Brave is Pixar's much-awaited new venture, featuring the first heroine in their seventeen-year run as an animation studio. The film is set in medieval times, in scraggy Scotland, with spectacular waterfalls, glowing sunsets and forbidding forests, giving Pixar plenty of scope for some stunning animation.
Merida (voiced by Kelly Macdonald), the feisty young princess with a head of unruly red locks and a talent for archery, is learning to be a lady. So far it's proving to be a lesson that stretches the limits of her patience when she'd rather be out riding 'through the glen firing arrows into the sunset'. There to ensure that she does not do precisely that is her firm and sensible mother, Queen Elinor (voiced by Emma Thompson). In charge of Merida's training, Queen Elinor is forever instructing her impulsive daughter on table manners, court etiquette, dress and deportment, while her triplet sons run amok through the castle, leaving destruction in their wake. Their father, King Fergus (voiced by Billy Connolly), is the indulgent type and takes a more lackadaisical attitude toward their upbringing. He majors on dinner-time stories and rough play, leaving the disciplining to his wife.
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