If you are a subscriber of TIME, you can check out the full article here. After Cars 2, where some questioned Pixar’s drive to make the film that made billions of dollars from merchandise, this should be a confirmation that the studio is determined to focus on the story and the characters, in spite of how challenging it may be to market.
Whether that is due to the fact that the film is an original property and does not already have an established base like Toy Story did, or whether it is because it is a princess film that is not your typical fairytale romance, it is easy to see that the merchandise department is not what is driving Pixar. While at Toy Fair last month, I noticed that there was not much Brave merchandise coming from the hundreds of companies represented there. It is true that Disney has made billions from the Toy Story and Cars franchises, but how much money do you think they made from Ratatouille or Up toys? People seeking toys of Carl and Russell and Up actually reported difficulty in finding figures or other merchandise in retail stores. Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and now President of Pixar and Disney Animation, tells TIME that the merchandise is not what is important to the film. Pixar has learned that you need to make the audience care about the characters and the method for that is make the public identify with the characters on screen.Īs for the merchandise department, some may say that Pixar is being bold by not having its princess character strut around wearing tiaras and princess clothes, which will inevitably make the film difficult to sell to toy companies. Many films from other studios overlook the importance of the story and simply focus on the spectacle. It has always been said that the studio’s films are a marriage between technology and story. That concept is where Pixar’s success lies. Just because Merida is a princess and her mother is a queen does not mean they do not face the same problems we do.
I was thinking, What’s she going to be like as a teenager?” “I have this amazing daughter, and she is really strong-willed, and I’m strong-willed,” Chapman says. Brenda Chapman, who pitched the idea for the film, was inspired by her relationship with her own daughter: In the same manner, Brave is shaping up to be about the relationship between Merida and her mother Queen Elinor. While The Incredibles was about a family of superheroes, it was not about the superheroes – it was about the family. toys can talk, superheroes can fly, rats can cook), the setting never overtakes the characters. The great thing about Pixar films is that even though they make take place in extraordinary circumstances and in imaginary worlds (e.g. However, it looks like Brave will give us a stubborn teenage girl who fights with her mom, which is a reality that happens often in the life of teenage girls. The worry was that eventually, at some point in the film, Merida would realize that she actually does need romance in her life. “This is a fairy tale without romance.” That sentence should hold many naysayers at bay. But mostly, like all teenage girls, she fights with her mom. Merida tells her that she isn’t marrying anyone. But Merida doesn’t tell her mom that she’s going to pick her own husband, as princesses sometimes do in films. Her mom, Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson) insists she follow tradition and let the eldest sons of the heads of the kingdom’s clans compete for her hand in marriage. Instead, she rides a horse and shoots a bow and arrow.
In the TIME article, there is a key paragraph that states:īrave’s medieval Scottish princess, Merida (voiced by Boardwalk Empire‘s Kelly Macdonald), almost never wears princess clothes. In the last issue of TIME Magazine, there is an in-depth article that brings confirmation to that hope – Brave is set to subvert the princess story by ignoring romance and focusing on the mother-daughter relationship. The last thing the public wanted to see was Pixar do a clichéd character, though, there was hope for a unique take on a princess story given the studio’s reputation for creative and imaginative stories. Then, when Brave was announced, the news of a lead female character brought yelps of joy, but also a bit of uneasiness since the lead would be a princess. Pixar has taken a lot of heat over the past decade for its lack of female protagonists.
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