When Pixar shoots wide.

Here follows my thoughts Pixar's Brave, which came out yesterday. I've tried to avoid spoilers, but they may have slipped in. If you don't read any further to avoid knowing too much too soon; the movie is worth seeing. All Pixar movies tend to be worth the ticket price for the visuals alone. This year's short film was Pixar at its best. And now to the main attraction.

Brave is about two women learning to be fully human. Merida learns to respect and live the kind of feminine grace and diplomacy that her mother displays. Queen Eleanor learns to respect her daughter's resourcefulness, courage and spirit of adventure. There were some great moments. The details of the world and the way the story was told were lovely and wonderful as usual.

Image from the Brave Facebook page

However, taking a step back and looking at the structure of the story, this one was far from the well crafted, water tight piece of art that Pixar has given us with movies like Up. They were just off their mark. I have a few theories for what went wrong.

First of all, the central point of conflict is a very old trope. Everyone in the audience knows that by the end of the movie, Queen Eleanor is not going to make her daughter go through with her traditional arranged marriage. The problem is, when the moment comes, we are not exactly sure how that change of heart came about. There is no connection between anything that has happened so far, and this moment of complete 180. This is very unlike Pixar. When a character has such a huge change of heart, it is usually very clear where it comes from. The words she actually uses to break off the engagement sound strange and cliché.

So, it seems to me that the arranged marriage trope got in their way. If the central conflict had been something more directly relating to the journey that they are both on, completing their imbalanced characters, they might have pulled off a good character arch. There are few things so universally unacceptable in America as an arranged marriage. Perhaps if the Queen had demanded that Merida do something that was a little more ambiguous culturally, the story would have been less predictable and the character arches more believable.

And speaking of imbalanced characters, the other serious problem with this movie is, ironically, the male characters. There was all this hype about Pixar finally doing a movie with female protagonists. I was really happy to see it because they have given us really strong characters of both sexes, but no women in title roles. So, they gave us their usual respect and depth to their two female leads, and all the men in the story were insultingly stereotyped. We have no reason to respect the King except that he is bigger and stronger than all the other men. He is no help to either main character, and he makes things worse most of the time. Merida's journey starts from a point where she appreciates all of her father's traits, and none of her mothers. It is clear that this is a fault in Merida. Her parents are set up as a beauty and beast couple, and Merida only admires the beast.

I really wish that the father had shown the kind of balance in his character that the women in the story are journeying towards.  If her father had actually had some of her mother's traits as well, the contrast would have been less sexed. The movie seems to say, it's alright for her father to be a belching cave man who is good with fighting and eating but pretty hopeless in every other aspect of life. But women ought to be smart and dignified, as well as brave.

I can't imagine why such flaws got past the Pixar story team. It is so unlike them. I wonder if the politics of making a princess movie in a culture where princess movies are at least highly charged, if not politically incorrect put so much pressure on the story tellers that they couldn't be free to work their usual magic. If that is the case, I just hope they can shake it off and get back to writing solid stories with real characters again.