A good, constructive mother-daughter relationship is hard to come by in film. They crop up here and there. Terms of Endearment comes to mind. But they just aren’t done that often. More common is the Carrie/Black Swan variety of horribly destructive relationships between mothers and daughters. So, in comes Pixar, producing the company’s first ever film centred on a female protagonist. Brave, conceived by Brenda Chapman and co-directed by Chapman and Mark Andrews, brings to the screen one of the most affecting mother-daughter relationships I’ve seen in quite some time.
Brave is a bit of a schizophrenic movie. It’s an uproarious slapstick comedy surrounding a very tender fairy tale about a mother and daughter coming to terms with each others’ views. Amazingly, the two tones work harmoniously almost all the time. (I’ll get to the “almost” a bit later.) Merida is a feisty Scottish princess who wants nothing more than to shoot arrows and climb cliffs. Her mother, Elinor, is Queen of the land, and particularly due to the boisterous nature of her husband, Fergus, she’s left to actually run the show. Part of that responsibility is teaching Merida to be a proper princess and to have her betrothed. Of course, Merida wants none of it. She just wants to live freely and take things easy. Classic conflict; a simple and effective set-up. Click to read more.
