Here’s a few fun facts about Brave and its technical and production challenges. Enjoy!
- 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 in the film.
- Merida has more than 1500 individually sculpted, curly red strands that generate about 111,700 total hairs.
- Several castles served as reference for the DunBroch family castle, most notably Eilean Donan Castle in the Highlands and Dunnottar Castle, located just south of Stonehaven.
- For each clan, artists at Pixar created a new, unique tartan design.
- The Brave production team took two separate research trips to Scotland and made visits to specific historical landmarks, took thousands of pictures and attended cultural events in an effort to get a flavor for the culture.
- In Scotland, there is a natural phenomenon of swamp and bog gasses that seep up through the earth, and are blue in color like the flames of a pilot light. Scottish lore says that some people would follow these lights, thinking they were little fairies. The production team took this myth and created the “will o’ the wisps“. The will o’ the wisps light a path and beckon Merida into the forest, leading her to change her fate.
- The Callanish Standing Stones on the Isle of Lewis are one of the oldest of Scotland’s mysterious wonders. They provided reference for the mysterious ring of stones Merida discovers.
- 111,394 storyboards were drawn, 84,421 of which were delivered to Pixar’s editorial team to create story reels of the work-in-progress film.
