Over the last 17 years, Pixar has provided the world with
some of the very best animated films that the genre has to offer. From Toy Story to The Incredibles to Up,
the studio has put together a ridiculously impressive stable of films and
basically didn’t miss between 1995 and 2011. Cars 2, though, was a huge disappointment and at the same time,
only served to highlight just how good this studio has been over the years. If
that film had been a DreamWorks or Sony Animation release, it would be
considered a decent-enough throw away family film and no one would think twice
about it. But because Pixar has set its standards so incredibly high, it seemed
like a tremendous flop because it didn’t have the strength to match up against
everything else these people have ever given us. Essentially, Pixar has become
an entity that is judged more by its failures than by its successes. So the
question is, to which side of that equation does Brave fall?
For lack of a better term, Merida (Kelly Macdonald) is a
tomboy. The heiress to a kingdom within the Scottish Highlands, Merida has
little patience for the duties of a princess and prefers to spend her time
riding horses, climbing mountains, and shooting arrows. When her father King
Fergus (Billy Connolly) and mother Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson) arrange for a
competition among the suitors of the kingdom to win the princess’ hand, Merida
takes her rebelliousness to a whole new level and upsets the careful balance of
power her father resides over. Anxious to prevent the arranged marriage, she
sneaks away into the forest and stumbles across a witch (Julie Waters) who
creates a spell to change Queen Elinor’s mind and thereby Merida’s fate. But
when the princess delivers the spell, Elinor is transformed into a bear,
leading to a desperate race to find a cure before the queen is left a bear for
eternity.
Brave is by far
the most traditional film Pixar has made to date. From talking toys to a robot
love story, this studio has always stayed away from fairy tales and the like
instead choosing to push wholly unique visions that consistently hit the mark.
As such, it took me a few minutes to adjust to Brave, which is much closer to a Disney movie than one from Pixar.
That’s not a bad thing, mind you; Brave
would fit nicely alongside Tangled
and the current Disney animation style. It isn’t, however, what you expect when
heading into a Pixar movie and requires the viewer to adjust accordingly. Once
I accepted what I was being presented with, my initial sense of disappointed
faded away and I enjoyed myself immensely. And while Brave doesn’t quite stack up to most of the other films from the
Pixar universe, it is still an excellent, if not entirely fresh, take on the
fairy tale.
As always with a Pixar film, the visuals presented within
Brave are stunning. There is less
realism to the human characters than what we’ve seen in the past (that the
studio could make Woody, Buzz Lightyear, and the rest look so incredibly REAL
in 1995 is still uncanny to me), the work done on the bears, which play an
increasingly important role in this film, is impeccable. There is no animal
that fascinates me more than the bear (nerd alert, I know) and at times I was
absolutely blown away by the lifelikeness of the creatures presented in Brave. It is a beautiful film with an
impressive and subtle score that highlights the emotions of the film’s subjects
wonderfully. The choice of setting, too, is a big check mark in the film’s favor,
though perhaps I’m a bit biased toward the awesomeness of Scotland. There’s
just something cool about the accents, music, and what have you. Behind the
camera, Macdonald, Connolly, Thompson, and the rest of the cast provide a
steady if underwhelming hand at the wheel of the film. None of the voice actors
deliver a particularly stellar performance but all do their part to effectively
balance the humor and seriousness required by the film.
I still want to see it a lot.
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