I never thought I’d write a title like that, and yet here we are and I’m not mad about it.

I saw Brave not long after it came out and I remember enjoying it, though it did not hit a home run the way Tangled had two years earlier. In Brave I didn’t particularly like the way the male characters were handled, especially the potential suitors, and I think that was what kept me from rewatching it all these years. How the story portrays and treats the male characters is a conversation worth having, but is not the focus of this particular post, so we will pass over it.

On a whim, I rewatched Brave recently and can’t stop thinking about it for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I found the mother-daughter focus extremely compelling and portrayed quite differently than most mother-daughter stories. (The Gilmore Girls squabbly “best friend” dynamic is much more common.) I found the way Merida and her mother learned to love each other was rich and beautiful. But that is not the focus of this post either. It is time to move on to the main course, which is also the main premise of the story: the fact that Merida inadvertently turns her mother into a bear.

Now I think this element has made some people uncomfortable. And I actually think it was a bold move for Disney, because it should make us uncomfortable. Fed up with her mother, feeling trapped and scared about the future, feeling unheard and misunderstood, Merida pays a witch for a spell to change her mother, thinking it will change one teeny little thing: her mother’s insistence that she marry. Instead, she changes nearly everything about her mother because it changes her into a bear.

There are a lot of interesting things about this. First off, what other Disney princess has a story focused entirely on fixing a mistake she made and dealing with the consequences of a bad decision? At worst, Ariel’s big mistake was being impulsive and naive. She truly thought she was just risking herself. And even though Mulan admits to herself, at her low point, that there was a lot of pride in her decision to become a soldier, the audience knows that she also truly did it out of love.

It is hard to defend Merida. I know what it feels like to try to communicate over and over and have someone not listen. I still don’t think that justifies trying to manipulate them the way she did her mother. But that is the point. Her decision to use magic to change her mother’s mind was a decision to violate her mother’s autonomy, and the consequences are appropriately devastating. Her mother is temporarily turned into an animal, and although she retains her memories and personality for now, the change may become permanent. Now they are forced to spend time together and go on a quest of sorts to put it right. On a surface level, it also communicates the common Disney theme that trying to avoid your problems with magical shortcuts always comes with a price. But whether intentionally or not, I think they touched on something much more profound.

There is an ideological history of humans turning into animals. Perhaps most familiar is the biblical story of God reducing Nebuchadnezzar into a sort of pasture animal who lived with donkeys and oxen. That was due to his own boasting and pride. But in late antiquity, we find an interesting train of thought in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy:

Boethius claims (in a tradition leading back to Aristotle) that when we participate in wickedness and vice we lose something of what it means to be human, not ontologically, but psychologically and emotionally.

“[T]hough they retain the outward appearance of the human body, wicked people change into animals with regard to their state of mind (Boethius, Book IV).”

Interestingly enough, C.S. Lewis has a scene in Prince Caspian where, after facing the truth that many talking animals have gone wild and lost the gift that Aslan gave them when the world began to be intelligent, speaking beasts, Lucy wonders:

“Wouldn’t it be dreadful if some day in our own world, at home, men started going wild inside, like the animals here, and still looked like men, so that you’d never know which were which? (C.S. Lewis, 122)”

Thomas Aquinas says something similar to Boethius in the Summa:

“[O]f such men the same is to be said as of irrational animals, which follow of necessity the impulse of their passions; for in them there is neither movement of reason, nor, consequently, of will (Aquinas I-II, 10, 3, body).”

Furthermore, a similar train of thought can be found in other cultures. In Kwame Gyeke’s article on African Ethics, he notes how closely morality is tied up with character and personhood.

“In the Akan society, when an individual’s conduct very often appears cruel, wicked, selfish, ungenerous or unsympathetic, it would be said of that individual that ‘he is not a person (Gyeke, 11).”

Gyeke is very clear that the individual is still considered a human being, not an animal. Yet, clearly, something is lacking.

While this lineage of ethical thought would be worth digging into by itself, what’s fascinating here, though, is that in Brave the mother doesn’t turn into a bear because of her own wickedness or vice. The way Kant would put it, Merida uses her mother as a means to an end and not as an end in herself, and that is dehumanizing. As one version of his famous maxim states: “So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means (Kant, 496).” The mother turns into a bear because Merida is treating her as less than fully human.

In a society that is all about getting what you want out of relationships and out of life, I find this message in Brave to be incredibly refreshing. Most movies and books these days actually teach us how to manipulate others through the behavior of their characters. Ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre argues that manipulation has become a crucial part of our society (MacIntyre, 74). (For more on Kant’s universal maxim regarding people and manipulation in our society, see my post on Elrond in LOTR for Mythic Mind).

Now, of course I’m not claiming that the writers of Brave had read Aristotle, Boethius, Aquinas, Kant, or Lewis. Whether they did or not, they struck upon something profound in Merida’s story: we need to treat other humans like humans. Attempting to manipulate another person’s will is a gross violation of their personhood.

I can’t help but think that for the rest of her life, every time Merida was frustrated with someone and tempted to try to force them to her will, she would remember the image of that bear. Maybe it’s an image we all need to keep in mind.

Sources:

Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologica, First Complete American Edition, Volume 2, tr. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Benziger Brothers: New York, 1947.

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trns V.E. Watts, Penguin Books: New York, 1969.

Gyekye, Kwame, “African Ethics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2025 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2025/entries/african-ethics/&gt;

Kant, Immanuel. “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.” Ethical Theory: An Anthology. Russ Shafer-Landau. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, 496.

Lewis, C.S. Prince Caspian, Harper Trophy: New York, 1979.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.