Film #42 - Brave

I suppose I owe you a review on Brave then, given it’s nearly a week since I saw it and over a month since it came out?

When I first heard that Pixar had been taken over by Disney in 2006, I was a mite concerned. This was the studio that had churned out stellar animated features like Finding Nemo and The Incredible (which  do love, despite my severe misgivings about the elitist ideology in the subtext). But then Ratatouille (2007) came out, then Wall-E (2008), then Up(2009) and it appeared that any doubts I might have had were just me feeling over-protective of a beloved property.

So, given that I skipped out on both Toy Story 3 and Cars 2, it wasn’t until 2012 that I really saw the shadow of the Mouse House loom large over Pixar – and that was with this year’s outing Brave.

I make that sound like a bad thing but it’s really not. Disney has its run in the early 90s of nailing the animated feature and since then may have fallen behind the times in terms of knocking things out of the park but has still managed to produce some regularly entertaining features even right up to last year’s Tangled (I’m a big fan of The Princess and the Frog for example).

It’s just that Pixar had set the bar so, so much higher.

Again, I make it sound like Brave is a bad film. It’s not. It’s actually quite good. It’s just not the treat you spend all year waiting for, marking days off your calendar with a thick red pen until release date is finally here.

Let’s talk about what the film actually is about for a moment.

Brave is the story of 10^th century Scottish highland princess Merida (one wonders if the emphasis on ‘princess’ is a Disney innovation and whether Merida will be joining the Disney Princess merchandising line up soon).

Far from being a standard princess, Merida is instead the standard rebellious young woman. She chafes at the expectations placed on her gender, preferring to ride horses bareback, firing arrows (all the proto-feminists in the post-Katniss world need to be archers apparently) and clambering over the picturesque Scottish landscape.

This picture pretty much sums up Act One.

Back at home, Merida frequently butts heads where her mother Queen Elinor over the latter’s attempts to prepare her for her impending womanhood and the vagaries of being of the ‘fairer’ sex in a society where wildness is still something to be prized – if you’re a man.

Learning that she is shortly to be married off against her will to one of three equally unappealing rival princes, Merida takes matters into her own hands and flees into the wilderness, stumbling across a witch living deep within the forest who promises to change Merida’s fate - by changing Elinor.

Unfortunately the change is rather more drastic than Merida had planned and she unwittingly places her mother under a dire curse that will cause Elinor to be hunted down by her own husband and the entire Scottish court. Forced to flee from home, the pair must finally work together to discover how the curse on Elinor works – and how to break it – before the effect of the curse becomes permanent.

As you can probably tell, the focus here isn’t really on the action of the piece so much as it is the examination of the strained relationship between too strong-willed women, though there certainly are more than enough set-pieces to keep boys engaged in Brave’s narrative. Merida is feisty, athletic, quick-witted and particularly good with her bow (there’s a nice nod to Robin Hood in Act One that leaves little doubt that this girl means business). That’s probably just as well as, while the action sequences are engaging, they rarely feel like they’re building to a grand finale so much just bridging the gaps between the last and next heartfelt conversation between Merida and Elinor.

And that may be my main beef with Brave, if I can be said to have a beef at all. It seems to pull its punches when it comes to the more objectives threats offered up by the narrative. For Elinor, Merida’s upcoming nuptials are vital to keeping the peace between the disparate clans on the highlands. We’re told that, if Merida does not marry one of the princes on offer, all-out war will break out and destroy them all. Yet, when the various factions arrive, they are all treated comically and the supposed threat that keeps Elinor up at night comes across as a fairly good-natured rambunctious barroom brawl.

There's just enough of the supernatural in Brave to keep things
humming without it turning into a film about the supernatural

Similarly, a subplot about an evil prince of yesteryear who may still be haunting the area today is threaded into the narrative in Act One. There’s a sense that Merida’s contract with the witch may have unbalanced the world in a way that will enable this villain to rise again and conquer all. Yet, when the threat does emerge, the villain is in such a degraded state that he becomes the catalyst for an action sequence for Merida and Elinor to escape rather than something they will have to team up to overcome.

There’s a reason for this of course. Pixar movies have long been known for their ability to inject real heart into their storylines – and Brave is no exception. The real stakes in Brave  aren’t the threat of violence or conquest but rather the sense that what Merida has done to her mother will permanently end the relationship between them and the film does an excellent job of setting up how devastating that would be.

