Whyboy Spotlights… Brave

Ok it’s time for some Pixar magic. Brave’s trailer by most people’s translation has been pre labeled as being an epic, large movie while also taking a very dark edge to it.  Sorry to say but that interpretation is dead wrong. Brave is a very small-scale Pixar film with a more comedic edge to it. But I had basically already guessed that from the trailer where there are three little bears sticking their tongues out at the camera. Seriously… also, not to brag but I kinda already figured out the story of the movie just from the trailer so I had basically prepared myself knowing what story I was gonna get. So to get it out of the way, is Brave good? Yes. The best? Hell no. Brave is a very below average Pixar film let down by a few missteps in, surprisingly, the writing department. Let’s find out what these missteps are.

In this tale we go to the green isles in good ol’Scotland where we have our newest Disney Princess Merida (Kelly Macdonald). The very first Pixar Heroine and whom I consider the newest member of the Disney Princesses. The story is very simple, Merida is the free spirited teen that just wants freedom and to do whatever she wants and her mother, Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson), is her very controlling mother. Elenor controls everything in Merida’s life to prepare her for a ceremony where she must choose a suitor to marry from her father’s, King Fergus (Billy Connolly), three lords’ sons. Obviously Merida doesn’t like this and visits a witch and gets her to cast a curse to change her fate by changing her mother. Okay I won’t state what the curse is exactly but let’s just say Disney has already created a premise “similar” to this before *cough* Brother Bear *cough*. So, now Merida and Elinor have 24 hours until the curse is irreversible.

Just by that you can tell that Brave is more Pixar’s answer to a Disney Princess film than any form of pure epicness and they pulled it off quite well all things considered. There are quite a few problems with this movie but let’s start off with something I liked, the relationship between Merida and Elinor. While it goes through the motions of showing Elinor be the snooty, and highbrow queen practically molding the free spirited Merida into queen material we do get to see some awesome character building scenes. My two favorites would have to be the in two different places discussion that the two girls have concerning their feelings in the marriage ceremony. While it’s a bit play out their frustration and love made them seem more three-dimensional. The other scene I won’t spoil because this is RIGHT before the curse is cast let’s just describe it as Elinor and Merida’s breaking points. Their frustrations have boiled over and they both say pretty nasty things but it’s there actions afterwards that show how grief stricken they are over their mistakes. That was just amazing to watch for me.

Next to make this article into a more manageable sandwich of criticism onto the bad parts of Brave. I already stated the plot is nothing special; Princess wants more, her wish screws her over and now she has to fix it yada yada yada. But there’s also a real problem with theming… and how it’s WAY to in your face. If you seen the trailer you can kinda gather this film has it’s sight set on bears and the film quadruples the amount of bears. I get that the bear is the main theme of the movie but come on by the time they had the joke where they were TRYING to play off how bear crazy the film is it wasn’t as affective because by that point bears had been shoved down our throats. Not to mention the similar premise to Brother Bear.

Sadly it’s time to talk more about this films poor writing choices. First being the sheer number of side characters that get practically zero screen time. A great portion of the movie is spent with Elinor and Merida like it obviously should, but we never see how the rest of their family feels about their disappearance. Because of this, what we do see comes off like the Great Bear King Fergus forgot completely about his wife and daughter in favour of just acting GOOFY.

The lords and their sons are nothing more then tools to have the story be more tense, and might I add how this movie uses them to build tension feels so artificial and plain that it feels we missed half the conflict while we were focusing on Elinor and Merida.

Last but certainly not least for the side characters that were grossly mishandled is the demon bear Mor’du. Let’s put it this way have you ever seen a zombie movie where when zombies attacks you get the feeling the writer wrote that just to make the scene tenser? That’s Mor’du. Another tool to create tension but sadly this demon bear’s importance to the store was grossly over-exaggerated because of the trailer. He barely has anything to do with the movie except help our heroes figure out the curse. Other then that his only true purpose is just adding tension to the climax. Nothing more.

Then there is the plot moving Will-o’-the-wisp. In Scottish lore a wisp is a ghostly light seen by travellers at night, especially over bogs, swamps or marshes. It resembles a flickering lamp and is said to recede if approached, drawing travellers from the safe paths. Obviously not the best guides but they are also known for getting people out of danger… sometimes.

Anyway excluding that, in this movie wisps are used mainly to lead our heroes to all the set pieces in the movie. It just gets plain silly when the wisps leads Merida to a place where she was obviously gonna go if she just used those flaps on the side of her head to HEAR where the commotion was coming from. I get the first two times but I felt if this movie is all about changing your fate wouldn’t Merida follow her own path not the path laid out by the wisps? Maybe if this took the more cross country aspect of Brother Bear the wisps wouldn’t feel so contrived seeing as how they lead our heroes back to the same spot every single time they appear.

Actually the cross-country idea could have worked pretty well. Then we could have cut to Fergus, the lords and their sons throughout the movie maybe hunting down where Elinor and Merida disappeared to and then we could see them grow as characters as well and not just Merida and Elinor.

OK. Enough negativity time to end this sandwich with what I REALLY liked about this movie. Surprisingly it’s in the writing the aspect I love so much. The simple writing of humour through action rather through dialogue. Yes, Pixar has done this before with movies like Wall-E where the characters had almost zero speaking lines but it’s just honestly my favorite type of animated humour. Telling the joke through visuals and actions has always been a love of mine in animation. One of my favorite episodes of ANY series was “Reef Blower” from Spongebob Squarepants, which had zero dialogue.

Brave’s main comic reliefs, Merida’s three identical twin brothers, have zero spoken dialogue. No noise comes out of these three boys mouths but through mannerism and action we see true character out of these boys. That goes the same for Elinor after the curse zero dialogue but the actions of her new form make the film hilarious to watch. This was undoubtedly my favorite aspect of the movie and helped in me forgiving the other missteps.

But that was also helped by how beautiful Brave looked. Thanks to a newly optimized and developed animation system Pixar’s animation now looks so beautiful it could bring tears to one’s eyes… well if you are an artist… maybe. Anyway the setting of Scotland while taking place in a very limited area looks detailed and immense. The character models are all distinct and flow magnificently through their animations. Simply this is one of the most beautiful Pixar movies I’ve seen.

Is the movie perfect? Hell no. As a Pixar film it surprisingly is very mishandled in the writing department, the side characters and supposed villain are thrown in the dirt, and the story overall is very standard and reminiscent of Brother Bear. This is why I say this is JUST a decent film. There is NOTHING in this film that is awful or groan worthy but it is a weaker film than the great majority of the Pixar films. For adult Pixar fans it’s probably worth a pass unless you like the more simple princess stories. As for kids, while I don’t approve of Pixar half-assing some of their writing, they will like this movie’s charm and humor. Simply put if you thought Brother Bear wasn’t that great than Brave improves upon that and creates relatively weak Disney princess movie.

PS. Fun Fact, did you know Brave was originally gonna be called The Bear and The Bow? Probably a more suitable title but I understand why they changed it to avoid any more comparisons to Brother Bear.