Brave (Pixar's)

A recently(ish) film by Pixar, Brave, features heavily archery. The story itself is good and I enjoyed it in the movies, but the setting, a medieval Scotland, is plagued by anachronistic stereotypes of scots invented in the Mel Gibson epic Braveheart. Since it's debut in 1995, every single "medieval" scottish cosplayer, picture or a movie character just has to have a kilt, and blue war paint on their face and body. The fact is that those two things have absolutely nothing to do with each other. And the blue paint nothing to do with scots either!

Picts (Picti, the name given by the Romans means 'painted folk') were the (possibly Celtic) people who used the blue war paint. They lived in Caledonia (from a name of one Pictish tribe Caledones) which was in the place of modern Scotland, at the late iron age, in Ancient time period, before Middle Ages.
Kilt on the other hand originates in the scottish highlands in the 16th century! That's modern age.

There's over a millennia between the use of the two, and they were/are used by a different people. Picts were no longer present at Caledonia when some pirates from Ireland – called Scots – came there, and gave the name for the modern country (not independent, still).

But now to the archery stuff!


Good:

The archery is extremely well presented in Brave-movie. The animators have really searched for proper historical and archerical reference, and actually used them in the final product. A thing rarely seen in other movies, so congratulations to Pixar for that! May it be because this is a computer animation, and other archery featuring movies are mainly made with real human actors, with a wide range of possible human errors in archery? An animation character can do things with a bow that a human cannot without proper training.
Meridas shooting form is almost perfect (as in picture C for example), the line of the arrow and the lines of both the arms are parallel as they should. She also has a hip quiver, which is very good!


Mistakes:

1. At least back in the days the English longbow (the second most overrated weapon after only 'Teh-Bestest-Eva-Katana') was the main choice of weapon for archer characters in movies. Nowadays the wages have turned in favour of a recurve bow, my favourite of the two main bow types. However, a recurve bow is primarily associated with either Eastern cultures (from Anatolia to Japan), or then Ancient peoples around the Mediterranean (Greeks, Romans etc.), while a longbow is quintessentially a Western European weapon, the most famous incarnation of it being the Welsh (English) longbow of the Middle Ages. In Brave, they had the perfect place to use the longbow, but instead they chose to give Merida a recurve bow. This is an error in my mind.
2. In the picture B can be seen a very strange thing, Meridas bow's lower limb has some stones tied to it! Why would that be, I have no idea. Completely useless and in fact a harmful idea, which makes the bow unnecessarily heavier. In other scenes the bows limbs have some strange discs attached to them, also with no use whatsoever.
3. In the screencapture C the fletching of the arrow is too back since it touches the string and the fingers of the archer. There should be more room after the nock of the arrow.
4. Most of the time Merida shoots with the bow vertically, like it is properly done, but in the picture D she shoots horizontally, a modern fashion style, which is thought to look 'cool', but it's only stupid. This movie almost avoided that cliché, but falls short here.