I guess I just want my cake and to eat it to; to have a film where the emotional stakes and the dramatic stakes hold equal importance and Brave just doesn’t tread this line as well as Wall-E or Up did. Maybe it’s just that I’m a boy, and this is definitely a film with female audience members in mind.

And so we get to the thing I’m always banging on about: the feminist underpinnings in Brave.

I’ve been a bit flip in my comparison between Merida and Katniss Everdeen earlier in that we seem to have established a cliché of what the feminist hero is and how she acts. In the post-Buffy world, she’s become almost commonplace (even the confectionery TV series Teen Wolf has its bow-wielding heroine Alison) which has been a great thing for young women to grow up alongside.

And that’s kind of the downfall of the cliché in many ways, it’s no longer enough to just shout “Girl Power!” and consider patriarchal narratives to be turned on their heads. The figure is now too commonplace and too many movies and TV shows do it too lazily for it to be ffective anymore (I’m reminded of Lisa Simpson valiantly applying to the Little League football team only to be chagrined to discover that it already has several female members).

Feisty girl with archery equipment? Stop me if
you've heard this before.

So, is Brave guilty of this? Putting a bow in a girl’s hand and calling itself provocative when it’s just derivative? Having a protagonist say ‘I will not marry’ and expecting to say something girls haven’t already heard several times before?

In a word, no. But it’s not necessarily obvious from the outside.

Because Merida does do all of these things and a less subtle film may leave it at that. But instead, Brave offers a counterpoint strong female character in Queen Elinor, who is also a potential feminist icon but who brings in a totally different understanding of gender and power.  Where Merida seeks to gain agency by bucking against a patriarchal system, Elinor has already gained it by working within the same system.

Technically, these are characters. You really
don't need to know anything about them though

There is never any question about it, Elinor is absolutely the real ruler of the Scottish highlands. Although she exhibits a genuine affection for her husband King Fergus, he defers to her in the administering of his state. 

When the first brawl breaks out between the various Scottish clans, Fergus can’t help but join in; it is Elinor who has the authority to make them cease. When Merida’s rejection of all suitors threatens civil war, the clan chiefs do not call upon Fergus for mediation, they demand to know what Elinor has decided to do about it. When Merida tries to pacify them, she does not call on her father for help, she channels her mother’s words and wisdom to get her point across.  

Men in Brave are almost an afterthought, it is the women’s narratives that count.

Too often, the cliché of a feminist hero is merely a cheap call of fury against an established power and not an examination of how that established power works. If Brave were not a good film, Elinor would be an out-and-out villain, an unsympathetic mother unheeding of her daughter’s desperate need to be her own person. But she’s not.

Goddamnit, stop trying to gain agency by
contradicting my attempts to give you agency.

Elinor never comes across as anything other than a caring mother. She has attained her agency from the rituals of femininity and that has shaped how she understands power to be attained. Her attempts to tutor Merida in womanhood is less an attempt to constrain her agency but rather an effort to show her how to reach a position where she can channel it more effectively. We know from the storyline that Elinor went through the same dilemma ahead of her marriage to Fergus that Merida faces now (amusingly, Fergus has never considered this point before Elinor blithely lets it slip out) but has come through the other side with a richer life and the ability to call the shots from within the expectations placed on her gender.

It’s just that Merida sees a completely different way to achieve the same goal.

That’s one of the really delightful and interesting things about Brave – that both characters want the same thing for Merida but are at loggerheads over how to achieve them. They each come from a position that seems at eternal conflict with the other but, as the film’s narrative progresses, develop mutual respect for the other and reach a point where the barriers between their ideals become malleable.

I like this, not just as a message for young women but for anyone. You don’t have to choose between being Merida, outside society demanding a world of your own, and Elinor, wielding great power but always peripherally. You can be a blend of them creating you own version of your identity without having to go to either extreme. That is essentially Merida’s journey throughout the film and I think Brave is richer for it.

Indeed, if the actual narrative of Brave had matched the sophistication of its emotional narrative, I’d probably say that Brave was among the stronger of Pixar’s films to date. But that slip up on the action side isn’t a small one in a film like this and I’ve seen Pixar do this much better several times before.

All in all, Brave is well worth seeing, particularly for young’uns, but don’t be surprised if you don’t feel compelled to watch it again even a few years later.