I liked it. But I didn’t really, really like it.

A great deal has been made out of the fact that Brave is the first Pixar movie with a female protagonist. Since Disney has had female protagonists from the beginning – Snow White was released in 1939 – Pixar isn’t exactly breaking new ground. If anything, Brave is the first major American animated film with a feminist female protagonist. Belle in Beauty & The Beast and Mulan were the closest before, and they weren’t very close at all. But Merida, the tomboy teen princess in Brave, is the sort of character many women hoped for after Anne Sexton’s feminist rewriting of Grimm’s fairy tales in 1971 exposed to a large audience the relentless misogyny of Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty. Continue…