Pixar’s Fast And ‘Brave’ Female Comedy: ‘Delightful’

First, I hate the title, and not because it’s an adjective. Notorious, Ravenous, Rabid: great titles. Brave? Generic. And with the poster of a girl with flame-red curls pulling back a bow, it looks like yet another female-warrior saga, another you-go-girl action picture suggesting the biggest injustice to women over the last millennium has been the suppression of their essential warlike natures.

You’d hardly know this latest Pixar movie is a broad comedy, a farce, and that it centers not just on the redhead who wants to shoot arrows but the mom who constantly undermines her. It’s closer to the uproarious Freaky Friday than the recent, glumly revisionist Snow White picture — and all the more delightful for it.

Now, the first part of the film is a bit misleading. After a prologue in which the huge medieval Scottish king Fergus goes nose-to-snout with a giant bear, Brave depicts his daughter, Merida, growing up and longing to head out. She wants to shoot arrows like her dad, to chase the wind and touch the sky — as proclaimed in a Celtic-inflected song on the soundtrack called, uh, “Touch the Sky.”