Let me make a bold, radical, and unexpected statement: I love everything about Pixar’s Brave. I love the cast. I love the concept and the setting. I love the poster and the teaser. (I’m certain I’m the only person who feels this way. Pixar! Who likes them, right?) I even dig the title for ridiculous, romantic, and altogether mythic reasons.
I shouldn’t like the title. I can foresee a thousand and one stories and reviews playing with some variation of Braveheart. “Brave Has Heart” is one you’ll undoubtedly see. “Brave Shows Pixar Has a Brave Heart” is clunkier, but also doable. I bet some smart-ass will even write “Brave: Every Film Plays, But Not Every One’s A Hit” or “Brave Shows Pixar’s Freeeeeedom!” or something equally wink-wink-nod-nod. The comparison and jokes to Mel Gibson’s kilted and bloody epic are inevitable, at least for traffic purposes. One might even argue Pixar is asking for trouble given Gibson’s plummeting popularity, and the sinking of anything and everything he cinematically touched.
But that’s just silly. Brave is a fantastic title, and a marked improvement over The Bear and the Bow, which screamed working title and not theater marquee. Brave immediately evokes a lot of things, whereas The Bear and the Bow will undoubtedly leave many (especially children, who haven’t quite grasped the one-word-multiple-meanings trick yet) confused as to what kind of bow we’re talking about, and how a bear plays into it. Does the title mean, like, a ribbon? Or what a man does in front of the Queen? Oh, you mean a Robin Hood bow! Well, now the bear bit makes sense! Someone probably shoots it!
Frankly, there’s nothing you can title a Scottish-themed picture but Brave. The Scots are a brave people, possibly even the bravest. Everything about them is strapping and hardy — their architecture, their weather, their bagpipes, their brogues, their alcohol, their food. (Cue the haggis jokes — but as someone who has eaten it, I can assure you haggis is far more palatable than homemade oatcakes or tablet.) Even the national wardrobe is a flag of courage. The kilt is sneered at by lesser beings — “The men wear skirts!” — which only proves what guts it takes for the men to wear them so casually, particularly since they’re generally not wearing anything underneath. (Consider that parts of Scotland are further north than Moscow, where they favor furs, and then wonder how they run around bare-legged, with the wind having no place to go but up.) Even without the haggis and the kilts, the Scots have their history, and their chronicles are full of valor. You can sneer at Mel Gibson’s film all you like (and I don’t), but William Wallace was no man to dismiss. He wasn’t the only man or woman risking it all for independence, either, and he wasn’t the only Scot to suffer the traitor’s death, which was only meted out to the “worst” offenders to the crown. You have to admire a people who watch one leader hung, drawn, and quartered, but keep on fighting, even as others meet the same hideous fate.
Even their unofficial anthem (or rather, one of the unofficial anthems) says how damn brave they are. Even America — as full of Scots as it was — didn’t have that kind of swagger. Our anthem isn’t “America the Brave,” we favored “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a title (and could get no tougher than “America the Beautiful” for our unofficial one), as if we were afraid Scotland would collectively sail over and kick our butts if we opted to title it after the catchiest lyric. (And “The home of the brave” was probably just Francis Scott Key acknowledging we’d mixed the Scots into the general population.)
In fact, I’m willing to wager Scotland, as a collective unit, quietly emailed Pixar and said, “You’re not actually going with that The Bear and the Bow title, are you? May we quietly suggest you refer to our massive courage? Perhaps you could just call it Brave? P.S. Did you get the haggis we sent? P.P.S. You know, the execution scene in Braveheart was the censored version of what happened. Just thought you should know.”
Trying to fight was pointless. Why try to pretty it up with a title like Merida and the Bear, or The Warrior Princess? It’s about a Scottish lass who picks up a weapon and defies all odds, so let’s just cut to the chase: she’s brave. As brave as William Wallace, the unofficial national anthem, Robert Burns poems, kilts, Sean Connery in Zardoz, haggis, and whiskey. Mel Gibson has no claim on the rugged brogue of a word. Scotland does. So, keep the freedom jokes and eye rolls to a minimum. They might see you …
