The cultural jokes, for instance-about haggis and what Scotsmen wear beneath their kilts-are amusing but just shy of inevitable.Īnd while it is refreshing that Pixar has (at last) built a film around a female protagonist, Merida, too, has a touch of the generic to her, a lack of telling idiosyncrasy. Like the flight of an arrow, its arc is swift but not hard to anticipate. With the exception of one novel twist (which I will not reveal), Brave is a rather conventional tale, with echoes of Mulan, The Little Mermaid, How to Train Your Dragon, and countless others. While it is refreshing that Pixar has at last built a film around a female protagonist, Merida has a touch of the generic to her, a lack of telling idiosyncrasy. And changed it will be, though not at all in the way she had hoped. There, she makes a rash wish that her fate might be changed. Merida rebels, first by dominating the archery tournament held to win her hand and, when that fails, by fleeing into the forest, where she stumbles upon a cottage inhabited by an old crone.
The day arrives, however, when to maintain peace in the realm she is required to wed the first-born son of one of her father's fellow clan chiefs.
Her mother, Elinor (Emma Thompson), tries to raise the young lady to be a lady, but Merida prefers to escape the castle with her bow, whipping through the woods on horseback while bull's-eyeing target after target, like a cross between Annie Oakley and Katniss Everdeen. And in the latter department, this newest good-but-not-great release-while representing admirable progress-suggests Pixar still has a way to go.īrave tells the story of Merida (voiced by Kelly Macdonald), an irrepressible Scottish princess with a mane of red ringlets that approximates a solar flare.
In the first department, Pixar's trifecta of WALL-E, Up, and Toy Story 3 set the bar so stratospherically high that the studio was bound to fall short of it, as it did with Cars 2 and has now done again with Brave. Two notable exceptions, however, have been the managing of expectations and the creation of indelible female characters. Over its brief history, Pixar has excelled at almost every conceivable aspect of animated filmmaking.
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