Movie Review: "Brave"

I am a little confused about “Brave”, the Pixar movie getting all the buzz. It’s not a foreign film. Its theme shouldn’t be all brooding and German and difficult to decipher. It features not one stark beach scene where you’re not sure exactly what you’re looking at or how it relates to the movie.

 “Brave” is a movie for kids. It features a spitfire of a heroine who is a crack shot with an arrow. What’s not to like about this set up? Especially if you’re the parent of a spitfire of a heroine (make that two) who are also crack shots, although their weapon of choice is the stomp rocket.

 There are some troubling aspects to the movie. The first is the fact that Princess Merida, the heroine, looks like she’s about 12 years old. The plot centers on her anger over being forced to choose a suitor to marry. 12 years olds marrying? Really?! I know the whole child-bride thing is historically accurate, but it’s still disturbing.

 However, I was still full of good will at this point. I had my vat of popcorn, my smiling 6 year old beside me and (thank goodness I don’t live in 10^th century Scotland) movie-theater-quality air conditioning cranking at me full force. What’s the Scottish word for nirvana? That’s where I was when… spoiler alert! Do not read further if you don’t want to find out about key points of “Brave”.

The plot took a turn for the worse. So bad that I got all lit up, at a Pixar movie!  Princess Merida doesn’t want to get married. Her mother, Queen Elinor (a loving and involved mother) tells Merida that she has to get married, for the good of the kingdom. Basically, Merida has to put on her big girl underpants and just get it done. Queen Elinor doesn’t actually use this language, but this is the idea.

 This sentiment is what I frequently convey to our two, little spitfires, and it’s exactly the language I use. Of course, usually at our house we are debating issues like the idea of putting on shoes so the stakes are admittedly a bit lower. Still, I admired Queen Elinor and her conviction.   

 Is Queen Elinor evil? Is she doing wrong? No, what she’s doing is called parenting. Guess how Merida rewards her mother? She poisons her! With a scone, laced with a spell that she bought from a sketchy witch. The spell was supposed to simply change the queen’s mind about the importance of her daughter marrying. But the spell went wrong, and it ended up changing the queen into a big, old bear. If this were modern-day, it’s a close up of Princess Merida that we’d be seeing on “Dateline”.

 The movie skims over the troubling point of, oh, poisoning and moves on to develop its theme, which is the part I’m still confused about. The theme seemed to be something like “one’s fate lies within oneself”. Or maybe it was “one doesn’t need to rely on sketchy witches or poisoned scones to effect change”.

 I was thoroughly perplexed. And if I was perplexed, what about the kids in the audience? What about the big-girl-underpants-wearing 6 year old next to me? What was the message she took away?

Judging from her slack expression, which indicated full-on sugar coma, I think the message she took away was “The movie size container of “Nerds” is awesome!”

 So maybe I’m overthinking things. Maybe I don’t need to worry about eating any scones whipped up by our spitfires just yet. But still… Pixar could have done better. They could have given us a nice and easy theme to take away. Or at least slapped a “be kind to your mother” public service announcement on at the end of the movie.