Brave

2012 Pixar princess movie

Rating: 14/20 (Jen: 16/20; Dylan: 11/20; Emma: 13/20; Abbey: 20/20)

Plot: Merida is a Scottish princess who, according to custom, has to be married off to a dude from one of the other three clans. She doesn't want that at all, probably because, like Entertainment Weekly has suggested, she's gay. She defies her parents and then runs into a witch who helps her in about the same way the monkey's paw helped the people in the short story "The Monkey's Paw". Oh, snap! See where free-thinking gets you, girls?

This isn't upper-echelon Pixar, but it does further prove their genius. I mean, who else is going to see Carrot Top and think, "Yep! There's the next Disney princess!"? I like Merida and she's voiced well by Kelly Macdonald who really pulls off a nice fake Scottish accent here. But with free-thinking gal Mulan and, to a lesser extent, Rapunzel, she doesn't feel all that fresh. The animation for Merida's hair is almost worth the price of admission alone. OK, I don't know why I typed that because it's not true. Movies are fucking expensive. The animation, with the exception of some of the humans who look a little rubbery compared to the settings, is top notch. They've taken the realism gauntlet thrown down by How to Train Your Dragon and nailed it. Their Scotland, kind of a storybook Scotland, is lovely, and the forest setting and castle interiors have an astonishing amount of detail and texture. I like how that horse looked, too. And I like that Pixar has created their own fairy tale here. That's not a bad direction for them to take. It really is a good movie, but it just never grabbed me, doesn't have that special bit of whatever that makes other Pixar features so magical. It feels on the surface like an original, but it's really made up of parts from the same store that other contemporary storytellers frequent. So it succeeds in being just like a whole bunch of other princess movies. There was a surprising lack of humor. The three red-haired demon twins thrown into the proceedings for little more than comic effect did very little for me. The witch was probably the funniest character, but she didn't exactly seem original--part Edna Mole/part Mama Odie maybe. The bulk of this has a too-serious tone, and the bears were too scary. And speaking of bears, isn't Disney having characters turn into bears a little too soon after Brother Bear? Plus, there's all this magic and floating blue fuzzy things which, for whatever reason, made me think of Disney's Atlantis even though there weren't any blue fuzzy things to be seen in that movie. Still, that's never a good thing. And all the magic is bound to irritate Christians. Of course, Christians are already going to be pissed when they take their little girls to see this only to have them see a gigantic lesbian on the screen which, of course, is going to turn them into little gay kids themselves. It was good hearing Craig Ferguson, one of my favorite people, and it's always nice to hear Billy Connolly, but their appearances were a little obvious. And I completely missed John Ratzenberger although he is in this apparently. I couldn't find the Pizza Planet truck anywhere in medieval Scotland either. Again, this is a very well done original fairy tale; it just didn't have enough personality. And without that, it's sadly the first Pixar movie I've seen in a theater that I'm not really in a hurry to see a second time.

For the record: As nutty as I am with my theories regarding Pixar movies (ahem, Up),I don't think Merida is gay. I am glad that I got to throw a few lesbians into this write-up though because that will surely attract some Googlers. It's safe for you to click on those links, by the way, because they're just articles written about how Merida might be gay. It won't take you to any not-safe-for-work hot lesbian action or anything.