Merida defying tradition

BRAVE…

The last animations I watched was the film Brave. A story about a young woman called Merida who wants to choose her own life not the life her mother and tradition demands for her. It takes place in the Scottish highlands in the dark ages where it was almost unheard of for women to defy the traditions of the people as she did.

BRAVE was written by a woman called Brenda Chapmen and part of the film was directed by her. However, Mark Andrews took over half way through. Katherine Sarafian produced the film (Pixar Wiki, 2014). 

Mother and Daughter relationship 

Merida's hair - 111,700 hairs in total

It was originally called 'The Bear and The Bow' and its creator Chapman used her own experiences with her daughter as inspiration. This film was Pixar's first fairy tale though it differs from the usual plot with more development in the mother-daughter relationship than in a romantic relationship (Pixar Wiki, 2014).  

In creating BRAVE the animators at Pixar fashioned a brand new hair simulation software named Taz, after the Tasmanian Devil (Terdiman, 2012). This was used in creating Merida’s curly red hair which had never been seen before in animation (Alexander, 2012). Within Merida's hair there are 1500 individual strands, this means that in total Merida has 111,700 hairs (Pixar Times, 2012)

Merida - water animation

Fergus - 8 layers of clothing

The animators also changed the way cloth was animated. Merdia’s father, Fergus, has around 8 layers of clothing, for example cloth, leather, chainmail and more  (Terdiman, 2012). Another difficulty in the animation was water, clothes were to getting wet and how it would look with people in the river  (Terdiman, 2012).