choose who they will marry. ALL the young people, including the male “suitors” (who really aren’t that happy about the traditional set-up either) get a chance to determine their own future.
All of the characters in the movie have flaws….Merida’s dad gives a hilarious spot-on imitation of his daughter that any dad with a teenage girl will love!
Merida’s mother has let her love for Merida make her overly protective and controlling-later in the movie her character has an interesting mix of humor and pathos as she adapts to becoming a bear.
We really loved the movie.
Of course, if you don’t like Brave, you can always hope that someone, someday, will make a movie called “Burkha”—in which a young girl learns that Allah, and her father, always know best, and, of course, she should marry that 60 year old Sheik, because that will preserve family unity! She gives up her headstrong ways, dons a niqab and gets down the job of chunking out young ‘uns for jihad! ‘Cuz that’s a girl’s true role!
I’m sure someone, somewhere, is working on such a movie, even now. Of course, once the Caliphate really gets going, we won’t have anymore movies about spunky girls who take their lives into their own hands—or princesses—or heroic rogues. We won’t have any movies at all—unless they’re depictions of Islamic heroes, such as Saladin, or Osama bin Ladin, or “The Glorious 19.”
There won’t be any male bashing, however.
And I’m sure we’ll all be very happy in this brave, new world. /Sarc. off.
(I liked “Brave” very much, but I wonder about many of its critics.)
MY wife, daughter, and I went to see “Brave” this weekend. Given that my daughter is Merida’s age, I think she and my wife identified with the characters a bit more than they are comfortable admitting. My daughter is a wonderful young woman, but this is the stage where she is trying to figure out who she is as an individual, while my wife is seeing her baby becoming a woman and is caught between not wanting to let go of the child and preparing the young woman to become a lady. The conflict between Merida and the queen is being played out live at my house and this was a great way for both to get a perspective on the situation through the eyes of the other. The magic of Pixar is in the way they consistently manage to do that: bring the every-day emotional situations we all go through into the screen in a format that gives us permission to laugh, cry, and reflect.
went to see it with 2 other adults – it was great. Both mom’s “over-protective, my daughter is a mini-me” and Merida’s “I want to be free, leave me alone” issues are confronted by the plot. The scenery was beautiful. And the 3 little brother (wee devils) are very important in helping solve a problem – by being their boyish selves! Dad is kinda goofy – but what pre-teen/teenage girl doesn’t think that her dad is a lovable, somewhat embarrassing goof? And they have a strong relationship from the beginning. Dad loves Mom; Mom loves Dad. And the goofy teenage boys — once again, teenage boys trying to impress a girl and stay on their dads’ good sides ARE goofy.
Not a feminist rant kind of movie…
It’s sure hard to deny the impact that Pixar has had in animation.
Just because the rough frame of the storytelling is girl-centered and the guys in the storytelling are set in place as foils or comic releif doesn’t translate into any kind of male bashing. This movie is framed much like Finding Nemo and only a harpie would think that the entire point of Finding Nemo was to codify mysoginistic social structures. Certainly that earlier Pixar film abandoned all but the barest sentiment of motherhood and otherwise framed its female charecters as periodically useable but otherwise unstable or downright crazy. These are cartoons people. When they are done right the creators try to focus on an simple and heartfelt story telling arc that will pull a charecter through some sort of growth or transformation in an interesting and compelling way. The more straightforward the peripheral charecters and arcs are – the better. Charecterizing that story telling simplification process as hateful to one gender or another is going way overboard.
Let’s wait for the truly overt. Gender hatered can really tear down our social contract but how about we try to be vigilant for the real thing and let’s pounce on it when we find it; but let’s not inject it where it might not even exist. Are the ratty CGI Tinkerbell and Barbie doll cartoons next on the list?
Finally, I’ll add that it’s not Pixar’s responsibility to heal or harm how your daugheters percieve men or dads or moms. That’s up to parents. Pixar has enough on their plates trying to make great movies that enough people will go see so they can all keep working – because I can’t wait for the next one. (Unless it’s Cars 3, for that, I can wait).
Seriously apologizing for all the typos!Sheesh what-a-mess. Gotta go back to work now.
“BRAVE” is almost a Pixar/Disney meeting Spielberg/DreamWorks’s “How to Train Your Dragon,” with a girl as the protagonist.
Something NOT usually found in Disney movies — Mom and Dad are both VERY MUCH alive… and TOGETHER in marriage… and children live WITH their parents…
Finally a Disney film that has an intact family at the center! (Not since the Doctor Doolittle movies with Eddie Murphy, not Rex Harrison)
Not so much “male” bashing, as comic relief from teen boys trying to over-impress a teen girl. When the boys have not yet matured into the men they will become. (Think of “Wart” and the “Sword in the Stone” still a boy even at the end.)
Another thought: In both Brave and Prometheus, we see echoes of features normally found mostly in anime. Brave copies the tendency of anime to portray children as beguilingly cute but willful, immature, and often destructive (and definitely not as innocent as they seem.)
Prometheus, on the other hand, copied the convoluted plotlines, hilariously misplaced use of poorly-understood religious symbolism, and tentacle rape.
I’ll let you be the judge of which film chooses the healthier aspects of Japan to emulate.
Feh. I don’t care how much of their Pixar magic they put into this feature. Yet another animated “liberated and daring princess flips off the patriarchy” flick. Screw it. It’s gotten so boys aren’t even allowed to play ball in the schoolyard anymore unless they thought to include a girl, lest they be hauled before the female overseer for “excluding and bullying” behavior.
That’s precisely the opposite of what the message is. Merida’s archery is only truly useful one time, to stop a problem she created herself. The men are perfectly happy existing and brawling among themselves and their clans, most of their reticence in front of women is deference, not physical fear. Merida’s attitude toward nature (and the very real dangers of fetishizig it as the greatest thing in the world) is specifically shown as dangerously naive.
Finally, taking shortcuts in life using forbidden and poorly-understood magic (the closest thing to science in that age) in lieu of working your way through the understanding and prejudices of your own loved ones is the great creator of lasting evil, that creates destruction and regret long after death. Yet even this can be forgiven at the end.
You do realize it’s a cartoon, right? It’s not a conservative documentary. No biggy. I’ll just go see something else. Liberated chick, or strong family values chick, it’s still a chick flick.
My understanding of the thinking behind Brave is that all the Pixar movies (as distinguished from the Disney movies) have had “male” figures as the lead roles. So to say that it’s all girl movies, all the time, isn’t even true. The last actual Disney film was John Carter, remember? Before that was Cars 2. I think the last Princess was Tiana, from the 2009 animated film, The Princess and the Frog.
It’s also true that from a marketing perspective the Disney princesses are a very big deal, and as the mom of a red-headed girl, I really wish Merida had been around fifteen-odd years ago instead of the whiny, spoiled Ariel. I hope there’s a Merida somewhere at Disney World when we go in December. I’d love to have a picture of her with MY red-headed Irish lass!
However, I now understand why the reviewers over at Rotten Tomatoes mostly thought the plot “didn’t take risks”, was “safe” (I saw that adjective mentioned several times) “Supposedly progressive… but surprisingly timid,”. In considering the sources, I now realize those were compliments. It sounds like a great movie for our family, we’ll probably be going next week.