What’s this?  A Disney Princess whose primary trait isn’t her physical appearance or pathetic social situation or desperate need of rescue?  I’ve had to rethink my whole Disney Princess schema.  With one arrow from her quiver, Merida from Brave has shot the stereotype all to hell.

I'd love to give credit for this image, but I couldn't track the original source...I found it everywhere!

I almost didn’t see it, but it was hot and there were lots of kids around and they were starting to annoy each other.  I hadn’t shaved my legs or armpits and wasn’t about to get that act together to take them to the pool, so a movie it was.

1.  Scottish people are inherently funny, especially when they are not trying to be funny.  This, never would have predicted it but there it is, is also true for animated Scottish people.

2.   I don’t know who is doing what with those computer machines they have nowadays, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of this particular princess’s hair.

3.   Boys like this princess movie, even though they will say the do not.

My daughter was freaked out by the conflict between the mother and daughter in this movie, not to mention the occasional bear fight, and if you haven’t seen it, I’ll try to be vague, but whatever – go see it.   Princess Merida is independent and feisty and smart and brave and does her own damn thing despite the fact that her mother Knows What’s Best.  And her mother probably does, sort of mostly, know what’s best. So they fight, because that’s what mothers and daughters do.

Merida and her mother say some things they wish they hadn’t said and some stuff happens that scared the bejeezus out of my daughter, even though I held on to her and kept saying, “I PROMISE it will be OK.  The princess and her mother are going to figure it all out and it will be all better in the end.  I promise.  Because that’s what Disney movies do.”

My girl is smart as a whip and getting to be that age where daughters don’t entirely believe that everything their mothers say is true, and she only sort of believed me. Because that’s what daughters do.

But in the end, the mother taught her brave daughter what it really means to be brave and they figured it all out and everything was better in the end.  Because, after all, mothers do teach their daughters how to be brave.  That’s what mothers do.

At the end of the movie when my daughter was happy and smiling and relieved and full of popcorn and Sour Patch Kids, she looked at me and said, “You’re crying!  Why are you crying?”  And I said, “Because it was a really good movie,” and what I didn’t say is that I was crying because sometimes the brave thing to do is to show how you really feel.

I love you, mom.