And now finally on to more pleasant things…kinda of
One of the things that may strike you if you read numerous reviews and forum discussions about the movie Brave is the amount of discomfort people express.
the wrongheaded nature of this plot twist completely alters the direction of “Brave,” and not in a good way. —LA Times
Brave (2012) Is Pixar’s Most Impersonal and Least Consequential Film and a More Troubling Failure Than Cars 2–Huffington Post
I can’t help but wonder if some of the stronger reactions are coming from the fact that, despite the English being spoken and the familiar themes this was–for many American viewers–essentially a foreign film.
Our culture, thanks in large part to Disney themselves, is largely steeped in a narrow slice of the folklore pie.* Our archetypes of familiarity come from the most romantic of fairy tales and are stuck in a retelling of the same story. Whether she’s falling 
in love with a beast or a boy with legs or the idea of love (Someday my prince will come ???), the fairy tales we know and return to are all focused on the Maid. We are a society in love with youth and all its promises. Our biggest trend in fiction for the last decade and a half has been books written about maidens, for maidens and around which we linger even as we ourselves move from Mother to Crone.
Celtic lore–largely overlooked by Disney until now–is different. While there are indeed fair maidens, there are also shapeshifters and wise women. While our myths of comfort focus 
on dancing girls, the Celtic lore has Queen Maebh killing pregnant women and starting wars to steal cows. It’s a harder series of archetypes to digest to be sure, but one that is ultimately more fulfilling.
It’s interesting to me to see this film coming along now, short weeks after my forty-second birthday when I am assuredly shifting from Mother to Crone in my own life.** To be sure, even Brave with it’s passing grade on the Bechdel test, doesn’t spend too much time on the old Crafty Carver upon whose spells the entire structure of this mythic society have 
spun for generations. But she is there, and she has the answers. Her age and wisdom are what put things right even as much as they upend normalcy along the way. We’re still most of us stuck trying to figure out Cronehood on our own even as we look back fondly upon the Maid.
Ideally as our society ages we’ll see more stories about older women and their lives. I feel that in many ways Brave was a shot over the bow (as it were) and I’m a bit sad that the oddness people feel from the film may impede the maturing and branching out of our folklore.
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*And the award for most awkward metaphor goes to….
**I have an eerie counterpoint in Hollywood it would seem. Father of The Bride came out the year I got married. Friends was the hit show when I was a twenty-something trying to figure it all out and now that I’m getting older and grayer, along comes Brave.
Just Another Pretty Farce 
I’m still very much stuck in motherhood, which is fine with me. I can wait to be a crone. 😉 Yes, I have to agree with this. It’s as if our collective society has not matured and is still trying to remain with the Eve anima. In Christian circles this is especially true. In Jung’s schema (I love Jung’s ideas, so I apologize ahead of time), the Helen archetype comes after Eve. Helen is the independent female who can fight her own battles. If you’ve ever looked at the various and growing patriarchal movements among Christian denominations, you would notice a trend of Christians holding females to that first level, where the woman must always keep her erotic appeal, as well as always depend on her husband for all things. It kind of disgusts me because you would think the transformation of the Christian mind through Jesus would help mature Christians beyond where the rest of society is, but it seems the opposite, to be honest.
I think the not-having-human-babies has made me more anxious to fast-forward the Mother anima, simply because it feels inapplicable on many occasions. Although simple analysis shows how even a childless woman of maturity has key aspects of the Mother function, which is as much about creating and organising and healing as it is about birthing and nurturing children.
I have to admit that I’m woefully underfamiliar with Jung (I think that’s my project for the fall, perhaps, to mend that deficiency) but I think you have EXACTLY pegged it. The modern Church is trapped in viewing women as the Maiden and insisting that we hew to that in spite of our age.
I was interacting with a young woman in a spiritual crisis a while ago and was struck once again by how intense the battles are that we women are called to fight and how unprepared many women are for them. Since “women’s ministry” is so often about staying pretty and sexually circumspect yet desirable in proper context, we are often overlooked in the preparations to become warriors of prayer and faith.
I honestly wonder, as I think about this in depth, why it is that we’ve stuck ourselves on permanent fascination with Phase I of life? It’s not as though life itself stops there.
This is wonderful food for thought. I didn’t get to see Brave; my husband and son saw it, sans Mom, for reasons of timing exigency. Little guy thought it was too scary and big guy didn’t talk Jung. Can’t blame him!
I reread Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching books lately and the last one does real service to the crone, even though the protagonist is 16 and firmly a maiden.