#13: Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.
Merida wants to be her own person, but doesn’t recognize the importance of her position. Her mother wants her to hold to tradition and isn’t a very good communicator. The two clash. (Okay, this one they got right, but for that matter the whole first act is actually quite good.)
#14: Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.
Why must this story be told? I guess because someone felt they could have gotten out of doing something if they had only turned who was pissing them off into a bear. After all, what kind of pull does a bear have? Growl! GRRRRRR! Sorry bear, can’t understand you, looks like I won’t be getting married after all.
#15: If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.
How would I feel? I guess trapped and then scared, because I didn’t want to get married and so I tried to poison my mom with a pastry and now she’s a bear. After that I guess I would be relieved because she didn’t actually die from eating the pastry of which I had no idea what it would do.
#16: What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.
On the second sunrise the princess’ mom will be a bear forever. Hmmm… reasons to root for Merida… Because she’s a whiny little brat? Nah, how about if they don’t succeed in turning her mom back into a human, her father might kill her and would never believe in magic at all and just think the bear ate his wife, which it didn’t. Then they’d need to call in a psychiatrist to figure out why she ran away and it would be revealed it’s because her husband was a big brute that didn’t respect his wife and only cared about her when she was in trouble or if there was something around he could kill.
Odds = stacked.
#17: No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on — it’ll come back around to be useful later.
I imagine this rule played heavily in the production as new writers and a new director was added to the project.
#18: You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best and fussing. Story is testing, not refining.
Probably would have been best to stop fussing with the “My mother is a bear” angle and back track to a more obvious option.
#19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.
Good thing it’s not a coincidence a similar spell was cast on someone that turned into a bear that chomped off Merida’s father’s leg, which sparked his whole hatred of any bear, or that Merida is a superb archer and swordsman. Otherwise at the end when the old bear shows up and when Merida fends off her father with her skills it doesn’t end up being coincidental.
#20: Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How [would] you rearrange them into what you DO like?
Instead of Hobo with a Shotgun it would have been Bear with a Shotgun. Instead of Mr. Popper’s Penguins it would have been Mr. Belvedere’s Bears. I can do this all day. Wrath of the Bears, Aliens vs. Bears, Beverly Hills Grizzly Man, etc.
#21: You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?
This is hard, because I would never feed my mother a magic pastry from a crazy old witch with a bear fetish, that lives in a hut in the woods and disappears after I turn my back on her for one second. But that’s just me.
#22: What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.
A spoiled little brat doesn’t want to get married and tries to change her mother by feeding her a magic pastry.
Her mother turns into a bear.
The mom learns a valuable lesson about trying to make her daughter do anything.
The end.
Now I understand looking at any movie under such a critical eye will find faults. With Brave, however, I couldn’t help but comment having been so frustrated with the second and third acts of this movie, knowing how great the filmmakers at Pixar are at storytelling, which is clearly evident in everything Coats reveals in her rules.
So what happened? Why was the story in Brave so poorly developed and resolved with such limited imagination and heart?
EXTRA: For another solid read on what went wrong with Brave, read Laremy’s piece at Slashfilm titled “The 15 Reasons Brave Doesn’t Feel Like a “Pixar” Film“.
