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ESSAYS & REVIEWS

Just Another Princess MovieBy LILI LOOFBOUROW JULY 12, 2012

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I suppose most girls remember when they became aware of themselves as

speci!cally female viewers. Growing up in the eighties, I watched movies

about boys and girls with equal relish, empathizing with the protagonists and

getting totally absorbed in story without my parts getting consciously in the

way. When I realized the boys in my classes didn’t do the same thing — they

refused to see themselves in female protagonists and found the prospect

humiliating to contemplate — I felt I had overstepped my bounds. Feeling

simultaneously embarrassed at being so pro"igate with my sympathy and

spiteful towards those who weren’t, I started watching movies the way I was

supposed to: as a girl, speci!cally.

Boy, was it bleak.

If you don’t get to be Indiana Jones and have to think about how he is with

girls, if you have to wonder, while watching Treasure Island, whether any of the

characters you loved would even talk to you, movies become kind of painful.

You do !nd ways around it. For one thing, you start actively seeking out

stories where people don’t rule you out quite so much. You look for “girl

movies.” Barring some truly wonderful exceptions, you get used to eating the

same three meals over and over, forever. Without thinking about it too hard

I’ll approximate them as spunkiness, pathos, and transformation. Working Girl,

He’s Just Not That Into You, Grease. Again, some of these are great. Most are

derivative.

Given the sameness of the "avors on o#er, you become a sort of expert at

spotting slight variations. You watch not so much for the arc (that’s almost

always disappointing) but for certain arresting moments. When you !nd

these, you treasure them. You dissect their context away and relish them —

sometimes for themselves, sometimes for the endings they didn’t have.

I don’t claim this is universal, but many female viewers I’ve had conversations

with over the years have expressed similar, if not identical, practices. We have



watered-down expectations when it comes to women in !lm. Most movies,

even the great ones, we watch for their perfect middles. Sometimes we edit

the !lms post post-production and pretend the end never happened at all.

***

I would never have guessed, either from the title or the movie poster, that

Brave would end with mother and daughter riding o# together in importantly

modi!ed hairdos. Subtle touches like this speak to the quiet rede!nitions

Brave makes possible—and it’s a kind of subtlety most reviewers are missing.

Faced with a princess story, the reaction has been a sort of kind

disappointment. We’ve heard all that! the reviewers say, and it’s a bit, well,

boring. “What’s happening to Pixar, it seems, is what’s happened to everything

the Mouse Factory has bought, from beloved children’s books to funky Times

Square: It’s being Disney!ed,” says Stephen Whitty of the Star-Ledger. “This

one !nds Pixar poaching on traditional territory of Disney, its corporate

partner,” says Rober Ebert. “We get a spunky princess; her mum, the queen;

her dad, the gru# king, an old witch who lives in the woods, and so on.”

And so on.

A stranger to our !lm industry might reasonably suppose, reading those

sentences, that the American cinemascape is littered with “spunky princess

movies” that center around the main character and her mother.

“Brave,” writes Christopher Orr, “is a rather conventional tale, with echoes of

Mulan, The Little Mermaid, How to Train Your Dragon, and countless others. Like

the "ight of an arrow, its arc is swi$ but not hard to anticipate.” It’s a well-worn

genre, the Spunky-Princess-Who-Doesn’t-Get-Married-(Or-Experience-Any-

Attraction-To-Anyone)-And-Her-Mother story.

http://www.nj.com/entertainment/movies/index.ssf/2012/06/brave_movie_review_disney_pixar.html

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120620/REVIEWS/120629997



I wonder, though, whether any of the foregoing critics who’ve tolerantly

yawned at Pixar’s latest e#ort could name a Disney princess besides Mulan

whose mother is alive, let alone named.

And yet, in Brave, there is a live mother, named and all. And then a

remarkably boring thing happens: this interloping mother who has no place

in this ordinary, predictable princess story suddenly becomes central to it. She

gets turned into something that keeps on getting misread as a monster,

something her loving and well-meaning husband has dedicated his life to

tracking down and killing for the sake of his own story, which is built around

victory and revenge.

