Kelly Macdonald is an inspired choice to voice Merida, having a tone that is at once dulcet and exasperated. Sadly, the emergence of Elinor’s bear-dexterity means a lessening in her human-motherly instincts, to the point where it’s unclear if she’ll coddle or consume her traumatized daughter. For a while, the ursine Queen Elinor attempts to maintain her ladylike dignity, to the point where her daughter has to teach her how to catch salmon from a rushing stream, the bear then insisting it be cooked and properly plated. The film has three directors - Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman, and Steve Purcell - and whoever was in charge of the scenes between Merida and her mother the bear deserves a celebratory blast of the pig-head horn that heralds the coming of the clans. So Merida must use her physical resources and wiles to keep her mum from being killed and having her head mounted over her own throne. Obtaining a spell from a witch to change her repressive mother’s mind about marrying her off to one of the chuckleheads, Merida changes her mother into a large and discombobulated bear, the very creature that drives her husband, the lord (who lost a leg to an especially nasty one years earlier), into a frenzy of bloodlust. But then the good comic bits come thick and fast, among them the noisy arrival of three suitors from rival clans, each more hilariously unprepossessing than the last, and the pranks of the heroine’s three little brothers, who whack off half the mustache of a snoozing guard with an ax.įinally-rather late-comes the delightful main arc (which the film’s publicists insist is a spoiler!, so if you want to remain ignorant, skip the rest of this and the next paragraph). As the girl gallops past wild crags, Julie Fowlis sings a song called “Touch the Sky”: “I will ride! I will fly! Chase the wind and touch the sky” and so on. Has Pixar’s association with Disney softened its spine? The first act is misleadingly humdrum, as the flame-haired princess Merida strives to do what medieval Scottish lassies mustn’t, like shooting arrows and letting her mass of curls flow free. The generic title and mythic-female-empowerment posters for Brave don’t prepare you for the rollicking Pixar comedy to come, a slapstick mother-daughter-rivalry farce that’s at its most moving in mid-mayhem.
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