Happy Thought: Brave

It should be obvious by now: I love animated movies. I know you're supposed to grow out of those, but I refuse. Some of them are too awesome to miss.

Like Brave. (Well, like anything from Pixar really, but this post is about Brave.)


I just love Merida. She's Pixar's first female protagonist, so they're making a big deal of her being a girl. (I don't mind that - In Always Neverland, Peter and the Lost Boys make a big deal of Ashley being a girl, but Ashley refuses to miss out on adventures just because no other Wendy girl has done it before.) But Merida is tough, resourceful, playful, rebellious, sometimes super grumpy, quick-thinking, and surprisingly short-sighted when it comes to making deals with slightly loony witches. She's also the funniest animated protagonist I've seen since Hiccup in How to Train Your Dragon.


She's the first Disney princess since Mulan whose main focus isn't finding a prince, and I really appreciate that. In fact, the most important princes in the story are Merida's brothers. The most important relationship in the film is between Merida and her mom, and the parent-child storyline is moving and transformative in a way that we haven't seen in a Disney movie since The Lion King. 


Fun and random fact: the voice actor for Merida, Kelly Macdonald, also played Peter Pan in the stage scenes of Finding Neverland! 

Plus, it's set in Scotland!! I'm also a sucker for highland accents, bagpipes, and gorgeously rugged landscapes. :-)


If you haven't seen it, get ye to a theater and go watch! 

I *Heart* Mulan

Seriously. Let me count the ways:

For one thing, I have gone through three copies of the film. I saw it in theaters, and I loved it so much that the VHS made my Christmas list that year. I purchased the DVD early in my college career, because the platinum edition came out.

Nowadays, since The Princess & The Frog just came out, I'm rounding out my Disney Princess collection before I see it. So, when I passed a sale display at Target the other day, I snatched up a third copy. Or rather, what I thought was a third copy. When I pulled the sleeve off, I discovered....this!


Not what I wanted. I've always been Tinker Bell fan, but Mulan was a big part of my childhood.

A little while before I purchased the aforementioned second copy of Mulan, I even wrote a paper on her.

I wrote many a melodramatic sentence as a college freshman.

But I do believe it. The movie came out when I was in middle school. I remember watching it in theaters with my younger siblings. I remember feeling the inner heroine swell within me when Mulan started the avalanche and won the battle. And I remember, a year later, in a seventh-grade math class full of only girls, when someone started humming one of the songs ("I'll Make a Man Out of You"), another girl across the room began singing along, and every girl in the class admitted to a secret love for Mulan.

And since then, every girl my age who saw it when it first came out has always had a soft spot for Mulan.

I have a theory about it. Middle School is a tough time. It's when you start to recognize how hard it is to be a girl. You begin to think about your body in terms of its attractiveness. You start to think about boys and sometimes try to change yourself to suit them. Maybe you had dreams in elementary school, but in middle school, you're old enough to start to really chase them. You just need the courage to try.

That's when you need to meet heroines the most - when you learn who you're aspiring to become.


I want to make every girl protagonist I ever create just as awesome, vulnerable, hardworking, smart, and kick-butt as Mulan.