Who’s the Brave-est of them all?

While everybody is waiting with bated breath for the finale of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy (which opens this very Thursday!) let’s not forget that outside of The Avengers, The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises there’s still ton of other potentially geeky movies out there (Prometheus, MIB3, etc) as the summer comes to a close. Up on our list is the next movie by one of our favourite movie makers, Pixar, who’ll be finally releasing the movie Brave on Aug 8, 2012, right before National Day.

With Brave, Pixar tackles the classic Disney princess tale, this time featuring Princess Merida – a red-haired, Scottish girl who defies tradition and ends up unleashing chaos in the kingdom. Turning to a “wise woman” she ends up unleashing something worse, and she has to turn to her wits and her archer skills (see: Hawkeye, Katniss) to save the day. Disney’s last princess-adventure was the pretty-darn-good Tangled, and this time it’ll be nice to see what the Disney magic added to the Pixar wizardry gives us.

I’m sure all of us know at least one brave woman in our lives – maybe nobody like Marie Curie or Rosa Parks, but someone amazing nonetheless. Thinking of Brave reminds me of something that just happened over the weekend, in Kuala Lumpur. We’ve all heard the stories about how KL can be pretty unsafe (armed robbery, car accidents), even though Malaysia is touted to be the safest country in Southeast Asia, and when my wife and I were split up in KL and she had to take a cab there, silly me was afraid she’d get into some kind of trouble.

She did: The taxi driver tried to take a longer route to fleece her. Of course, it’s not as if he drove into some dark alley or kidnapped her, but the moment he took the wrong route with the excuse of “there got jam”, her klaxons rang. Anybody (probably me, who had then touched Justin Bieber and was wondering if anybody wanted my hand if I’d offer to sell it to them) would have panicked given the stories of crime and villainy in Malaysia, but instead of buckling she did the exact opposite, pointedly telling the driver that he was obviously going the wrong way. Amid his protestations of innocence and “there really got jam”, she then fell silent and seethed. That worked – the driver started to panic, seeing that he had failed to pull any sort of sheep fur over any ocular orifices, even drove against traffic to prove that he was doing his utmost to get her there post haste. All in all – my wife got to the final location safe, and then proceeded to have a good time. Brave? I’d say so. (I’d like to add that I love Malaysia, and whatever country you’re in the key thing is to be careful, whether you’re in Singapore or Syria.)

So what about you? When’s the last time you kicked ass?

Catch Disney • Pixar’s BRAVE in cinemas this 8 August 2012 and like the Official Walt Disney Studios Singapore Facebook Page, follow the @disneystudiosSG and subscribe to Official Disney Studios Singapore
YouTube Channel!