Don’t believe the mediocre reviews that state that Brave is like a Cars B-level Pixar movie. Those who don’t see how revolutionary it is as a movie are not looking at it for what it is.

On January 25th, 2006, Disney–long considered the gold standard of the cartoon movie–purchased Pixar, the young upstart who had spent the last decade showing everyone how old and out-of-touch Disney’s animation studios had become. Since then we’ve been waiting for the inevitable–the Disney fairytale, done Pixar style.

In 2010, Disney released Tangled, the first princess movie since acquiring Pixar. But this was no Pixar film. It was a Disney Princess movie that looked like its animators were aping the Pixar style. It was a generous C+ effort, but certainly did not come anywhere close to the heydays of the gold or silver ages of Disney cartoons. Now Pixar has answered back. Disney wants a Pixar-style princess fairy tale. Pixar had given it to them. It is vitally important to understand that this is what Brave is. Merida, the heroine, is being included in the Disney Princess pantheon, and will be marketed to little girls the same way every princess in their line, from Snow White to Rapunzel has been.

That princess, and this movie, are part of that history now. Taken from that view, this fairy tale is nothing sort of revolutionary.

Why is Brave so revolutionary? Part of it is that they created their own fairy tale. This is no Hans Christian Anderson story. Grimm is nowhere to be seen. The story that Pixar tells has many of the hallmarks of those old legends, and could easily be mistaken for one of them. Willful heroine makes bad decision, must set world back to rights. There are little touches here and there of the Disney-esque silliness we’ve grown accustom to having, with talking animals, and brooms that sweep by themselves. But make no mistake, this story is one created by modern day hands.

Let’s start with the glaring change: Merida’s parents are alive.

Take a quick look down the list of those illustrious cartoon Princess pantheon Meirda is about to join, and there’s one thing every one of them has in common: dead/absentee parents. Those who do have a living attentive parent always have a father, never a mother. The lack of mother is always part of their hardship, their trouble. It’s a piece of why they have to grow up. But that’s not realistic. Most girls have mothers who are alive. They don’t have dead saintly mothers, they have living mothers with opinions and thoughts. These girls have to grow up just the same, and without the easy romanticism a dead mother allows. Merida’s relationship with her mother is in fact the heart of the film, and brings me to my next point.

This is a love story. But there’s no handsome prince. Instead, there are three princes. None of them are handsome, and all of them about as interested in marrying Merida as she is in marrying them–that is to say, not at all. The princes are besides the point. They are minor characters. Instead this love story is that of the love between a girl and her mother. I was most struck by this during the scene after Merida and her mother have left the castle and have struck out in the woods together. Merida is teaching her mother to hunt and fish, and proving that all those wild child things her mother never approved of her doing actually come in handy. As they stand together in the stream catching fish, the music swells, and we have that moment in every Disney fairy tale where the heroine and the prince bond together and start down the path to falling in love. Except there’s no prince–here it is mother and daughter. This brings me to my last point.

The major complaint in the reviews of Brave is how two dimensional the characters are who are not Merida or her mother. Or, to put it another way, how two-dimensional all the male characters are.

I am assuming we have heard of the Bechdel test. Well, if there was an opposite-Bechdel test where two men had to talk together about something other than the heroine of the movie, Brave would fail it. In fairy tale movie aimed towards girls, I do not consider this a bad thing. Recently there was a study done that showed that modern media boosts the self-esteem of white boys. Because the bulk of television and movies are all geared towards their experience and their world. How many movies are geared towards the inner life of a female heroine? Time and again, it is always a male lead (It was, for instance, never Hermoine Granger and That Time I Save Two Idiots From Doing Something Stupid.) In fact, girl characters are regularly relegated to two dimensional characters, whose only job is to prop up the male characters.

Brave turns that formula on its head. The men are only there to serve as a chorus to the two female characters at the heart of the film. Pixar hasn’t just made a brand new fairy tale for the 21st century, it’s made the first truly feminist fairy tale for little girls. They made a movie I would show to my three-year old nieces without a second’s reservation about the message it sends.

That is revolutionary.