Which doesn’t stop Elinor from expecting her to be every bit as much the political and diplomatic power-broker in the kingdom that she herself is. She clearly takes more after her father than her mother. Left to her own devices, Merida would do as her father later jokes, AKA “stay single and ride on a horse at dawn, firing arrows while her hair blows wild in the wind.” Merida is much less interested in royal decorum than she is in scaling craggy cliffs and drinking from secret waterfalls, and she lacks neither the physical prowess or warrior’s confidence to do so. Indeed, as has been noted elsewhere, the mother-daughter relationship lies at the heart of this film. When a killer bear attacks the village, his point is unintentionally proven.Īfter the title sequence, we flash forward several years, and Merida has grown into a young woman who bristles at the micromanaging concerns of her mother. Fergus notes that his daughter clearly loves the gift and that anyone and everyone should be able to defend themselves. Elinor’s husband Fergus has given Merida a bow and arrow, a gift that Elinor does not believe is appropriate for a clan princess. At the opening of the film, for instance, we find young princess Merida playing hide and seek with her mother Elinor. This is not to say story doesn’t contain any of the trappings of the rote princess story. Fortunately, Brave is a much better film than any of the cookie-cutter examples with which it might be confused. It’s a set up which, in less capable hands, could result in yet another recycling of the Dreamworks’ “be true to yourself” mantra or Disney’s own set of princess-genre bromides. Superficially, at least: the protagonist Merida is an impetuous red-haired princess who feels shackled by tradition and tribal expectation. With Brave, the people that brought us the Toy Story trilogy– arguably the greatest film trilogy originally conceived as a story for the screen–have given us a movie that, at first glance, runs the risk of being confused with the work of a more simple-minded studio. Now in its 17th year of box office activity, Pixar may have entered into chronological adolescence, but the studio is far from becoming a brazen teenager who’s unaware of the past. Have a great Fourth and we’ll see you back here on Thursday: Just in time for Independence Day, a wonderful (if spoiler-heavy) review of Pixar’s latest from resident animation guru Jeremiah Lawson.
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