It’s a bit as if, having heard the word “princess,” the reviewers all stopped

listening and missed Brave’s real project, which is to quietly but determinedly

recuperate the “princess story” from some of the qualities for which it’s been

so universally condemned.

***

Movies featuring women protagonists tend to have messages. Brave has one

too: there’s a voiceover at the beginning and the end that goes on about

changing your fate and your destiny living within you and whatnot. And that’s

!ne, and it’s true in complicated ways, but it’s also a classic case of

misdirection. By supplying an apparently easy message you barely listen to,

the !lm actually gives the more complex one room to breathe. You might

leave unconvinced by the explicit sermon on fate, but quite converted to the

quiet rede!nition of bravery, barely aware that you’ve been worked on.

Virtually everyone in the !lm (except poor screaming Maudie) is Princess

Story brave. Everyone jumps eagerly into a !ght and reacts courageously to

physical danger. In fact, its very ubiquity seems to dilute its !ctional value: If

everyone is brave, why are we making a big deal of it?



Its sheer abundance makes us stumble over our own expectations of what

bravery is supposed to do. Bravery is good! is our default position. We need

more of that for our girls! But too much bravery sucks, it turns out: it costs

people legs. It turns political summits for nascent kingdoms into childish free-

for-alls. And for our hero, Merida, courage doesn’t achieve the victories we

expect !ctional bravery to produce. She doesn’t slay Mor-du. She’s no Mulan;

her archery, despite her skill, is unhelpful. All this, in a story featuring a

warrior princess, should make the mind boggle: Why would a studio create

such a character in order to make her real crisis be her relationship with her

mother?

If fairytale princesses are motherless, warrior princesses are even more so.

They’re motherless because it’s di%cult—still, in 2012—to imagine a woman

warrior who enjoys a relationship of mutual love and respect with her family

generally and her mother speci!cally. “I don’t know any women like that,”

Maxine Hong Kingston writes in The Woman Warrior, “or men either. Unless I

see her life branching into mine, she gives me no ancestral help.” Kingston is

referring to a suicide in that particular passage, but the point holds: Brave

gives us a woman like that. The !lm is about revolution, innovation and

compromise, but it’s just as much about parents (who become ancestors),

children (who become powerful) and their good and bad decisions, the

weights of which increase exponentially as they recede into history. Brave, in

other words, is about seeing a family’s story as a heroic journey. “We are a

young kingdom,” says Merida, as much about her family as about the Scottish

alliance, “and we are still writing our own legends.”

That moment, incidentally, is Merida and Elinor’s breakthrough, politically as

well as personally. Faced with four enraged clans and the imminent collapse

of the kingdom, Merida steps into Elinor’s shoes and becomes the politician

and diplomat her mother has always been—which is precisely what she

thought she’d never do. A$er badly misreading each other for so long (“I wish



you would LISTEN!” they both say to each other’s respective stand-ins),

Merida does, and Elinor has. Elinor mimes anxiously to Merida, who seems to

be about to capitulate to the clans and to the fate she’s been !ghting. Merida

reads, understands, and translates her mother’s charades into her own words.

It’s a remarkable scene. If it had been “dictated” by Elinor, it wouldn’t have

worked — Merida would have e#ectively been a ventriloquist’s dummy (which

is in one sense what Elinor has been trying to make her). If Merida had broken

tradition without the bene!t of mother’s political experience and diplomacy,

the kingdom would have collapsed into war. It took the combination of their

two best selves to compromise with each other and to simultaneously convert

a bellicose crowd. The message they jointly write is gorgeously consensual,

and it’s all the more moving since it comes about through a game of charades,

calling to mind the joy Elinor and Merida took in each other at the !lm’s

opening, during their game of hide-and-go-seek.

