The way the witch warned Merida of the possible consequences behind giving the spell to her mother strongly suggested (in my mind) that it could be something that could kill her. And still Merida agreed to use the spell on her mom.

This is where Merida lost my empathy and the movie as a whole lost my interest, although it's not the only reason. I was really getting into it, too (despite the silliness of the witch), but it never recovered after this (how could it?).

Any human being with any concept of right or wrong would start questioning whether using such a spell would be a good idea at this point.

Even if a character is hopelessly ignorant and naive, and never learned to be anything but selfish, there should be some kind of instinctual protectiveness of or concern for one's own mother. A story can only push things so far, and this one went too far for many of us.

This is what makes Merida, to me, the worst of the Disney Princesses, even worse than Ariel. Ariel may have made some stupid choices but I think she would've given it a second thought had she known that it would've endangered her father's life in the process.

Ariel is bad enough as it is, but yeah, Merida strikes me as even worse. It's one thing to have faults, as we all do, and to hurt the ones we love in some ways (don't we all occasionally?), but for goodness' sake this was not merely foolish but unnaturally cold and calculated! What does Disney and now Pixar have against redheads, anyway?

This movie is so stupid that I couldn't watch for more than fifteen minutes. And I usually like Disney. The animation and characters design are excellent but the script is pretty silly.

Yes, that spell thing was just… off. Not a great Pixar film, but it was on sale for ten cents. I decided to watch it on a 2.5 inch portable black and white cathode ray TV.