Brave: A good movie with a horrible lesson

It seems like every Disney movie is like this: good character development meets a fantastic/magical plot, combined with at least one horrible life lesson learned.  Disney/Pixar’s new movie Brave certainly fits the bill. 

Don’t get me wrong: it’s an entertaining flick, and is about as family friendly as movies get these days (so long as you’re fine with seeing naked male backsides, both child and adult).  Like I said, about as family friendly as you can get these days. 

However, in addition to any gluteal concerns you may have, you may want to warn your kids that the fantasy of animated movies doesn’t stop with will o’ the wisps or witch’s spells.  Let them know that Disney princesses also teach horrible life lessons and that no one is well served by applying them into the real world. 

I hesitate to write this because there are a lot of good lessons accompanying the bad: Merida, the heroine, has an intact family with both a father and a mother who care for her (this is extremely rare for animated movies), she learns that other people can suffer for her mistakes, and she owns up to those mistakes and tries to set them right.  Finally, she reunites her family and expresses her love for them. 

But then there’s the rather nasty lesson that the title of the movie suggests and that the narrator overtly tells you: that you can be in charge of your own destiny as long as you’re brave enough to fight for it against any and all things that appear to be acting against it.  In Merida’s case, this meant flouting tradition, demanding that the society as a whole change its conventions, all while risking open warfare and demanding a spell from a witch that doesn’t really want to spell for her. 

Essentially, then, this movie is telling you that you can be in charge of your own fate only insofar as you’re brave enough to fight and rebel against tradition. 

Of course, I don’t know of any 8-year-olds who will walk out of the theater with that lesson clearly in mind.  Instead, they’ll just have a fun story about a Scottish teen who shoots arrows and doesn’t want to get married (because who would in her early teens?).

Nor do I think Disney (or Pixar, or anyone who makes animated movies) is setting out to deliberately poison our children’s minds with horrifically counter-effective life strategies.  Instead, they’re just trying to make money by making a cutesy film.  They don’t want to be seen as ground-breaking (except in a good way!), so they have to re-hash the same ground covered by Aladdin and The Little Mermaid.  Girl hates tradition, girl rebels, girl gets rewarded. 

This self-serving profit motive means that they won’t be taking any pains to create good (or bad) lessons; instead, they’ll be playing to the lowest common denominator.  If you happen to disagree with that, you need to make sure that your kids know it.

So am I proposing a boycott on Disney or Pixar?  Am I advancing a conspiracy theory where Pixar is trying to woo your children, pied-piper like, and make them Death Eaters?  No, far from it.  All I’m saying is this: Don’t rely on Disney, or Pixar, or Hollywood, or anything like unto it, to teach your child right from wrong.  Enjoy their products, if you’d like to: they are mildly entertaining.  But TALK with your children about what you see.  Explain what is fantasy, what is real, and how they should live their lives.  Because in the end, if the movies make you talk about things that have thus far remain unsaid, then no matter what horrible life lessons the heroines exhibit, seeing the movie might be a good thing.