The other noteworthy thing about that scene is that we see Merida willing to

lay down her life for her kingdom. She’s about to announce her willingness to

marry one of the suitors when her mother interrupts (waving her arms in a

room full of maniacal bear hunters) and rescues her.

If these actions are brave, it’s certainly not the kind of bravery we were

expecting.

If it weren’t already obvious, this isn’t a !lm that fetishizes courage in its

ordinary sense. Fergus’ bravery when he attacks Mor-du the bear at the

beginning is admirable but ine#ective. He was already the Bear King, but a$er

that encounter it’s all too much: he falls prey to an overdetermined belief in

his own story. The loss of his leg turns him into a cheery Ahab who —

whenever he’s reminded of his Story — bores all rehearsing the tale of the

revenge to come. His throne room is littered with trophies celebrating his

eventual victory.



***

It’s risky to tell a woman’s story, which is why Pixar hasn’t done it until now.

Riskier still to tell a princess’s story, which, as reviewers note, has been done

and redone and parodied and remixed from every conceivable angle. Why,

many moan, did the !rst girl Pixar movie have to be a princess movie?

The answer, it seems to me, is obvious. Of course it had to be a princess story.

Rightly praised for creating beautiful, poignant and original stories, Pixar

understood that its !rst e#ort featuring a female protagonist had to sidestep

both the traditional romance plot and the shallow triumphalism o$en seen in

!lms with plucky “role models”. Pixar knows its !lm conventions. It has heard

of the Bechdel test.

It knows Disney because it is Disney. It knows Shrek and Tangled and G.I. Jane.

With Brave, they wanted to be better than all that, and the studio opted to

meet the enemy on its own terms, using its own weapons. It had to be a

princess.

From the creators’ point of view, Merida’s biggest battle — the !ght she really

has to win in this !lm — is against her predecessors. She has to cover the same

ground and give it new depth. She has to wallow in princess tropes before she

can change a fate that feels massively overdetermined.

Maybe the creative team named the movie a$er themselves. They were brave;

reckless, even, ostentatiously fording a swamp of crocodilian movie tropes,

any of which could swallow the story whole. Merida, remember, isn’t just a

princess. She’s a redhead and a teenage rebel who loves to explore and !nds

her role as princess constraining and dull. The Little Mermaid’s Ariel has been

conjured and is waiting in the wings, spoiling for a !ght. (“Echoes of The Little

Mermaid,” certain critics wrote, as if this were an oversight, or an accident.)



Like Ariel, Merida avoids her duties as royal daughter. Like Ariel, Merida

chases an impulsive wish which is granted at too high a price. No one who

imprinted on The Little Mermaid as a child could miss the echoes of Ursula the

Sea-Witch while the wood-carving witch mixes up the potion.

As genealogies go, Ariel is Merida’s main ancestor with Shrek’s Fiona following

close behind. But there are others, of course: Merida has Mulan’s physical

ability and Pocahontas’ know-how and love of nature. To these she adds

Beauty’s essential insight that natural “monsters” are actually man-made.

None of this was accidental, of course, though I didn’t know it at the time. I

fell into exactly the same trap as the aforementioned reviewers and watched,

nursing pangs of disappointment, as it seemed the !lm would take a princess

amalgam and stage as its crisis that old chestnut: arranged marriage. Merida

must marry! Whom will she choose? Or rather, who shall be chosen for her?

There was a time when such a story was brave, back when arranged marriages

were the norm. These days, it’s about as polemical as suggesting that

polygamy has problems. Most people will agree, but it’s kind of a weird point

to build your crisis around.

So I watched the way anyone familiar with The Merchant of Venice, its

antecedents, or its thousand heirs might watch: a little tiredly, but hopeful that

this particular version of the story would take some interesting detours en

route to its fated end. The perfect man would of course suddenly appear.

