Brave new heroine

Brave new heroine

Pixar's terrific-looking animated adventure puts a woman front and centre for the first time
By Jay Stone, Postmedia News June 22, 2012
BRAVE

Starring: The voices of Kelly Macdonald, Billy Connolly, Emma Thompson

Directed by: Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman

Parental guide: some intense scenes

Running time: 100 minutes


Rating: 31/2 out of five

The new Pixar movie, Brave, finally features something missing from the 12 previous films from Hollywood's most successful studio: a heroine.

Her name is Merida (voiced by Kelly Macdonald), and she is, of course, a princess. As the first woman character to play the lead in a Pixar movie, she is an unusual one: a feisty Scots teenager with a glorious tangle of red hair - the animation details in Brave are stupendous - who is an accomplished horsewoman and a fearless archer. She doesn't walk: she strides.

Merida lives in a gloriously rendered medieval Scotland of green hills and pink and blue skies, in a palace that's less a fairy-tale dream and more an oatmeal-and-haggis castle of coarse tweediness, barking dogs and varying degrees of brogue.

She lives with her mother Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson), who vainly tries to maintain a slightly English sense of propriety - she's always admonishing Merida to keep her weapons off the dining room table at mealtimes - and her father, King Fergus (Billy Connolly), a large, raucous clan leader who loves the cacophony of big meals, long stories and his family. He hobbles around on a wooden leg, the result of an encounter with a fierce bear. Bears form the symbolic subtext of Brave, and Fergus is its Ahab, a man obsessed with the mythic creature that swallowed his limb.

And the villain? It's a familiar one to many teenage girls: a mother's will, something powerful enough to overcome a father's indulgence.

Merida, who prefers spirited horseback rides through the foggy moors to almost anything, is being groomed for marriage, and three clans have been asked to present their first-born sons for her approval. The young men in question

WHAT OTHER CRITICS ARE SAYING ...

It's a rousing adventure and a hilarious comedy, and if its athletic and intelligent leading lady creates a new paradigm for animated features, so much the better.

- Alonso Duralde, Reuters

The movie - a magnificent rebound for Pixar after the wheel spinning of last summer's Cars 2 - also has sporting competitions and slapstick humour, mysterious witches' spells and some very scary bears.

- Christopher Kelly, McClatchy Newspapers

Since its inception, no animation house has been as good at telling an adult story for children, as adept at tugging the heartstrings as Pixar, and Brave continues that tradition.

- Roger Moore, Tribune News Service

turn out to be heroically unsuitable - a skinny klutz, a thin warrior with unwarranted selfregard and a fat guy with an

This is a great-looking movie, much enlivened by the inspiration of giving Merida three small brothers, little red-headed triplets. The Scottish Highlands are thrillingly painted in astonishing detail -

- Roger Ebert, Chicago SunTimes

We would expect this kind of overstuffed joyride from DreamWorks Animation or the folks at Fox or even Disney itself. But it's terribly ordinary for Pixar, and ordinary is no longer enough.

- Ty Burr, Boston Globe

It may not live up to the lofty standards of the Pixar brand, but Brave offers young audiences and fairy tale fans a rousing, funny fantasy adventure with a distaff twist - and surprising depth.

- Rotten Tomatoes

incomprehensible accent - and Merida chooses something more valuable than a husband. She chooses her own freedom.

This makes Brave an unusual undertaking: there is no fourth choice, no handsome prince to rescue the princess. There's a hint at what the filmmakers are after in the fact one of the clans is named MacGuffin, a famous movie concept (popularized by Alfred Hitchcock) to signify the element that puts the plot into motion but isn't important on its own. Merida's suitors, who can't match her skills with bow and arrow, are mere decorations in a story that's really about mothers and daughters.

Merida sets out to change her mother's mind about marriage. Riding into the forests around her castle, she's led on by fluorescent blue lights, willo'the-wisps, that point her to her fate. She comes across the cottage of a witch (Julie Walters) who runs a woodcarving business - a great scene, reminiscent of the marching brooms sequence in Disney's Fantasia - but the magic backfires, and mother is transformed in a way the girl never expected. The rest of Brave has Merida trying to change her mother back into what she was.

This is presented with only a little of the comic bravura that has become the Pixar trademark. There are three little brothers who conspire to eat desserts all day long and a trio of bandy-legged clan leaders, but there's little madcap to them. Brave never quite lives up to the magnificence of its technique: the flowing water, the soaring eagles, the carefully rendered mane of Merida's horse, all come in service of a story that lacks the humorous complexities of Ratatouille, say, or Finding Nemo.

The complicated relationship between mother and daughter in the film's first half becomes a somewhat silly - though haunting - chase story in its second. It seems small and (another Pixar first) not astonishing.

"Legends are lessons," Elinor tells Merida. "They ring with truth," and this is an attempt to create such a legend. It turns out to be an overwhelming goal. Brave has to settle for being merely entertaining and beautiful.

(Brave is preceded by a charming six-minute short called La Luna by director Enrico Casarosa, about a boy who learns the secrets of caring for the moon.)