Brave Characters

Merida

OH MOTHER – The story of Merida and her relationship with her mother, Queen Elinor, was inspired by director Brenda Chapman’s own relationship with her young daughter.

COSTUME CHANGE – With five dresses, plus a cloak, quiver, hand wrap and necklace, as well as torn dresses, Merida has a total of 22 different costumes. She also has five different hairstyles. Diva? Never.

GOOD HAIR DAY – Merida has more than 1500 individually sculpted, curly red strands that generate about 111,700 total hairs.

BIG STRETCH — If Merida’s curls were straightened, her hair would be four feet long and reach the middle of her calf.

Queen Elinor

UNWRAPPED – If Elinor’s hair were unwrapped, it would be about six feet, six inches long.

King Fergus

COMPLICATED KING — Fergus wears nine different simulated garments at the same time—each has its own movement that must be “simulated” by algorithms in the computer. His head hair and mustache are also simulated, as well as his sporran (pocket-like pouch) and scabbard (sheath for a sword). He has arm hair, chest hair, hair lining in his boot, as well as a full bear pelt on his bear-clawed cloak—all of which are simulated in some way.

LOTSA LAYERS — To achieve the mass of Fergus’s kilt, the drape going across his chest has eight layers of cloth folded over and interacting with each other and other garments. The left, right and back sides of the drape have six layers each.

The Lords

A LITTLE FUZZY – Pixar artists divied up the Lords’ hairier characteristics in unique ways:

· Lord Dingwall has chest hair, arm hair, back hair and ear hair.

· Lord Macintosh and Fergus are the only characters with fur on their boots.

· Lord Macintosh is the only character with fur on his sporran.

TARTAN TIME — For each clan, artists at Pixar created a new, unique tartan design.

TAKING LIBERTIES — The DunBroch tartan pattern is physically impossible to make with traditional tartan weaving methods.

Tertiary Characters

HAIRY SITUATION — There are more than 100 unique hair/facial hair combinations used in “Brave” for human characters and animals.  Each variant can appear in any of nine different colors, creating more than 900 hairstyle/color variants.

Animals

FOUR-LEGGED FUR – Hair was created for 70 different animals—some living, some living forever as taxidermy—including 11 horses, 13 birds 7 bears, 16 other animals and 23 animal pelts.

THE WORLD IS MY INSPIRATION – The demon-bear Mor’du’s skin textures are based on satellite images of scorched earth.

Brave will be in theaters June 22nd.