The trailers for Pixar’s Brave didn’t exactly wow me, so when I went to see the movie itself, I tried to keep my expectations low.
It didn’t work.
Come on, we’re talking Pixar here. The big dogs of animation. The people behind Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Monster’s Inc. Wall-E, The Incredibles, and one of my favorite movies of all time, the movie guaranteed to make me sob like a baby and crack up, Up. These people specialize in breathing life, depth, and creativity into unexpected set-ups and situations. My expectations just couldn’t be kept down.
Unfortunately, they couldn’t be lived up to either.
First things first, this film was visually delightful. We’ve seen Pixar pull off some pretty cool stuff in the past, but Brave takes the cake. It definitely has the most artistic visuals of any Pixar movie to date; at times it’s like watching a gorgeous painting come to life. The panoramas of mythic Highlands, atmospheric forest scenes, and above all Merida’s fiery corona of hair are breathtaking to watch.
Unfortunately, I watch films for the story, not the eye candy. And unlike Finding Nemo or Up, the story of Brave never lives up to its stunning visuals.
The story centers around Merida, a princess in the rebellious tradition, and her relationship with her mother, the strait-laced Queen Elinor who’s trying to train her unruly daughter to follow in her footsteps. Merida, on the other hand, much prefers riding, archery, and filching food from the palace kitchens to Elinor’s endless instructions on how to be a proper princess.
The film’s portrayal of Merida isn’t quite sure what it wants to be, or maybe it wants to be too many things at the same time. Is she a butt-kicking action girl? A strong female standing up to sexist tradition? A misunderstood teenager? A spoiled brat in need of some growing up? As Pixar’s first female protagonist, there’s a lot of pressure to make her a role model, but in trying to be all things to all people, it comes across rather forced. For example, Merida is an excellent archer (and a fearless horsewoman)…but in the crucial action sequences her archery has little effect, and in the climax she ends up needing to be rescued (although not by a prince).
Similarly, the conflict between Merida and her mother seems uneven in tone. Merida raises some points that are hard to argue with from a modern perspective—she doesn’t want to wear dresses so tight she can’t breathe or marry a man she hasn’t met—but it’s also take Merida’s complaints seriously when she gripes just as loudly about Queen Elinor teaching her geography, oratory, and statecraft as she does about her embroidery and deportment training. Additionally, Merida goes about protesting her “fate” in such a immature way that I sympathized with her harassed mother instead. Some of her actions are so selfish and short-sighted that I cringed in my seat.
On the other hand, some of Elinor’s actions seem like they were crafted just to make her seem unreasonable. Would you really spring an arranged marriage on a sixteen year old girl. Especially one as volatile as Merida? That seems like something that Merida should have been taught to expect from a very young age.
Both Merida and Elinor grow and change throughout the film, but it doesn’t seem like enough time was spent on HOW they grew. While there are some touching scenes between them, they don’t didn’t seem to support the amount of change they exhibit by the end.
The other characters in the movie are mere ciphers, much to the movie’s detriment. Boisterous King Fergus gets in a few good lines, and it clear that he loves both his wife and daughter dearly, but otherwise he merely exists to serve the plot. Merida’s triplet brothers are rambunctious rascals without a single line between them. The clan leaders do their quirky bits and then melt back into the background. Most egregiously, the three suitors for Merida’s hand have minuscule screentime, despite all three of them having genuinely intriguing personalities.
As far as the plot itself, while the story is more a mother-daughter bonding piece than the epic adventure promised by trailers, it still suffers from a lack of driving plot. Storylines enter, meander a bit, and then languish until they are patched back in for the resolution. The characters are decently interesting, but much less three-dimensional than Pixar’s usual fare. The jokes are surprisingly crude for Disney/Pixar and lack the cleverness I would expect from the latter.
Overall, “Brave” is a good film, that many companies could be proud of. Just not Pixar. I don’t expect good from Pixar; I expect great. And this film just wasn’t it.
Animated Rhapsody 