Film Analysis #4: Brave

I took the opportunity to watch this film because I'd never seen it before and it's one of my little sister's favorite movies.  Paired with our discussions on family and the role family plays in children's media, I've found that the film offers up important and heart-warming contributions to the discussion.
The thing that I find to be really great about Brave is the way it addresses the relationship between mothers and daughters and differences in family members.  It's a really sweet and special message about getting to know and understand where each other is coming from.  I think there are probably a lot of daughters in the world that don't see eye to eye with their mothers, and this film handles it with great respect and love.  There are wonderful and beautiful parts of the mother/daughter relationship, but with the shifting feminist movements and with women starting to reject the roles that women have fulfilled in the past, this film showcases some of the arguments that I'm sure many have engaged with with their own mothers.

Something that I think is really great, though, is that respect that's still held or advocated for with both mother and daughter.  Merida is wild and unruly and strong-willed; she resists the role her mother desires her to fulfill and because of that, puts her family in danger.  Merida has to learn to not only reign her passions a bit to fulfill her responsibilities, but that she doesn't have to completely ditch who she is.  Her mother in return then learns to administer her knowledge to her daughter to help her become the woman she needs to be, but also to accept the change in tradition and expectation. Both women have to learn to accept each other, adjust something within themselves, and then also stand up for what they believe is right.  It's really great, too, that in the end, they both actually wanted the same thing--they just needed to communicate better.

I think something that has caused rifts in society and generations is the lack of will to understand one another.  I know that my mother and I have frequent and lengthy arguments about what each of us thinks is important for my own life and the way I live it.  Much of what we disagree on is because of a lack of understanding and a lack of proper communication.  This film was able to kind of shed light on an important issue for me: that the outcome of the argument isn't important.  It's not about whether I'm right or whether she's right, but it's more about the fact that both of us have to learn to see the value in what the other is saying.  It's an acknowledgement, too, however, that both of us are valid and right in our own ways.

Brave is a good example of a family friendly film that promotes good communication between family members.  At the end of the day, it's not about who was right or who should have listened, too.  It's about that achey bad feeling you get in your gut when you realize that you will someday lose the person you love so much that you break them.  And that's the moment in Brave that seems to drive home the message.