Disney gets ‘Brave’ to break its own stereotypes
We all have witnessed the Disney culture which is dexterous in narrating stories that sum up as gorgeous princesses happily ending up with their prince charming. So I was kinda surprised when I watched ‘Moana’(2016), a Walt Disney Studio production. Because this one was different, it journeyed the viewers through Princess Moana’s pursuit of identity and self-discovery as she sets out on a dangerous adventure to save her tribe. She sings, “See the line where the sky meets the sea? It calls me… And no one knows, how far it goes…” bringing up the theme of following one’s own path, one’s own calling, which seems unknown and untrodden by most.
Moana goes about breaking the stereotypes of a patriarchal society where girls are seen as soft, weak and are denied their dream quests because the trail seems dangerous for them to follow. Moana lives up to the cultural context of recent times where we talk of breaking gender identities and following our heart.
On a side note, the film ‘Moana’ is vibrant and lively in its colour scheme, the animation is good, characters are quite funny — especially the chicken sidekick HeiHei takes the stage with the best funny moments. However, there were too many songs advancing the story, like in most Disney movies.
I would have kept believing that Moana was the turning point in Disney Princess stories, that it was a fairy tale which rightly belonged to our generation unlike Cinderella, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast etc., but then I watched ‘Brave’(2012), and I was in awe seeing that it was two steps ahead of Moana in catching-up with our world.
‘Brave’, the story of Princess Merida revolves around the issues with parents, often faced by teenagers as they decide to go against the norms and follow their dreams. Merida wants to live wild as she is, a free soul who rides a horse, shoots arrows, roams in the forests, drinks from the firefalls, she doesn’t want to be contained in the elite lady gestures forced upon her.
Merida shouts in an argument with her mother “Do you ever bother to ask what I want? No! You go around telling me what to do, what not to do, trying to make me be like you! I don’t want to be like you! I want my freedom.”, Haven’t we all said similar things to our parents at some point or the other? And haven’t we all faced the backlash with replies like, “All this work, all the time spent preparing you, schooling you, giving you everything we never had, I ask you, what do you expect us to do?” just like Merida did from her mother?
This story is a beautiful portrayal of the eternal modern-day strife between we teenagers and our parents. We love them a lot, they love us a lot and we both know it, but still, we have moments when we are not ready to understand each other, when we both don’t want to step down, don’t want to compromise for our own reasons. We teenagers, see future in terms of ‘what all we want to be, and what all we want to do’ without considering the harsh realities and low possibilities of the same, while our parents see our future in terms of their experience, which is outdated sometimes. Thus it becomes hard to perceive each other’s opinions against our own beliefs and predictions of the future.
The story advances with the heartwarming character development of both Merida and her mother, as they come to understand each other a little more, and Merida realises the depth of the relation with her mother when she goes through the horror of almost losing her, for the love which we often take for granted is the purest of its kind.
My favourite quote from the movie is,
Some say our destiny is tied to the land, as much a part of us as we are of it. Others say fate is woven together like a cloth, so that one’s destiny intertwines with many others’.
This is so true that it hurts to know, whenever we choose to run after our so-called destiny, we choose to ignore that in our rash search for it, the fate of those woven into our lives will change too, we forget about the butterfly effect, about the grand picture.
Merida, among all the Disney Princesses, is the most beautiful one to me, with her unruly orange hair always swaying carefree like herself, her incredible skills at archery, her stubbornness, her adorable expressions and the way she speaks, all in all, she’s the Princess we want, the Princess we deserve.
Besides, I absolutely loved the animation, Pixar nailed it, as always. The colours and the mood were in perfect resonance with the storyline, the background sceneries — environment design was grandly beautiful, and the character design was very cool in my opinion. The story had its own funny moments and didn’t lose its well-set pace.
