You know a lot of people thought the predominantly-male Cars was shallow too. :rolleyes:
Brave being based around females has **nothing **to do with it.
Yeah you’re going to have a hard time convincing me that I’m not grokking feminist themes. If I’d never seen a trailer I probably would have liked the film more, but I still would have had some problems with it.
I think a lot of people have a problem because this wasn’t a story where a girl just goes out and kicks ass in a tomboyish fashion.
Was cars about men’s issues? Was it about the struggle men have to find their place in a society that pigeon holes them? If it wasnt, then that is moot.
I think the theme of Cars, discovering that we are interconnected and not being a self absorbed jackass, was rather powerful. It actually wasn’t that different as a theme than Up…Up took the same theme and gave it more emotional punch, but it wasn’t the theme that wasn’t powerful in Cars. It was that the filmmakers didn’t choose to tear at heart strings.
I’m not sure that Monsters Inc, which is a great and very enjoyable movie, had a very powerful theme, but I haven’t really thought about it other than in the fun movie sense. Unlike Wall-E, which was all message.
Actually the mother-daughter relationship was the best part of the movie for me. I just didn’t think they did enough to flesh it out. And I say that as neither a mother nor a daughter (but living with one of each).
Certainly they weren’t as heavy handed in pulling out the emotional heartstrings as Up or Wall-E. However, I’m not sure if that is the same as the theme not being powerful.
I don’t know what could have been done to flesh it out further. The movie was almost exclusively about the mother daughter relationship, and I feel like the did a great job of developing a complex and complicated relationship that balanced the adolescent need for freedom, the paternal need to make sure your child is fully prepared to live their own life, and the love/hate between parent and child at that age. Even the father character mainly served to throw the mother daughter relationship into relief.
I feel like a lot of the criticism is coming from dissonance between the movie that was expected and the very different movie that was presented.
Whether or not my example is moot doesn’t make your point any more relevant.
Did you watch the same trailers I did? They have only themselves to blame for any dissonance.
I saw several of the trailers, and I saw no dissonance.
Is the title really a good one? I mean, it’s not really about a little girl being brave, is it?
Several reviewers/critiques have mentioned that the working title or original title was “The Bear and The Bow” but I suppose they thought that was too wordy? I think it would have fit a little better than Brave, personally.
Also, the above is much better if you read it out loud in King Fergus’s “I’m pretending to be Merida” accent.
:D:D:D
I saw it. I really liked it. Generally speaking it’s a story about a mothers love.
As was noted early in this thread, Pixar trailers are usually duds, this one less than many others. At least their trailers are not spoilers.
1.) I liked it. I’m a little surprised about the negative reactions. Even MilliCal and Pepper Mill (my daughter and wife), who insisted on going opening night, were lukewarm about it. They were expecting “more”
2.) They didn’t really give the story away in the many trailers and promos, although
It was pretty clear to me that the three little brothers were going to get turned into bears. The promos showing three little brothers and three cute little bears made that perfectly obvious. But I didn’t foresee the mom’s metamorphosis, until the cottage scene.
3.) The scene with the witch was beautifully done. And I liked the later “answering machine” joke about “going to Wicker Man”. The Pixar guys have a wickedly dark side
4.) It is apparently OK to show Bare Butts in Disney/pixar now. As long as they’re male butts, and there’s no frontal
5.) The queen’s womanservant had the best case of “Chekhov’s Cleavage” that I’ve seen in a long time. The first cleavage joke from Disney I can recall since Roger Rabbit, although more reminiscent of Black Cauldron.
That because a movie deals with “gender (specifically female) themes” those themes aren’t perceived as deep or as important as other themes in Pixar movies? I still think that is a very relevant point to be making here. Your response was that Cars had male characters. What is the connection? Do you see the themes of Cars as being gender (specifically male) themed? How so? And if so, why are those themes less worthy than the themes in Up or Wall-E or Toy Story? Make a pertinent rebuttal to the point, not what I’m perceiving as a non sequitur.
Disney been OK with nudity since Fantasia. This bit of the Pastoral has naked male cherub butt and topless female centaurs (although they oddly lack nipples).
Yes. as i’ve observed in the past, you can only have nipples if you’re evil (Look at the Night on Bare Mountain sequence, with its naked harpies).
But this is different from Fantasia – we not only have bare little boy butts, but big Scottiosh Men, too (After being teased with the “Feast your eyes!” line, they actually DO let us see them).
You’re hung up on the analogy. My rebuttle was in my first post: it’s a giant leap in logic to suggest people only didn’t like Brave because it dealt with female themes, and it’s frankly insulting to anyone who didn’t like the movie to make such an assumption.