Well, I just got back from seeing
Brave in 3D and...I have very mixed feelings about this movie. It's a very solid, enjoyable fantasy film that's never boring; has incredibly detailed and fluid animation; and has several very well-voiced and memorable characters. If all you're looking for is some light entertainment for 1 1/2 hours, I don't see why you wouldn't enjoy Brave.
However, at this point I really expect a lot more from a Pixar film, especially after the safe mediocrity of Toy Story 3 and the LCD garbage of Cars 2. Make no mistake: this is a
far better film than those two were, but unfortunately if I had to sum this movie up in a single word it would be "safe". The film hits its marks and guides the audience coherently from scene to scene, but there's just nothing "daring" or "risky" about the film in the way I'd describe Pixar's earlier films. There is nothing in this film that you haven't seen before in one form or another in a previous Disney film, and it often feels like the writers are pulling their punches.
I'm going to be putting out some spoilers from here on out. They'll be spoiler-tagged, but in case you don't want to accidentally read them, you've been warned.
Unfortunately, where I think the movie really goes wrong is around the 1/3 portion of the film where a heavy
magical element comes into play. To be more specific, the main character accidentally
turns her mother into a bear, suddenly giving the film a suddenly very jarring and silly feel out-of-place with the tone of the film up until that point. This is where Brave somewhat lost me, because the
moment I saw that, I just couldn't get images out of my head of the
terrible Disney animated film
Brother Bear. While the animation on that character is really well-done and outright hilarious for the rest of the film, I just wasn't interested because I'd seen that trick done before and there just
had to be another way to convey the character development desired that would have had more of a dramatic punch to it. The ending overall just feels "too easy" and wrapped-up too neatly, as well.
And to be honest, I'm kind of indifferent on the main character, who at the beginning of the film is such a "Disney Princess" I expected her to break out her "I Want" song at any moment. She's certainly spunky and fun to watch, but she's more than a little bit of a selfish brat for most of the movie, and in the end she pretty much gets what she wants without really having to sacrifice anything or grow as a character. Her
mother is the one who has the most character growth. Sure, she comes to
appreciate how her mother is willing to sacrifice for her, but she never acknowledges that just
maybe her
line of thinking wasn't the one true path. The movie reminds me a lot of Eden of the East in a way in that there's this overall tone of "adults are stupid and usually the problem, and we young people know what's best for our future!" I don't think that's what the writers
meant, but that's the tone the film seems to set.
It's also kind of odd just
how much time the movie devotes to showing that the main character is a superb archer, and yet there's never really a payoff for this throughout the film outside of a single shot at the end of the film. And in that case, she fires the arrow from off-screen during a close-up so the audience can't really appreciate the difficulty of the shot. There's also some really
weird implementation of what sounded like Scottish pop music throughout the film, which just felt a little mis-timed and out-of-place (but not bad).
End SpoilersBrave is a good film with some
incredible animation (particularly hair and grass). I enjoyed seeing it, and I'll probably buy the 2D Blu-Ray when it inevitably releases later this year. But the film just feels fairly toothless and lacking in that wild creativity I've come to expect from a Pixar film. As for the 3D, the theater did not have 2D glasses so I had to watch the film in 3D. Thankfully, because the film uses very gentle camera movement and not terribly rapid character animation, I only had a minimal amount of dizziness by the ending credits (and that was mostly as a result of some fast camera panning or the cinematographer getting cute with Depth of Field). The 3D was very nice and subtle. Despite this being a movie with archery, I don't think there was a single shot in the movie where an object was hurled into the camera. Instead, the object is hurled at an angle so it goes
past the camera off to the side, and that worked really well. However, I didn't appreciate how dim the picture was with the glasses on. This is a movie with some fantastic lighting and coloring, and that's just...wasted in 3D with the dimmed lighting of the 3D glasses. If you can, I'd suggest you see the film in 2D and enjoy the visual splendor.
By the way, Pixar's next movie is "Monsters University", because the incredibly
lame (IMO) "Monsters Inc."
really needed a prequel. Yeah, that trailer with the main characters in college did absolutely nothing for me. And how is it that we've gotten sequels or prequels for Toy Story; Cars; and now Monsters Inc., but we
still haven't gotten a sequel for the one Pixar movie that set itself up
for a sequel: The Incredibles?
Topic: Rate the last movie you've seen (Read 1553622 times)
