Filed by KOSU News in Art & Life.
November 21, 2011

Dear Pixar,

It’s been almost two and a half years since I wrote to you and asked quite sincerely that you consider a movie about a girl who isn’t a princess. We needn’t relive the whole thing.

Now, you’ve released the first full trailer for your March 2012 film Brave — back then, known as The Bear And The Bow — which concerns a princess named Merida. And while I still hold out hope that you will find a place for a girl not born into royalty (and it’s fine if she’s a robot or a bug or a car or a pork chop, by the way), I am certainly glad for many, many things about it.

I like her big mess of kinky red hair. I like the fact that while she’s hard to see clearly (partly because she’s not constantly posing in party dresses, but is riding and fighting and climbing), it doesn’t appear that she’s been drawn to be without a rib cage. I like the way she holds court at the dinner table; I like her laugh. I like the word “hero” attached to her.

And I like the fact that there’s not a prince. I mean, maybe there is in the movie, but not in the trailer. This is, whatever the movie turns out to be, a moment of confidence that you can market a movie about a girl and make it clear that it’s about a girl and not about the guy who meets his match in that girl, and you can have confidence that you’ll be fine.

My mind has not changed. I look forward to that pork chop or that bug or that robot. But I said then that I was confident you’d make my favorite princess movie ever, and I’m optimistic that you just might. Those girls I talked about then, the girls with Band-Aids, the girls who only have outside voices and cackle laughs — they’re getting something they usually don’t in a movie like this, just because they’re being encouraged to see it for encouraging reasons. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]