Michael Ledo
The graphics is great on yet another Disney princess film. The film starts out with some deep themes. Mom attempts to mold Merida into her expectations of her being a princess. Merida is daddy's girl and a tomboy. When it comes times for suitors, the 15 year old rebels against her mother to win her freedom to choose her own life. This was all great as the classic female roles are being broken, a reflection of today's world. I was really enjoying the film.After this great start the film digresses into magic and witchcraft. Now I have nothing against either one, it is just at this point the film loses track of the theme and becomes needlessly silly and moves off into a new direction and creates a kids version of "The Monkey's Paw" i.e. be careful what you wish for. The preteen kids will enjoy it, I can't imagine adults getting too excited.
cricketbat
Brave is kind of bland. It doesn't have the same heart, wit or power that other Pixar films have. It's just a regular, old animated family film. It's entertaining, but it's not one that I would put up in the realm of Toy Story or Ratatouille. Maybe I'm just holding Pixar to too high of a standard.
gerumghl
As a movie, this is alright. But it's just very simple and doesn't really do anything. This movie could've been summed up in about 20 minutes without all the unhilarious jokes.The animation is a big complaint, yeah. Disney has a reputation of great and clean animation. They team up with Pixar for many franchises you know (their cleanest studio for this stuff), but this is Walt Disney. And those movies are also good. This was kind of bad for a Pixar standard around the time. he movements looked choppy at times and the characters look like dolls. Not much texture was put in to it. And then, the whole color tone of the movie was just a dark gray smoky tone.The story is a retelling. A retelling of "A girl asks a witch to cure her life, but it hurts her instead." There's many versions of this kind of thing. So nothing special, her mother just turns into a bear, how original. So then the movie tried to make a Brother Bear theme trying to "bond" and stuff. Just very boring. Nothing grand was explored, and it definitely didn't give justice to the Scottish culture they tried to use.Instead of making it grand like they hyped it up to be, we get a one dimensional story. The girl never showed her skills for any real fight. She's always teased throughout the movie as a skilled fighter and archer, yet at the end she doesn't show it off. The story just goes of the curse she's trying to heal. There's nothing "brave" about this. It's just another copy and paste story.Oh, and I don't hate jokes that much, but was this terrible with it. It's the biggest disappointment i humor. The three brothers were honestly annoying and the three kingdoms coming made no sense. They added ANOTHER plot with this reverse the curse plot which made it worse. So of course they just made the three kingdoms plot to make them for humor, and focused more on the reverse curse.This wasn't good in a fresh sense, and the reverse cursing thing they tried to teach was alright. It wasn't grand with anything they tried to do (like the three kingdoms not helping with any of the plot or the souls which made the protagonist less brave). I don't think this just had a right mindset of how to handle this.
Intelligent Reviewing
A film based on the tom boy feminist ideology welded to simplistic disney stereotypes.The usual princess story, an immensely privileged tantruming individual portrayed as a victim at the centre of the story, men only good as violent stupid ineffectual oafs for unrealistically un-empowered oppressed women to easily manipulate etc, whilst the lead individual is shown to be superior at all male virtue half the time, she then messes up the world entirely with her youthful arrogance and then practically single handedly recovers, in the usual up a tree down a tree scenario, for her only to end pretty much back at the beginning a little wiser in a way her elders understood, The only in theory beneficial message in the film being to state the arranged marriages are not good, but its probably not watched by any community that might benefit from that message, not that arranged marriages prove completely ineffectual in terms of sustaining birth rates and sometimes making successful marriages, All in all it is a 'cartoon for children' and the parables and metaphors are pretty simplistic, girls get what they want etc, but ultimately the protagonist saves the day, and then gets to write her own ticket and everyones happy, and the adults learn the lessons from the children etc, but theirs no follow up of her still being single at 40 with cats rather than children etc ;) perhaps I care too greatly for more complex realistic parables, On the upside the film is well animated and the quality good, but as per usual as with all essentially kids films, its all just a bit too chintzy disney simplistic, not sure as to the virtue of feeding this kind of fodder to children. and what harm or benefit it really does?
AD
