But depressingly, she’s a princess, the most traditional role for female characters in children’s fictions. Merida is strong, capable and courageous. Brenda Chapman (The Prince of Egypt) was the director of Brave, until she was replaced in the last 18 months of production by Mark Andrews, and the halfway-there aspect of that triumph serves as an apt metaphor for Pixar’s halfway embrace of female empowerment within the text of Brave. But Pixar has never made a girl the lead until now, just as it’s never had a woman direct one of its films until now.

E and ant princess Atta in A Bug’s Life.

The animation giant has featured female characters in its movies, including adorable Boo in Monsters, Inc., daffy Dory in Finding Nemo, feisty chef Colette in Ratatouille, the clever robot Eve in WALL She’d rather ride her horse, drink from waterfalls and wield her bow and arrow, like a medieval Katniss. It’s about a flame-haired princess named Merida (voiced by Kelly Macdonald) who doesn’t want to get married. But we’re getting several thousand animated years ahead of ourselves.Follow is Pixar’s 13th movie. It’s in Brave, set in the Middle Ages, where moviegoers find a character that they first met more than a decade before in a seemingly unrelated film set several millennia in the future, at the far end of the Pixar timeline.

The theory begins and ends with Brave, the studio’s 13th feature film and one that falls at the very beginning of the animated universe’s chronology as we know it. The Grand Unified Theory of Pixar is a long tale, spanning centuries, of a struggle for the domination of Earth among humans, animals with humanlike consciousness, and sentient inanimate objects-AI machines. (A longer version of this article originally appeared on Negroni’s personal blog.

Negroni has condensed his original theory for Slate. Back in July, Jon Negroni went down an animated wormhole with his Grand Unified Theory of Pixar, an absurdly close reading of the studio’s canon that weaves together each of its 14 feature films to create a world that stretches several thousand years into the future only to eventually loop back upon itself.

Boo becomes the witch from brave