The animators gave her strong, athletic legs, but in the final film they are rarely seen, as Merida usually wears a long dress. Over the course of the design process the character was drawn many ways, sometimes taller, sometimes older looking. “But the thing that would always underline everything,” Mr. Pilcher said, “was she always had to be appealing. We needed to always keep the essence of her personality intact.”

Scraggling The Tresses

In this drawing by Mr. Nolte, Merida’s hair begins to take more shape. Aspects of the hair stayed consistent throughout the design process: it was always red and always a little on the wild side. This sketch gets close to how the hair appears in the finished film, but its final look was an adjustment that Mr. Andrews made when he joined the production as director. “When I came on, they had already done the research and testing of her hair to arrive at the style,” he said. “So I asked if I could see the genesis of her hair, because I thought it needed a little more finessing to get the quality of the curly hair.” The team, Mr. Andrews said, showed him a “wedge” of Merida’s hair. The individual hairs were laser-straight. Lined up in a row, they would go in a curl, but Mr. Andrews said he thought they were too lined up and uniform. There was a parameter in the computer settings called “scraggle.” “It takes the straight lines of these curl points and jumbles them up and crisscrosses them, like real hair does.” Mr. Andrews was taken by this look and requested that the animators “turn up the scraggle,” and that solidified the final style.