thejboy88 said:
Brave, one of Pixar's most recent films, is one that I really enjoy. While there may be many aspects to it that have been done many times, like having princesses etc, it was, overall an enjoyable film for me, even though I don't think it compares to Pixar's earlier masterpieces, like Wall-E or Finding Nemo.
However, as I looked at comments and reviews online about the film, I found that, more often than not, people tend to dislike this film. They call it cliche, or uninteresting, with some even going so far as to call it Pixar's worst film.
So, I ask all of you, where do you stand? Do you like this film or dislike it? And what are your reasons?
It's a good film. But it doesn't focus on male characters, which means that for a large segment of the vocal online and reviewing population, it's got one strike going against it already. No, I don't mean "sexism", I mean understanding and empathy - it's harder to empathize and understand the plight of someone different than you. The closer the characters are to the viewers, the easier it is to understand the motivations and the less the movie (or any other work of art, really) needs to explain them. The biggest mistake Brave made was underestimating how much time and effort it needed to spend in order to connect the characters to the entire audience.
Brave looks worse than it is because Pixar keenly understands this problem, and in movies like Wall-E and Up, it did a phenomenal job connecting the audience to the characters. Really, who can understand what it is to be a ROBOT, left alone for centuries doing nothing but cleaning up garbage? So Wall-E needed to spend the 30-45 min getting us to understand Wall-E, so that when things picked up and the story really began, we had a powerful connection to Wall-E. How many reviewers are seniors, widowers and childless? Up only needed to spend 8 minutes (perhaps one of the greatest segments in movie history; easily in the discussion for the greatest segments in movie history at the very least) to get the audience to understand, empathize and root for Carl, the man older than many of the audiences grandfathers.
But Brave didn't do this as well, and so there's a disconnect. The disconnect heightens all of the other errors that arose in the movie, some of the inconsistencies and changes in tone, making the movie seem worse than it was. It's not hard for us to understand what it is to be so confined to a narrow role (wife/mother) and to have an entire society against your attempts to break free - this is often couched in terms of "Parental Vision" (As an example look at How To Train Your Dragon, and how Hiccup is supposed to become a warrior like his father, a slayer of dragons. We all know Hiccup is too weak, scrawny and smart for it, but his story is about rejecting that role and making something for himself that is new.) or "Overcoming Poverty/Class/Gender/etc." (Disney's Mulan is an example of overcoming Gender to be seen as something different) Brave looked like it was going to follow the "Overcoming Gender", but ends with the Princess accepting her fate and not really becoming anything different. She's still going to be a princess, she's still going to marry one of the three princes, it's just delayed until the future.
Because of the disconnect between the vocal audience and the character, this unconventional ending becomes more jarring than it should be. And as with most things, the way it ends flavours the way we remember it. If the ending is good and satisfying, things in the movie that we were concerned about before are glossed over and remembered more fondly than perhaps they deserve to be. If the ending is not satisfying for us, the mistakes that went on before are magnified out of proportion.
A good article I remember reading (and bookmarking!) is found here: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/just-another-princess-movie/ . It's extremely long but well worth the read.
