movies: brave

brave: change your fate
I'm going backwards and forwards about how I feel about Brave...

On the one hand, it's an amazingly beautiful movie with some great characters, fantastic scenery and beautiful music.

On the other hand, the more I think about the story, the more it feels recycled (cue the spoilery link)... and the more there feel like there are parts missing or that were somewhat glossed over.

Pixar seem to often alternate between making stories that are unique and completely unpredictable... and stories that you see coming a mile away.

Brave probably lays somewhere in the middle. Nothing in any of the advertising for the movie really gives you a clue about what direction the movie is going to take (possibly a flaw on the part of said advertising), but once it does, the plot becomes a tiny bit predictable.

But as I said, there were also parts that didn't necessarily seem to go anywhere... whether they'd been taken out of the movie due to time or to focus the story more on the main character, I don't know... it's not that there were holes in the plot exactly, it's more that things were glossed over.

And just as a brief aside, am I the only person who's been to see Brave and come out of it hearing a Scottish accent in their head as they read things? No? Just me then.

For all it's flaws, I did love Brave's protagonist, Princess Merida... she's feisty, brave (unsurprisingly), wields a mean bow and has the most amazingly rendered hair in the history of computer animated movies. Seriously, I could watch about half an hour's worth of footage of just her hair. It's gorgeous.

The whole move is gorgeous though... the amount of fine detail and texture Pixar manages to squeeze into every corner of every frame of the movie is just amazing.

It's by no means the worst of Pixar's movies (that honour still belongs to the original Cars)... but it's somewhere in the middle of the pack... entertaining, occasionally quite funny, but overall good, not great.

yani's rating: 2 wee naked bairns out of 5

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