Yet after visiting Dunnottar Castle, a stunning structure set on jutting cliff-side rocks just south of Stonehaven in Aberdeenshire, the team decided to imitate its staggering surrounds by making DunBroch an outpost by the sea. Initially, Merida's DunBroch family castle was going to be set against a loch in the Highlands.
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Some of Scotland's landmarks proved so mesmerising for Pixar's Brave team, they actually ended up altering ideas they originally had for the movie to incorporate what they'd seen on their memorable trip. We worked really hard to bring the magic, beauty and ruggedness of Scotland to life in the film through our production design, sets and environments." "We brought everything back and spread it all out, loaded it into our computers.
"We took photographs and video, sketched and wrote stories," says Sarafian. This helped them capture the spirit of Scotland on film in a fashion that had never been attempted in cinema before.īrave producer Katherine Sarafian admits the team kept journals while staying in Scotland, which proved tremendously useful when they returned to California to begin work on the project. Taking in a breadth of Scottish events, from the iconic Highland games of the Braemar Gathering (that informed much of heroine's Merida's impressive archery skills) to eating haggis on the Royal Mile, Brave's animators fully steeped themselves in the local culture. There was a time when Pixar movies worked gloriously for adults, teens, tweens, small kids, everyone this one is unsatisfying for all ages.īrave is released in England and Wales on 13 August.Where did Brave's animators visit on their Scottish tours? Now, in some respects, it is interesting and unusual not to have a conventional love interest, but what we are offered instead is something oddly regressive, binding Merida into the family unit just when she was making that bid for independent adulthood, and we don't learn anything very interesting about Merida or her mum.
There are magical transformations, and Merida encounters a perfunctory witch, voiced by Julie Walters, whose character is removed from the story in a lamely disconcerting way. The wellbeing of her mum, who hasn't been an especially interesting character, and whose relationship with Merida has been significant only in representing what she is trying to escape, turns out to be pretty much all-important. So Merida makes a defiant escape, and embarks on a fantasy adventure … with her mum. Soon, the official Games are to commence, in which various dorky princelings are to compete, but Merida is infuriated to discover that the winner gets her hand in marriage, whether she likes it or not. Kelly Macdonald voices Merida, the feisty, flame-haired Princess whose tomboyish interest in archery is indulged by her doting father, the King (Billy Connolly), but frowned upon by her strict mother, the Queen (Emma Thompson).
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It also resembles the robust Viking world of lovably grumpy clan chiefs and wimpy kids in another DreamWorks animation, How to Train Your Dragon. The fantasy Highland setting is effectively extrapolated from the Scottish accent Mike Myers put on back in 2001 playing the curmudgeonly Shrek in the DreamWorks animation, occupying very much the same sort of landscape. Brave has a certain inoffensive charm, sometimes, but it is often bafflingly uninteresting as a story. Even the short film that precedes the feature – traditionally a tiny delicious treat in any Pixar programme – is treacly and dull. It feels like a standard issue super-sophisticated Pixar movie with the super-sophistication removed. It is eerily bland, with none of the zingingly funny lines and smart self-awareness we've come to expect from Pixar yet it doesn't obviously appear to be pitched at very young kids, either, and doesn't quite have the necessary unforced simplicity. It looks as if their script has been reworked pretty often, though perhaps not quite often enough. Brave is written and directed by Mark Andrews, one-time story supervisor on Ratatouille and The Incredibles, and Brenda Chapman, director of The Prince of Egypt. T his animated family movie – set in the olden dayes of Scotland – gives us a worrying glimpse of the Disney/Pixar "ideas" fuel gauge, whose needle is twitching further and further leftward towards the "E".
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