As Merida complains to her horse that her mother won’t listen, Elinor complains to her husband Fergus about the same issue involving Merida.

This strong point of the central conflict, Merida and Elinor’s misunderstandings of each other, is expertly displayed using a scene that goes back and forth between two conversations. Merida and Elinor begin the story unable to listen to or understand each other the mother-daughter relationship is messy and lacks effective communication. The story centers on familial tensions instead of romantic ones, a welcome change from the classic princess formula. In stark contrast to the classic but unfortunate Disney trope, Brave’s more modern story not only allows Merida (voiced by Kelly Macdonald) to have a relationship with her mother, Elinor (voiced by Emma Thompson), but also centers the conflict of the plot on their struggle to understand each other. Rapunzel’s main dynamic in Tangled is with her love interest, Flynn Rider. Even when the protagonist’s mother is present, she typically has no presence for example, Rapunzel’s mother exists, but she has no dialogue and little bearing on the action in the film. A popular Disney princess trope is the lack of mother figure or presence of an evil mother figure, such as the Evil Queen that hunts down Snow White, Cinderella’s Evil Stepmother, and Rapunzel’s captor, Mother Gothel, to name a few.

However, the film’s positive qualities still make it an enjoyable watch, 10 years later.įor one, very few Disney princesses have much of an onscreen relationship with their mothers. Mixed reviews cited Merida’s immature behavior, the plot’s predictability, and the overall lack of tension as proof that Brave is sub-par when compared to other princess stories of the time period. As such, the movie tends to be low on fans’ watch lists, leaving Merida’s story largely ignored. As far as princess movies go, Brave is one of those Disney-Pixar movies that got lost in the hoopla between Tangled and the phenomenon that was Frozen.

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