Brian Ferguson: Brave effect must not be underestimated IT FEELS like an awfully long time ago that I spotted the intriguing news that Scotland was about to be brought to the big screen by the combined power of Disney and Pixar. In fact, it was almost five years ago that the recently-merged companies announced early details of a feature to revolve around a Scottish princess. If the casting of Reese Witherspoon seemed slightly incongruous at the time, the fact Billy Connolly, Emma Thompson and Julie Walters were also on board offered a clue to the shape of things to come. It was an article by former Edinburgh International Film Festival director Hannah McGill that had brought it on to my radar. Looking back, she seemed to realise the scale of the behemoth heading our way, even before she got the chance to stage the UK premiere of Toy Story 3 in her farewell gala in 2010. No-one could have predicted that, within months, that festival would be looking for a new figurehead when her resignation was announced, as well as the calamitous matters that were later to engulf the event. By the time her eventual successor as artistic director, Chris Fujiwara, strode on stage last June at the Festival Theatre to introduce that Disney-Pixar production, much had changed. The film itself had been renamed, from The Bear and The Bow to simply Brave, its original writer and director Brenda Chapman had been replaced after much behind-the-scenes anguish, and Scottish actress Kelly Macdonald had long replaced Witherspoon when the latter pulled out of the project. By this time Brave was being ridiculously hyped as the saviour of the entire Scottish tourism industry, with £7 million of public money committed to related marketing initiatives. To question any of this was considered virtually treasonable in VisitScotland and Scottish Government circles. In the short term, Brave certainly provided the festival with an almighty boost 12 months on from a disastrous overhaul of the event that was panned by critics, shunned by audiences and left long-time supporters cringing with embarrassment. Although Mr Fujiwara's first festival was well received by the critics, it is probably not unfair to say he was lucky that Brave was ready to be premiered last summer. It did a remarkable power of good in restoring the event's status, brought much-needed glamour Edinburgh and was a welcome return for the kind of red-carpet event unwisely banished in 2011. Whatever any "independent" analysis of the Brave campaigns eventually show, the film most certainly did not rescue Scottish tourism last summer, as the latest figures show. It was ironic that those figures partly overshadowed Brave's Oscar nomination, the two pieces of news emerging on the same day. No sooner had the Oscar nomination been confirmed, the critics began to carp - that Brave wasn't really Scottish, that it was all made-up fictional nonsense and was nothing whatsoever to do with the Scottish film industry. Quite how a film set in Scotland, with a cast full of leading Scottish acting talent, featuring the work of several singers, musicians and composers, and which was directly inspired by several parts of the Scottish landscape could not be considered remotely "Scottish" is beyond me. The production process actually saw two separate and extensive recces around the country, while the Callanish Standing Stones - to use but one example - were a key inspiration for the film. You could tie yourself up in knots looking at the "Scottish" credentials of films from the past few decades. If pedantic enough, a strong case could certainly be made against Braveheart - with its American writer, Australian star and director and Hollywood funding, not to say the Irish locations deployed for most of the shoot. I'd argue that it would be equally ludicrous to tag Braveheart "not Scottish" as Brave, which actually meets some of Creative Scotland's official criteria for financial support. Let me put it this way. Had Brave not been part of last year's EIFF, the event's "Scottish" element - particularly in the fundamental area of feature films - would have been threadbare to say the least, and would have been a bit of an indictment on one of Scotland's principal arts events. Would anyone seriously suggest it should have been given the cold shoulder?