Something would be wrong with him. He might be low-class (Aladdin, Robin

Hood), he might be a gru# and unpleasant bachelor consumed with self-hatred

(Jane Eyre, Beauty and the Beast), or he might seem at !rst too proud, too sti#,

too unwilling to accommodate the heroine’s spontaneity and wit (Pride and

Prejudice). But he was coming. Everyone in the audience feels it. Even as the

camera stops on each of the three clan leaders and their unappealing sons, we

were all trying to spot the real hero. Once he showed up, he’d take over most



of the story.

Then came the twist: Merida, bound (literally) by the accoutrements of o%cial

princesshood, broke out of her constraining dress and represented herself in

the contest for her hand! On the grounds that she is a !rst-born, and therefore

eligible to compete, she shames her suitors by beating them handily! The

crowd goes wild.

That last part’s a lie — there is a crowd in that scene, all gasping ecstatically as

each silly prince takes his shot, but that crowd does not go wild when Merida

wins. This proves not to be the triumphant moment of female empowerment

Hollywood likes to deliver when it remembers that women are watching.

The crowd instead does something much more likely: it goes weird.

Things get awkward.

This was the point at which I began to suspect that Pixar was outsmarting me.

Brave was retelling many familiar stories (the splitting-the-winner’s-arrow

business rips o# Robin Hood, Disney’s other archer, also a redhead), but it was

stripping them of their attendant auras of victory. Like the legend of the four

brothers (one of many stories that “ring with truth,” a point Brave dwells on at

some length), the legends that last tend not to contain happily-ever-a$ers.

There’s darkness even (and especially) in fairy tales — the “real” Little

Mermaid killed herself — and Brave is reviving that tradition. Brenda

Chapman, the director and story writer, said Brave was meant to be a fairy tale

“in the style of Hans Christen Andersen or the Brothers Grimm.” That

clari!cation tells; among other things, Chapman tacitly refutes our

contemporary understanding of the fairy tale as a charming morality play

more or less stripped of ambiguity.

It’s bold to frame your story as a forced marriage plot (there’s one



convention), to then destabilize the convention with a hackneyed plot twist in

which the heroine rescues herself (there’s another convention, almost as

tired), and then to dwell on that plot twist’s failure to launch.

***

Given the extent to which Brave has been read as having capitulated to the fate

it expressly avoided, it’s !tting that Brave’s beginning is obsessed with Fate —

the pre-existing ending that you can somehow change.

This, by the way, this idea of changing your fate, is the “message” I mentioned

earlier, the Disneyish sermon that lets us listen for other things. But I want to

take it more seriously than I did a few paragraphs earlier. It’s not a great line, it

could have been done better, but the quixotic notion of altering an inevitable

outcome is what Pixar itself set out to do. Jaclyn Friedman laments in The

Guardian that Pixar capitulated and made yet another princess story. “If Pixar

can’t imagine itself out of the princess paradigm,” she writes, “how can we

expect girls to?” But that’s in some sense exactly what Pixar does: it takes a

phenomenon so tired we’ve named it, and imagines its way out of it.

Fate, in the Greek sense, is !xed: you can !ght it, but any such step will lead

back to that which has already been predestined. By these lights, a changeable

fate is no fate at all; we might as well call it probability or free will. But Brave

builds an entire movie around the notion that fate can be changed, and it’s

worth asking why. What’s to be gained from this insistence that things would

have gone one way inevitably if enormous e#ort (and bravery) hadn’t derailed

a set course and produced a di#erent outcome?

Taken on its own terms, it’s a message we need these days. Politically,

American fatalism is at an all-time high. Sure, there’s rancor, yes, there’s

acrimony, bitterness, disagreement, even !ghting, but there’s also a desperate

sense of inertia, a feeling that we’re on a set course. It’s true for the

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/26/snow-white-brave-evolution-action-princess



environment, it’s true for economics, it’s even true for elections. The Occupy

movement and the Tea Party are both manifestations of a Brave-like

determination to change outcomes that seem unchangeable — what if the

country wants neither of its suitors? What if it wants to marry no one? Is that

possible? Would our refusal spell political disaster or a liberating break with

tradition?

