It’s a welcome, unusually introspective interlude that slips into the ecstatic when she scrambles up a rock wall and twirls on its summit, laughing, happy, free and alone. When she takes a breather, surveying the land (this is her land, you sense) while Angus rolls on the grass like a puppy, you see her at peace with herself. She’s a wee thing, about the size of one of Angus’s feathered legs, but her flaming hair and fiery daring - she shoots from the saddle, bull’s-eyeing targets - make her seem bigger. Early on there’s a scene in which she jumps in the saddle and races into a wonderland painted green and splashed with purple. It’s easy to see why Merida prefers galloping into the world to sitting pretty at home.
(She aims for fun, not for dinner.) The only burr in her happy-go-lucky life is her mother, Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson), who wants her to be a lady and polices her behavior accordingly. Merida adores riding her horse and, like Katniss Everdeen, she’s a crack shot with a bow.
Chapman, the 3-D movie takes off with Merida, liltingly voiced by Kelly Macdonald, in teenage rebel mode. Chapman, the first woman hired to direct a Pixar feature, either left or was removed from “Brave” and now shares directing credit with Mr. It hasn’t been easy, to judge by the deep divide between the movie’s seductive pictorial splendor and its discouragingly uninspired script by Mark Andrews, Steve Purcell, Brenda Chapman and Irene Mecchi. After 17 years of feature filmmaking and 12 box-office hits, Pixar has - ta-da! - entered the big business of little girls. More to the point and to the movie’s marketing, she is Pixar’s first female protagonist, which means that there’s a lot more riding on her head than that ginger mop. Merida is active instead of passive, a doer rather than a gal who hangs around the castle waiting for Prince Charming to rescue her. Then again, Rapunzel has a supernice head of hair too.įrom her wild and woolly locks to her Clydesdale, the gorgeous high-stepper Angus on whom she races across the softly rendered Scottish hills and glens, Merida has been created as somewhat of an anti-Rapunzel (at least before Rapunzel received a girl-power makeover for Disney’s 2010 movie “ Tangled”). There’s so much beauty, so much untamed animation in this hair that it makes Merida look like a hothead, a rebel, the little princess who wouldn’t and didn’t. A rich orange-red the color of ripe persimmon, Merida’s hair doesn’t so much frame her pale, creamy face as incessantly threaten to engulf it, the thick tendrils and fuzzy whorls radiating outward like a sunburst. The riotous mass of bouncy curls that crowns Merida, the free-to-be-me heroine of the new Pixar movie, “Brave,” is a marvel of computer imagineering.
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