Film: Brave - Tradition! Tradition!

*The first three paragraphs are not even remotely relevant unless you’re seriously interested in the politics of animated film production.

            Brave boasts two primary directing credits: Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman.  Andrews is an old hand at Disney, having acted as Head of Story on the very fine The Incredibles as well as his most recent (and unfortunate) screenplay credit for John Carter.  Chapman is no slouch either – she was Head of Story on The Lion King and directed one of Dreamworks’ best and most cinematically exciting efforts: The Prince of Egypt, a retelling of the Moses story that focuses on the conflicted relationship between Moses and Rameses.

            Anyway.  Nobody denies that the story of Brave is Chapman’s.  She brought the project to the studio and began to develop it as the writer/director.  (At the time, it was much more evocatively titled The Bear and the Bow.)  Not inconsequentially, Merida wasn’t the only female first for Pixar – Chapman was to be the first woman director in a company that is notoriously male-dominated even by industry standards. 

            Eighteen months before Brave was scheduled for delivery, Pixar replaced Chapman with Andrews.  It’s disingenuous to say that this was misogynistic or unprecedented: Monsters Inc., Toy Story 2 and Ratatouille all had directorial switches, for reasons the company is reluctant to disclose.  But it is unusual enough that people wondered about the motives for the change.  After all, who better to tell the story of a headstrong daughter than a woman who admitted that the script was based on her own relationship with her six-year old?  Pixar has never come out with a reason, and probably never will.  But at points in Brave, the cracks show.  It’s impossible to tell whose hands shaped what, but there are definitely two sets of distinctive tonal fingerprints on the film, and it muddies it up somewhat.

            This is Pixar’s first foray into a few things: period pieces, female leads, and the dreaded Princess Movie.  In the Scottish Highlands, adventurous young Princess Merida is chafing under the controlling thumb of her conservative mother, Queen Elinor.  Unbeknownst to her goofy, encouraging father Fergus, Merida and Elinor are in an escalating cold war about Merida’s arranged betrothal.    When the day comes, Merida looks for a third option with disastrous results and must struggle to right her wrongs and understand the true meaning of family and tradition.

            It’s probably not worthwhile to go into why it’s disappointing to see Pixar, a company that has historically tried to tell fresh stories with unconventional protagonists, choose the tale of a princess who doesn’t want to get married as their first female-led feature.   That said, Merida has one quality that certainly hasn’t cropped up before in the Disney stable:

            She’s kind of a jerk.

            Disney princesses are unfailingly as kind as they are beautiful, even when their clumsiness or naïveté or whatever other relatable flaw they’ve been saddled with puts them in awkward situations.  Merida is… immature.  Self-centered.  A little bit whiny.  She’s not a bad person in any sense of the word – she’s just fifteen, with the inflated sense of gravitational pull in the universe that age entails.  Is this an interesting choice?  Absolutely.  Does it work?

            …Mostly.  A few scenes (particularly one where she harasses her ailing mother) ring very false and tip Merida’s attitude from ‘realistically self-absorbed’ into ‘callously indifferent to the feelings of others’, something you don’t want your protagonist to elicit unless you’re writing about Patrick Bateman. 

            That said.  The first time a child expresses explicit hatred for their parent  – and the fallout from that declaration - is a powerful experience that isn’t expressed on film nearly enough, particularly in films that children can watch.  On a related tack, Pixar also broke from the Disney tradition not just in letting the mother live (won’t somebody think of the dead Disney mothers?), but in creating a real character who’s not evil, just struggling to connect to her children and fulfill her own duties.  They’ve done this before, and probably better, with Elastigirl in The Incredibles, but the specific conflict between mother and daughter brings a new angle to the table.

            Merida and Elinor are pretty standard foil characters in this day and age.  Watching Merida fly through the forest on her trusty Clydesdale is certainly marvelous eye candy, but her reserved mother’s admonishment that a princess “does not place her weapons on the table” feels a little stale.  Even their hair (red, curly and abundant and restrained, straight and dark respectively) reflects their somewhat cardboard odd-couple personalities.  The film’s attempts to nudge them towards compromise are very touching in parts, but it’s not the most creative pairing the studio’s ever put out there.

             [Disclaimer: it is very difficult to review Brave without talking about Merida’s hair.  It is truly awe-inspiring.]

            Much like the work coming out of Studio Ghibli, it feels almost superfluous to discuss the technical quality of a Pixar film.  But it must be said: Brave is absolutely beautiful.  The landscapes are lush, the characters emotive, and the ‘camerawork’ is fluid and inventive.  The period setting allows for lots of beautiful forest that again recall older Disney films like Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, and the titles are similarly retro.  The only thing that breaks the vintage feel of the piece is the surprisingly broad humour that comes from the male supporting cast.  What is it about Scottish people that is so integrally tied to physical gags?  It feels tonally at-odds with the more emotional core of the film and I wonder if the discrepancy is due to its production history.

            Brave is not by any stretch of the imagination a bad movie; in fact, it’s a good one.  Is it as gripping and moving as Pixar’s best efforts?  No, but if we compared every film in theatres to Pixar’s best we’d be sorely disappointed much of the time.  The story may be safe, but Merida is far better company with faults than Snow White was without them, and it’s well worth the brief hour and a half.

Other notes based on something that freaked me out when I was walking back from the theatre:

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            Save one significant point, Brave is identical to Beauty and the Beast.

            Bear with me.

            In terms of structure, character arcs, and plot progression, it maps almost alarmingly close.  The one difference is the nature of the film’s primary relationship.  Instead of being romantic, Brave follows a daughter and mother.

            This fixes a lot of the problems that came through in the original Beauty and the Beast.  As good as that film is, it makes some very weird statements about how love and romantic relationships work, as many irate feminists have no doubt noted.  In Brave’s familial context, that things that crop up in both films - irrational love in the face of divergent interests or opinions; the ability to forgive hatred and anger – play as a touching comment on why family is so important (especially during adolescence) rather than an affirmation that a good woman can change a savage 

man.

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            There’s a really explicit Maiden, Mother, Crone trifecta in the film, and apart from those three [main!] characters, the Scottish Highlands seem to be exclusively populated by dudes.  This is more funny than it is troubling, but I do wonder if the Three Faces of Eve stuff was intentional – it’s pretty obvious.

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            La Luna, the short that preceded the film, is awesome.  I won’t spoil it save to say that it explores the themes of familial tradition and respecting your heritage without enslaving yourself to it in a way that’s funny and sweet.

           Also it is so cute.