*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.
