On a scorching afternoon in LA, I’m in a cinema in The Grove, the city’s swanky open-air shopping mall. I feel a bit strange. Not because I’m a solitary man at a showing of a kids’ cartoon, although that’s weird enough. (Weirder still: there are other unaccompanied blokes in the darkened theatre. What’s their excuse?) No, I’m welling up because Brave, the latest animation from Pixar, is giving me, a Scotsman, thousands of miles from heart and hearth, a severe dose of homesickness.
Brave is that kind of film: a love letter to a romanticised, Hollywood vision of Scotland, centred on the volatile relationship between a rebellious kid and her mother. Even if the kid is a flame-haired tomboy princess (voiced by Kelly Macdonald) in a mythical Caledonia of witches, sword-wielding clansmen and murderous bears, while the mum is a graceful queen (Emma Thompson) married to a one-legged warrior-king (Billy Connolly), I relate.
Kevin McKidd knows the feeling. So does his one-time Trainspotting co-star Ewan McGregor. In Brave, McKidd, born and raised in the Highlands, is the voice of clan chief Lord MacGuffin and his son Young MacGuffin. The latter is a suitor of heroine Princess Merida, brought to sparky life by Macdonald, another Trainspotting alumnus. McKidd gives both characters an accent close to his own, with an added topspin of ‘teuchter’ (the Scottish word for a yokel).
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Brave is that kind of film: a love letter to a romanticised, Hollywood vision of Scotland, centred on the volatile relationship between a rebellious kid and her mother. Even if the kid is a flame-haired tomboy princess (voiced by Kelly Macdonald) in a mythical Caledonia of witches, sword-wielding clansmen and murderous bears, while the mum is a graceful queen (Emma Thompson) married to a one-legged warrior-king (Billy Connolly), I relate.
Kevin McKidd knows the feeling. So does his one-time Trainspotting co-star Ewan McGregor. In Brave, McKidd, born and raised in the Highlands, is the voice of clan chief Lord MacGuffin and his son Young MacGuffin. The latter is a suitor of heroine Princess Merida, brought to sparky life by Macdonald, another Trainspotting alumnus. McKidd gives both characters an accent close to his own, with an added topspin of ‘teuchter’ (the Scottish word for a yokel).
print of the article and photos
Read the full article here
