Princess Merida rebels against her mother’s plans to arrange her marriage. Desperate to change her fate, she seeks help from a witch, receiving a spell that unintentionally transforms her mother, Queen Elinor, into a bear. As chaos spreads through the kingdom, Merida must undo the curse before it becomes permanent. Because of a misunderstanding, Merida thinks she has to repair the family tapestry she damaged during the argument, but once it is repaired her mother remains a bear. When the two rediscover their connection and mend their bond, Queen Elinor returns to her human form.
When Pixar began creating Brave, the team knew Merida’s wild, curly hair would be one of their biggest challenges. No existing tool could manage thousands of tight curls that bounce, intertwine, and react to motion in such a complex way. This led to the development of Taz, a custom software system built specifically to control every strand of her hair.
It was powerful enough to handle the 1,500 hand-placed curls on Merida's head. Taz accounted for all the interactions between different strands while making sure that every curl held its shape. The system also changed the effect of gravity on Merida's hair, using a gravity coefficient closer to the one on the moon than the one on Earth. With a lower gravity, the hair could keep its mass but flow and bounce in a natural way. To give the hair its softness, the lighting team used a mix of subsurface scattering and colored shadows to imitate the complex way curly hair scatters and transmits light.
It is the proprietary software developed and used in-house by Pixar Animation Studios in the animation of its features and short films. In 2012 it replaced Pixar's older proprietary animation software.
