There are no villains in our world, really. Most of our lives are filled with, "I've caused the problem myself. Why did I cause the problem?" It's our own agendas. It's our own vanity. It's our pride. It's our envy, all those things.
The one thing I love about telling stories is, we spend our whole lives going in and out of being better or worse, in our own character. But in a movie, the character transforms into the best they're going to be. So you take a whole life, what we live, that we have to constantly work at, and we shove it down into 80 minutes so we can see what this person goes through. We can see the human condition at high speed. That creates more intensity and more stakes in the story, but what we get out of that is like [claps], "That person overcame everything, and boy, that's inspirational. That's what I'm going to do." It empowers us.
--director of Pixar's Brave in an interview. The Onion's A.V. Club, June 21, 2012, p. 26.