Brave isn’t charting a new course for American politics, but (and this is one

more way it isn’t Just Another Princess Story) it is tracking the formation of a

powerful but youngish state torn apart by internal dissent. Any parallels to

America end there, however; the idea that young people’s futures should be

sacri!ced (or at least mortgaged) to patch up an untenable system is obviously

outmoded.

In any case, the main con"ict — a mother-daughter !ght — is a function of

the fact that Merida’s fate is unfairly but by de!nition neither hers nor her

mother’s; it’s bound up with the fate of a new state.

There again, Brave is charting new territory in an area everyone thought was

over-mapped. Amanda Marcotte points out the real radicalism it took to

expose the political underpinnings of a mother-daughter !ght. Too o$en

consigned to a feminine sphere that is considered “private,” “domestic,” and,

ahem, “predictable,” Brave stages the con"ict and its stakes for society at large

without making the mother a caricature of villainous domestication:

Many patriarchal societies leave the stressful job of

forcing girls to comply with degrading social norms to

women, especially mothers. Unlike other movies such

as Real Women Have Curves, where sexism-enforcing

mothers are painted as villains, Merida’s mother,

Elinor, pushes her daughter to perform femininity out

of love. As with mothers throughout history who have

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/14/opinion/the-college-graduate-as-collateral.html

http://jacobinmag.com/blog/2011/11/measuring-the-generation-gap/

http://prospect.org/article/shocking-radicalism-brave



done everything from put young girls on diets to hold

them down to have their clitorises removed at

puberty, they are acting not out of hatred but out of a

love that leads them to protect their daughters from

the price of rebellion. In real life, that price is o$en

exile; in this movie, it’s war. With stakes this high, it’s

hard not to feel for a mother in such a bind.

There’s no way out of this, of course. That’s the point. As Marcotte argues in

that piece, Brave, like Wall-E, doesn’t exactly o#er any solutions to the

problem of Merida’s marriage or non-marriage. What it does do, however, is

say (rather like the Occupy movement) Not This. Not the prince, not the

forced marriage for the sake of political stability, not even the turn in the story

where — in an amazing coincidence — she turns out to actually like one of the

princes, so no di%cult choice must be made.

It also says Not That, and points to Mor-du. If the !lm rejects total submission,

that is, sacri!cing the individual for the sake of the group, it also exposes the

perils of a radical and self-serving individualism. Mor-du is a monster not

because he’s a bear, but because he has the strength of ten men and is acting in

the interests of one.

I’m belaboring the political aspect because one of the criticisms leveled

against Brave was that it lacked the “deeper metaphors” that inform other

Pixar !lms. This is nonsense, perhaps born out of the average male viewer’s

lack of practice when it comes to reading female-centric narratives for

geopolitical content. Still, however potent, Brave’s public and political

metaphors are ultimately less moving than its private and archetypal ones. It’s

in its exploration of the relationship between mother and daughter that the

!lm really shines.

***



The paradoxical “changeable fate” is probably a familiar fantasy to most

parents. That it stumped me for as long as it did I attribute partly my lack of

imagination and partly to the fact that I haven’t had to think about the

archetypal patterns parenthood introduces. It’s a parent’s destiny to nurture a

child at considerable expense and personal sacri!ce until that child becomes

an adolescent and despises him or her (hopefully brie"y). Every parent hopes

they can change that charted course. Very few parents succeed.

Brave’s !rst beginning, so to speak, tells a beautifully-shot story of familial

harmony. Parents and child are entirely united. Even when con"ict comes, it

comes from the outside, in the shape of a monster bear.

