Pixar makes good movies and Brave is a good movie. But like every successful studio they seem to be slipping into the George Lucas mindset of using more special effects and not worrying so much about the story.
Brave was an amazing looking film, the hair and water were especially well done. In fact, much of the film had a hyper-real look that was at times at odds with the usual cartoony people who live in the Pixar universe. This has always been a major gripe of mine-Pixar can make water and hair more real than reality but all their people look ridiculous.
Anyway, Brave is the story of a young Princess who doesn’t want to live the life that her mother has planned out for her. So, she runs away, where she meets up with some wil-o-the-wisps who do her no favors by leading her to an old witch’s house. The witch give her a spell and it doesn’t go quit as the princess would have liked.
The story works well enough, when the spell goes wrong and disaster is close at hand I was teary eyed liked everyone else in the theater. But this whole magical bit of business seemed completely out of place. Our heroine’s talents are showcased, but ultimately useless. You can’t fight magic with bows and arrows and a mess of red hair. This is a break of the standard movie promise that our hero’s skills will save her in the end. Here our hero is just a screw up who is along for the ride in cleaning up her problems. But then, all of the people in Brave are screw ups.
Part of Brave’s problem, of course, is that it IS a Pixar film and has some damned big shoes to fill. Brave is not UP or Finding Nemo. Disney hasn’t made consistently good movies since the 1950s and it’s clear that Brave is more Disney than Pixar. This is not a good thing.
