June 1st, 2022 
Jackson Murphy 
Pixar’s Brave won the Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature. It was released 10 years ago this month to critical acclaim and more than half a billion dollars at the worldwide box office. To mark the occasion, ABC is airing Brave for the first time this Monday June 6th at 8pm. Co-director Steve Purcell shares his favorite memories. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)
Jackson Murphy: How does it feel that it’s been 10 years since the release of Brave?
Steve Purcell: It’s amazing because the time just goes by and you don’t realize it. And recently I was getting notices on Facebook: “Here’s your Facebook memory from 10 years ago!” And it was being in New York City and seeing the Times Square billboards and signs on the buses going by with Merida. It was a really fun time when the movie came out because they sent me on a Disney Cruise, and the movie opened on the cruise, so I got to introduce the movie there and did a talk about the movie on the Disney Cruise with my family. My kids were pretty young. We wanted to make sure we stopped in New York to see the billboards and presence of the movie. It’s amazing it’s blown by.
JM: That’s awesome. I’ve never been on a Disney Cruise, but obviously they have been promoted so much over the years and as game show prizes. What is something people would be surprised to learn goes on on a Disney Cruise?
SP: Oh, it’s like a little city. We were actually on one of the smaller boats, but it’s so expansive. And the theater where we showed the movie was bigger than the theaters in my town at home. It was amazing — packed full of cruisers all watching the movie together in a theater you would never guess is on the water.
JM: That is really cool. I love that Brave is gonna be on ABC this Monday June 6th. It’s the premiere of it being on the network. I think there’s still some prestige of showing the movie on the network.
SP: Oh sure. Even though I have a big collection of movies, if something comes on that I’m interested in on TV, I’ll just end-up watching the broadcast version. Like you say, there’s something about it being broadcast and watching it in real time that’s different from plugging in a disc and watching that. A lot of times I’ll just enjoy the fact that something’s on TV at that time and just see it through.
JM: So I think we’ve got your Monday night covered then.
SP: (laughs) Yeah. I haven’t watched the movie in a while. So it’ll be fun. It actually takes a while to be able to watch as an audience member when you’ve worked on something because you’re so attached to it and so in every moment… there’s some threshold where you kind of cross over. “Now I’m an audience member and I can just watch this like everybody else instead of thinking about every moment that was created in the process.”
JM: If you think of one memory… of the production of Brave, what is that top memory?
SP: I think it always ends-up being the research trip to Scotland. I had never been to Scotland. Members of our story crew and some of our artists and Brenda [Chapman] and Mark Andrews — we all went on this bus tour of Scotland. We started in Edinburgh and we traveled around the perimeter of the country, and we stopped at castles and saw standing stones and we were in the Highlands and met with people in every town so we could hear their folklore. Immersing ourselves in the country allowed ourselves to create an authentic version of it and something that felt correct and to be celebrated. I think the movie is a love letter to Scotland — visually it’s like being there.
JM: I saw the film the night before it opened: Thursday June 21st [2012]. Disney had a preview screening near me. I was there with a few other critics, and we were blown away by the visuals. We thought they were probably the best ever in a Pixar movie. Clearly all that research paid off when it came to the details and the look.
SP: Yeah, and they were the most challenging of any Pixar movie to that time because everything in Scotland is fuzzy or mossy or covered in lichen. So everything is made of things that the computer hates. The computer wants to organize everything, [but] our movie is made out of things that are random, like curly hair and a furry cloak and a tree covered in mossy moss. It was quite a challenge, so our technical people really swung for the fence and were able to bring everything home in a way we had never seen in a Pixar movie before.
Steve Purcell
JM: Just saw Kelly Macdonald in Operation Mincemeat. She’s extraordinary in that — and perfect as Merida in this.
SP: She was so great at channeling her 16 year old self. We were kind of teasing her that it was so easy for her to get back to that zone where she was kind of a petulant teen that’s pushing back on her mom. And that tone of voice and that kind of attitude that teenagers have. She was able to inhabit that in a really great way.
JM: The whole cast is excellent, including Emma Thompson and Craig Ferguson.
SP: We loved working with all the actors. It was great to be able to travel around. One day we would be in New York recording Kelly Macdonald and Billy Connolly, and then we’d have to take an overnight trip, and then we were working with Emma Thompson the next day. So it was pretty cool to hang out with these people and see how they all have their own process. And a lot of the Scottish actors were really pleased to get to use their real accents in the movie. [For] a lot of the work they do, they’ll have to hide their accent or play American or a different nationality. They were able to celebrate their own voices in this. Kevin McKidd, who played Lord MacGuffin, played his own son too. And he had this dialect that was incomprehensible. That was the joke: whatever he said, even his dad didn’t quite understand what he was saying. [McKidd] based that on his mom’s native dialect called Doric. So he would send his lines to her and she would interpret the lines and say, “Here’s how you can say it.” It’s actually an authentic slurring of his lines.
JM: And you contributed to one of the songs as well.
SP: Yeah, with Patrick Doyle, the composer. There’s a song that was in the story reels. It was a storytelling way of describing the threat of the Mor’du — this legendary bear. So we had written this song for the people in the dance hall to sing — how they’re gonna take down this bear and how terrifying he is. Patrick Doyle worked on a version of that, so I was able to contribute to the lyrics, just thinking of nasty ways to take down this nutty, scary bear.
JM: One of the big success stories of Brave during that year was its awards season run, winning the Golden Globe, BAFTA and Academy Award.
SP: It was really exciting — just seeing those honors… “Line ’em up, knock ’em down”… just great to see the film honored. Very gratifying to see that it landed amongst those award givers.
JM: One level of the lasting impact is Merida being part of the iconic Disney Princess group. I remember there was talk early on, “Well, she’s Pixar, so does she go into this? Yes she does!” She deserves to be in that lineup with everybody else.
SP: It was fun to help create a character that was entering that pantheon of princesses and having a life outside of the movie. And actually being a character in the parks was an interesting wrinkle to that too. “What’s she gonna wear in the park? And when it’s cold? Here’s what her costume looks like. Here’s what her signature would be like if she’s signing an autograph for a kid. Here’s some kind of patter she might have to interact.” I remember the first time seeing the actress playing her in the park, I just watched for a long time at how the actor was able to behave as our character that we created and how sweet she was with the kids — showing them how to use the bow. It’s quite an exciting thing to help create a character that’s gonna endure through the history of Disney.
JM: Why will we wanna talk about Brave in another 10 years?
SP: She was a very unusual princess. We wanted to create a story that felt like a piece of folklore that we just hadn’t heard yet somehow. As far as princesses go, she broke some boundaries. It was interesting that we created a story where she was interacting with her mom, rather than having a stepmom or having a mom that was absent. It was a relationship that started with Brenda’s story of herself and her daughter. Myself and Mark Andrews — we all kids that we could mine those experiences of interacting with our kids. That part of it is very relatable: the parent-child relationship and the push and pull that happens with them. This story will continue to resonate with families.
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