The second opening is both less idyllic and less mythic. Fergus is as cheerful

as ever in his throne room full of dead bears. Queen Elinor has aged almost

imperceptibly and given birth to triplet sons. As for Merida, she is a little too

perfect, in the way Princess Story heroines tend to be. She’s an incredible

shot,a fearless rock-climber,a masterful equestrian. She’s a tomboy whose

unladylike tendencies are tempered by the ultra-feminine tresses which she

refuses to discipline. She isn’t a devastating beauty in quite the way other

Disney princesses are — her cheekbones aren’t as sharp, her eyes as

hypnotically eye-lashed, her !gure as persistently Barbi!ed—but her hair is a

distracting wonder. (Pixar was obviously in a game of one-upmanship on hair-

animation with the makers of Tangled.) And she is being shoe-horned into a

very speci!c type of femininity by her exacting and intolerant mother.

The stage is set: we have the slightly henpecked but hypermasculine husband

who understands his daughter’s plight. The misguided mother whose

unwelcome instruction marks her as unpleasant and wrong, if not evil.

Domesticity is (as ever) oppressive, unrewarding, and reactionary. Still, the

kingdom is in need of a marriage alliance. There’s a quiverfull of

unsatisfactory suitors. As for our protagonist, she wants nothing to do with

any of it. In her father’s words, she just wants to wear her hair wild and be



free! Bears are everywhere in this universe, but they’re dead and stu#ed, and

the only dangerous one is outside.

If the story was an arrow and we shot it now, we’d know where to !nd it when

it landed. “I’ve been doing comedy for 25 years,” says Louis CK in Episode 2 of

Season 3 of Louie. “I know every joke. Even if I haven’t heard it, you start

telling me a joke, I know how it’s going to work.” It’s sort of like that.

But if you heard Pixar was doing a fairy tale about a family consisting of a

mother, a rebellious teenager, and a Bear King, and it turns out one of them

turns into a bear, how much money would you have put on it being the

mother? In Season 3 of Arrested Development, Lucille Bluth says something

unexpectedly profound: “First they turn you into a monster, and then they

call you one.” Queen Elinor is the civilizing force in the kingdom. She is the

disciplinarian. She is the educator. She is the one busily engaged in turning

the family’s stories into historical documents — into tapestries. If history and

politics are going to make it to the next generation, it’s because she’s taking

the trouble to ensure their transmission.

This is not the stu# of feminized domestication, though the fact that two

women are engaged in the foregoing activities makes it astonishingly easy to

read it that way. Elinor is training a Renaissance prince. Taken as a whole,

Merida’s education (if we include Fergus’ share in it, which we should) is

straight out of the Mirrors for Princes.

Elinor is wise and dedicated to furthering the cause of her kingdom and

family, but she’s also overzealous and insensitive to her daughter’s needs as a

person (as opposed to a prince-in-the-making). There’s a hint that she sees

this when Merida is corseted up and looking pathetically at her mother, but

she lets the moment go. All their former playfulness is gone; where once they

played hide-and-go-seek, they’ve become humorless and impatient with each

other. In fact, mother and daughter are engaged in a process familiar to many

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirrors_for_princes



people who have been adolescents or had one: they’re turning each other into

monsters. The transformation is complete when Merida slices through her

mother’s tapestry and Elinor burns her bow. Elinor realizes it instantly. Her

question — “what I have I done?” — is one she asks many more times in her

incarnation as a bear, when her humanity starts slipping away with increasing

frequency.

And so Merida turns her mother into a monster. There’s much one could say

about the transformation itself, but Dana Stevens sums it up :

The transformation brought about by the witch’s spell

isn’t a Freaky Friday-style body switch, but it unseats

both Merida’s and her mother’s identities just as

completely, forcing the two of them to leave the castle

and take refuge together in the woods, where they

must hunt and forage for their meals. At once, all of

the issues they were battling over—power, femininity,

!nding the right balance between the realization of

one’s own desires and conformation to social values—

are made literal, sometimes to comic e#ect.

The question that strikes any mother and teenage daughter who have gone

through this together — this shocking moment when you see yourself turned

into something you could never have imagined becoming — is this: what

happens next?

