Merida brave courage movie#
Merida brave courage full#

Aliens grew more (literally and figuratively), even if, as Orenstein points out, she could have used “a few more pixels in her waist.” Tiana in Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, the first black female lead for the studio, had a job and an ambition. She can shoot like Hawkeye in The Avengers. I did wonder if Pixar went with the princess concept in Brave with an eye toward subverting the tired (ahem, Disney) genre by attacking it head on, making this princess so defiantly different that all the other princesses would pale in comparison. It’s just that she is so chapter one of what girls can be - and so many other Pixar movies skipped most known chapters and moved on to whole new volumes. And having a princess protagonist isn’t inherently bad. It’s the absence of others that turns the spotlight on Brave. This wouldn’t feel so vaguely unsatisfying if Brave were just one of many Pixar movies that featured a strong female lead. “What is it that we are imagining girls moving toward here? ‘I get to ride around on a horse all day’ isn’t really enough. “It wasn’t clear to me what her arc was,” Orenstein says. She’s simply extended her time as a tomboy, another archetype, less a girl than a stereotype of a kind of girl. Other than deciding her mother isn’t so bad, Merida doesn’t really grow. You only have to be brave enough to see it” - her physical metamorphosis represents the main transformation. But despite a lot of superficial talk of fate - “Our fate lies within us. The best parts of Brave are the scenes involving the changed Queen Elinor, now a gigantic bear. Stewing with resentment, she consults a witch to change her mother’s mind but doesn’t stop to read the fine print.

But for Merida, it feels like the end of freedom. She is “cautious,” “clean” and “above all, strives for perfection.” Elinor hardly considers marriage the end of the world she actually loves her buffoonish husband Fergus (Billy Connolly). ( MORE: The War on Women Begins with Girls)Īlthough Queen Elinor has a Susan Sontag–style white streak in her hair, she’s Miss Manners in a crown.

This is tradition, intended to keep the peace among clans with a history of warfare, and therefore it’s Merida’s duty. It is set in medieval Scotland, where Merida has just come of age and her mother Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson) is preparing to marry her off to any of three candidates from the other clans. The animation is beautiful, but the story is staid.

Merida brave courage movie#

She’s talking about the nature of the character, but it is also true that the movie itself, while nowhere near the low point of last summer’s Cars 2, doesn’t dazzle. I’m grateful, but she’d be the go-to person on the topic of princesses regardless.) (Full disclosure: Orenstein and I were once in a writing group together, and she also blurbed a book I wrote. “It’s a failure of imagination,” says writer Peggy Orenstein, author of the best-selling Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture. I’m glad it finally got there, but I would have preferred that the studio’s groundbreaking moment had involved something actually groundbreaking. It has been 17 years since the studio released its first movie, Toy Story, an awfully long time to get around to a female lead.

Merida brave courage full#

Pixar is full of brilliant, flexible minds, the kind that made credible heroes out of a stuffed Wild West sheriff, an assortment of worker-bee types, including an ant and a robot, and a rat that dreamed of creating haute cuisine. ( MORE: Brave Old Worlds: Does Pixar Have a Problem with Stereotypes?) She’s a rebellious tomboy, but her concerns are still limited to those of a princess, the biggest of which remains, as ever, marriage. But depressingly, she’s a princess, the most traditional role for female characters in children’s fictions. Merida is strong, capable and courageous. Brenda Chapman (The Prince of Egypt) was the director of Brave, until she was replaced in the last 18 months of production by Mark Andrews, and the halfway-there aspect of that triumph serves as an apt metaphor for Pixar’s halfway embrace of female empowerment within the text of Brave. But Pixar has never made a girl the lead until now, just as it’s never had a woman direct one of its films until now. E and ant princess Atta in A Bug’s Life.The animation giant has featured female characters in its movies, including adorable Boo in Monsters, Inc., daffy Dory in Finding Nemo, feisty chef Colette in Ratatouille, the clever robot Eve in WALL She’d rather ride her horse, drink from waterfalls and wield her bow and arrow, like a medieval Katniss. It’s about a flame-haired princess named Merida (voiced by Kelly Macdonald) who doesn’t want to get married.