The fluffy red tangled hair that defines Princess Merida, feels central to the aesthetic proficiency in “Brave”. It is a modest story in many ways, atmospheric more than plotty in key moments, but so thoroughly earnest and warm and gorgeous that I always think of it as an easy-highlight of Pixar’s 25-film history. And yet, a decade later, and with so much changed in the animation world, I think of “Brave” more fondly than many of its counterparts. Brenda Chapman, the first female director for Pixar, started the project as the sole director but was joined by Mark Andrews in a move that felt more like studio interference than one intending creative legitimacy. The rocky production history also hadn’t helped. The straightforward premise of “Brave” a princess who refuses to be betrothed and her relationship with her mother felt quaint in the context of the previous films. The story of Scottish princess Merida, and her journey towards self-actualisation, felt less ground-breaking than the studio’s more overtly unusual premises, such as an old widower chasing adventure in “Up”, the robot love story in “Wall-E”, or a rat with culinary ambitions in “Ratatouille”.

Disney had, in fact, bought Pixar Studios six years earlier, so that “Brave” was, technically, a Disney film. It was a foray into the princess-mode of storytelling that was more reminiscent of Disney. Although the reception was positive, the general feeling then was that “Brave” was good but not great Pixar material. By that point, the studio’s previous 12 features across 17 years had defined it as a cultural behemoth in animation.

When “Brave” premiered at the Seattle International Festival in June, 2012, it was the first feature from Pixar Animation Studios to feature a female protagonist.

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