SOME THOUGHTS ON BRAVE, THE MOVIE

When I asked my visiting nieces and nephew if they'd like to go to the movies, they instantly said, "BRAVE!"

I'd seen the commercials all ablaze with red hair and that trusty bow and arrow, and thought, could this be something for my FIERCE year?

So we saw it. And it surprised me.

First of all, who knew it was actually a movie about the mother-daughter relationship? I may have mentioned here before (ahem) how the mother-daughter relationship seems the most complex to me of all relationships --- and I only know it from the side of "daughter." It comes up in my writing all the time. So yeah, I liked this development in the movie.

So did my fifteen-years-old-this-month niece. She said it made her want to see it with her mother. She also said how glad she was that there was no prince in the movie, no romantic storyline. "As if that's all that's important," she said. Love it! But it also made me realize that I sorta missed that element. I do love a love story.

What I didn't like about the movie: our heroine wants her mother to change. She does something that does, in fact, help cause her mother to change. But what message does this send our daughters, Disney? Here we've piled into our cushy theater chairs expecting a brave, go-get-em heroine, and she is brave, but come on, wouldn't it have been better to have her change HERSELF?

Because that's the way it works in real life. We have to come to some terms with the fact that we can't change our mothers or anyone else we love. There's no woodcarver/witch in a cottage, no magic pastry. The trick is to change ourselves in ways that allow us to love those people despite our differences. The only person we can truly change is ourselves.

Hey, Disney/Pixar: next time, write a movie like that, 'kay?