And this is where Brave’s message about a changeable fate makes sense. There

really are two fates for mothers and daughters. If Elinor doesn’t learn to

depend on her daughter, if she doesn’t value Merida for her “unprincessy”

skills and accept her help, she’ll remain a bear. If Merida doesn’t learn to see

her mother not merely as an imperious authority but as a complex but loving

person trying to prepare her daughter for a "awed and patriarchal world — a

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2012/06/pixar_s_brave_reviewed_.html



woman who, far from being invulnerable, is a#ected and even transformed by

her daughter’s actions, she’ll be stuck.

That’s Fate #1. Plenty of mothers and daughters have gotten stuck here. As

fairytale fates go, this one is uncomfortably real.

If Merida and Elinor succeed, Fate #1 will be demoted to a phase.

What Brave describes, then, is the black box a parent-child relationship

becomes in adolescence. Like Queen Elinor’s legends, it rings with truth: a

daughter acquires the power to turn her mother into a monster and

accidentally does so. Their futures depend on their mutual rescue: how they

work with each other to negotiate their new and unfamiliar roles will

determine whether or not they remain monstrous to each other for the rest of

their lives.

In the language of fate, of omens and prognostications, it’s !tting that

Merida’s !rst time shooting leads her away from her family and into the

woods. Her taking up arms in one sense endangers her family: mother and

daughter exit pursued by a bear while her father stays to !ght and loses his leg.

It’s equally !tting that, immediately a$er hearing a growl in the woods, she

!nds will o’ the wisps. But instead of leading her away from her family and

into trouble, as every will o’ the wisp should, these take her back to her family.

This is Merida’s paradox: the very qualities that make her an appealing target

to Mor-du — who seems to sense in her another spirit capable of being

corrupted into breaking with family and kingdom for the sake of personal

gain — emerged organically from her own family. Her skill as an archer isn’t

simply a manifestation of teenage rebellion. Quite the contrary: she’s the

product of her upbringing. She’s a master archer because her father taught her

to be.

Neither her archery nor her father can save her. Upsetting yet another fate



that seemed !xed, it turns out to be Elinor, not Fergus, who defeats Mor-du.

And this shows what we’ve always suspected: Mor-du isn’t the wild creature of

the woods Fergus thought he was hunting. He’s human ambition and

untrammeled self-interest. He’s what the new state could easily become

without education, without history, without storytelling, and without love.

***

By the end it’s clear that one form of bravery the !lm celebrates is a#ective:

It’s the bravery to see and name our mistakes, to apologize, and to help each

other unbecome the monsters we’ve created, and to do all of this without

submitting to an unreasonable or unjust authority.

This is important.

Far be it from me to say that the !lm is perfect, or that there aren’t real

critiques to be made of it. The pacing is sometimes o# and there are stretches

that are less compelling than others. But there are three things Brave

absolutely isn’t, and there’s something pernicious about the fact that reviews

repeatedly refer to it as precisely those three things. Whatever Brave is, it’s not

predictable, it’s not Just Another Princess Movie, and it’s not — my God! —

lacking for deeper layers.

Insofar as Pixar is a teenager !ghting its ancestor, this story needed to be

written. They needed this story in order to be able to write a di#erent kind of

story. Having fought through the strangling thicket of princesses, it’ll be easier

to !ll the space on the other side with many more female characters, most of

them commoners. We need them, badly, and it’ll be interesting to see what

they do now that they can start work on a less exhaustively populated canvas.

I said earlier that a certain kind of female viewer learns to watch movies

without paying too much attention to their endings for fear of discovering



herself outside them. The nicest thing I can say about Brave’s open-ended

ending, in which mother and daughter ride companionably into the sunset

with the big questions still before them, is that I missed their new hairdos the

!rst time round. When I watched the second time, no longer fearing the false

happily-ever-a$ering, there was a reward.

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