Pixar’s fairy tale of 10th century Scotland is a perplexing blend of two narratives; one in which the spirited princess Merida rejects her constrictive role in society and struggles to achieve sexual freedom, and one in which she encounters mystical forces which transform her mother into a bear.
The trailer cunningly fails to mention the second narrative, probably because it is so weird and doesn’t fit with the Pixar way of doing things. In a Studio Ghibli film it would have worked. You’d have a sense of why the character has become a cat or a pig or whatever, and at the end of the film feel relatively clear about the character’s development. In Brave this is not the case, and furthermore the bear scenario sits oddly between comedy and tragedy; the mincing gait and effeminate posturing of the Queen-bear are too cruel and unsettling to get any laughs, while the whole thing is treated much too light-heartedly for it to have any emotional weight.
It’s nonetheless a fairy tale which is less offensive to women than most, and the absence of any kind of love story is a really nice touch. The only problem with questioning one aspect of the fairy tale ideology is that it really throws into relief all the other nasty assumptions at play. For example, the class thing. I’m baffled as to why, in 2012, we have the dopey, overweight servant ‘Maudy’ who continually goes into hysterics as she’s tormented by more quick-witted characters. And without a love story there’s no opportunity for the humble love interest to mess with some of the assumptions about class.
The film does at least look beautiful, with a constantly shifting mixture of very dark and very bright and colours reproducing the dramatic changeability of the Scottish landscape. Merida’s fantastically curly hair is fascinating to the extent that it tends to steal the show, upstaging everything from the forest scenery to Merida’s own face, which starts to look bland and inexpressive.
As with the unbalanced animation, the whole film is a bit wonky and muddled. It shuffles about a few motifs of the fairy tale without much enthusiasm, lacks the laughs of other Pixar films, and hangs off a bizarrely unclear and directionless plot. But it’s nonetheless worth seeing even if it doesn’t all fit together. It’s quite refreshing to watch something so unexpectedly strange and (perhaps unwittingly) dark.
THREE STARS
