In reading reviews like these, I sensed the reviewers just couldn’t get past the fact that Brave is about a princess, rather than something as unexpected as talking cars or talking toys or talking fish.Īsk any girl who’s been raised on princess films, and she’ll tell you that Merida is different, and very unlike her Disney Princess peers. How is this “familiar” and “well-worn”? He and other reviewers complain that Brave is too Disney and not enough Pixar. Reviewers were complaining that unlike other Pixar films, Brave didn’t feature a fully fabricated, fantastically unexpected world it seemed to be treading old ground.įor example, Todd McCarthy wrote in The Hollywood Reporter that Brave is “familiar” and treads “startlingly well-worn territory.” He also complains that it is “laden with standard-issue fairy tale and familiar girl-empowerment tropes.” But is it, really? It’s a story about a mother-daughter relationship. When Joanna Weiss of the Boston Globe and I talked about Brave, she mentioned that a lot of early reviews complained the film was unoriginal–“just another princess movie,” she said. There are two strands of criticism that I would like to address: 1. With all that in mind, since the release of Disney-Pixar’s Brave, I’ve been reading reviews and commentaries of the film with interest. Can’t a girl who is supposed to be strong not be a loner?
Finally, having studied girl power media for several years, it bothers me that Merida is presented as isolated, an anomalous female, without a community of female peers her own age.The storyline itself features such unappealing would-be suitors that Merida’s disinterest in romance is undercut: What if the three young men who must vie for her hand were more like Prince Charmings than doofuses?.The film’s marketing, which essentially ignores that Brave is a tale of a mother-daughter relationship (presumably for fear that such a story wouldn’t be a box office draw), is insulting.
I saw Brave the day it debuted in theaters, and I’m glad that Merida is a different kind of princess–one who can be read as a critique of both the trope that princesses are passive and the trend to tell their stories as romances.
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