Disney, by the way, has been okay with little boy butts since before Fantasia – Little Hiawatha from 1937 had the titular indian’s pants falling down as a running gag, and Disney had no problem with naked pixies and the like.
Big, burly Scottish guys is something different.
Having a powerful *theme *does not make it a powerful story.
Depends on your perspective I suppose, but I think that you (general you to the critics) are looking for a story that the film makers weren’t trying to tell. I think that the story of a young woman growing up and how her relationship with her mother changed as she finds her place in the world and transfers from childhood to adulthood was very powerful. It made my wife cry. The secondary story of how a mother’s relationship to her children and the rest of the world shifts as they grow up as well as the role that the matriarch plays in society was also powerful and well executed.
It was character stuff not plot driven, but it was a story of depth not breadth.
But that wasn’t my point. Note I said nothing in that post about the story being powerful or even the movie being good in that post - it was that people were dismissive of the theme. You can have a powerful theme and a poor story. You can have a great story with very little theme.
I majored in Film and minored in Women’s Studies - I’ve seen a LOT of craptacular movies with powerful gender themes.
(I liked Brave, saw it with my daughter though who LOVED it and is an easy critic. I’ll agree it wasn’t Pixars best, but I don’t think it was their worst either. I liked Cars, I am not a Finding Nemo or A Bug’s Life fan at all - this was better than either of those. My favorite is The Incredibles. I liked Up and Wall-E, but thing that they are both too ham handed in the way the message is delivered by a two by four - too emotionally manipulative to hold up to repeated viewings.)
I didn’t know what the story was going to be.
I mean, YMMV. Maybe you thought there was a lot to the story; I honestly do not. I found it shallow and a real waste of potential. The young woman DIDN’T grow up, and didn’t find a place in the world; my main objection, really, is that Merida’s character went nowhere except to admit she loved her mother, wholly as a result of thinking she had effectively killed her.
I don’t see anyone being dismissive of the theme, and I don’t know why people are being so defensive about it. To be honest I think the movie was a gloden opportunity, and they blew it. I wanted to see a female protagonist in a Pixar film, and when I relized it was about Merida and her mother I was thrilled; now, I thought, Pixar’s gonna knock it out of the park… and then the movie just went completely flat. Boob gags and gross-Scotsmen jokes, really?
She did grow up and her Queen like entrance and speech to the rowdy clansman proved that. Maybe Merida isn’t ready to settle down with one of those three “princes”* but she is ready to assume her role as Queen. This is why the Queen/bear was so enraptured while watching Merida give her speech. Powerful moment, and it is when Merida also realized she would have to play that role in her near future and she was OK with it and had the skills to do it.
She came to understand that she had responsibilities and a role to fill. Her mother came to understand that the role did not demand cookie cutter adherence to preconceived notions. You can be a woman and not be a wife. You can be a Queen and not have a King (although its mideveal Scotland, one of her brothers ends up King). You can be female and shoot arrows.
Yeah, my biggest complaint is that in trying so hard to make her mother and her admirable and not set this up for the standard fairy tale “women need a man to rescue them,” all the male characters were portrayed as doofuses. So you ended up with lots of gross Scotsman jokes so we could be VERY CLEAR that only Merida or her mother (and maybe the triplets) can find their ass with both hands and you won’t get any help from those men.
I was thankful for the doofus humor and glorious eye candy and so was fully entertained from start to finish, but the entire plot structure went to hell for me when the parents, especially mom who was otherwise at great pains to prepare her daughter for her future, sprung the three suitors on her like a trap.
I still can’t fit that into the character they tried to draw of the mother.
This is a real problem, the bigger problem is that their kingdom is only as old as Merida’s father. They don’t have any traditions to speak of yet, so it’s not like Merida is breaking with ancient custom just a law that is, at most, 10 years old and never tested.
They’ve existed as a people for longer than 10 years though. Remember the legend about the four kings? They have traditions that are older than the current kingdom.
Sure, but the point is that this kingdom is new and the law would also have to be new. Maybe it’s not a plot hole, maybe it’s because the kingdom is new that it is possible to challenge the law at all. But these were previously warring tribes, so I have doubts that they were intermarrying prior to the establishment of the kingdom.
Am enjoying this discussion. Will not be going to movie for money etc reasons, but plot does sound disappointing. Wish Pixar had chosen adaptation of " The Paper Bag Princess" if the female protagonist HAD to be a princess. And since when is it brave for a girl to disagree with her mother?
Wish something in this thread made me interested in this film. But so far no.
The bravery isn’t a reference to the disagreement with her mother. If you want to give the film makers credit it probably is a reference to the difficulty of leaving behind childhood and facing adult decisions. Again, the whole standing up to her mother, child rebelling against the unfair rules of her parents is a misdirection. They used that familiar story device to do something very different. Merida was, without question, in the wrong the whole time and with every selfish childish choice she made created worse and worse outcomes for herself and her family. It was only after she started to grow up and take responsibility rather than simply hopping on her horse and running away from things she disliked, that things started to get better.
If you don’t want to give them credit it is just a snappier sounding title than “The Bear and the Bow” and sounds like it means something profound when it doesn’t really mean much.
The movie isn’t perfect, and it’s not without its flaws, but it was clearly trying to say some stuff about growing up and finding your way in the world that is sort of being hand waived away.
I’m certainly surprised that I’m on the not-liking-it-so-much side considering what those of you who liked it seem to have experienced. Those experiences are right up my alley of appreciation, to the point where I’m quite confident that I seek them out whenever possible at both the conscious and unconscious levels. I’m an animation-loving-cinefile-geek-lesbian fangrrl who owns just about everything that Pixar has ever made.
RickJay’s experience much more closely resembles mine than NAF’s does, and it wasn’t only due to being led astray by the trailer. I’m used to that. What ‘ruined’ the film for me, for lack of a better word, was that I realized that my mistaken imaginings were more interesting to to think about than what I was watching, while I was watching it.
Far far far more often when my preconceived notions are proven false with trailers vs the actual film, those notions are tossed aside as I’m whisked merrily along the whatever story the filmmakers want to tell. But in this case, in spite of being right smack in the middle of a target demographic for the film (at least on the adult side) it didn’t connect with me.
I do admit that I’ve wondered that as a 37-going-on-13 year old married lesbian who has no kids and doesn’t want them, vs NAF as the father of a young NAFlet with his lovely wife…perhaps it is that paradigm shift of parenthood that is distinguishing our views. I’m only half kidding, but to put my clumsy argument simply, I was perhaps trying to identify with Merida while NAF was perhaps seeing his wife and child in the roles, including possibly considering the relationship of his wife and her mother. Or something.
For anyone who has seen both, how does “Brave” compare with “Coraline”? Theme wise, obviously not animation wise. Both concern mother-daughter dynamic. Right?
That might have something to do with it. I am also probably being pretty heavily influenced by the intensive course on adolescent psychology that I am just now wrapping up and have been more or less buried under for the last 6 weeks. Couple that with my not knowing anything at all about the movie going in other than having seen the very first teaser trailer and I am probably coming at this from a different place.
It doesn’t hurt that I liked it either. I thought Merida was a really well drawn character and one that you don’t see that often in this type of movie. I thought that Pixar’s playing with traditional fairy tale and family movie conventions was really wonderful. You have it all there, the unruly teenager who just knows better than the adults. The doffus dad. The stoney unreasonable mom. The witch. The ancient evil supernatural terror. But none of it was true. The witch wasn’t evil, the Mom was in the right the whole time, the Dad was goofy but actually a pretty fit ruler. The ancient evil terror was really just an analog for the teenage girl and what she could become. And the teenager didn’t actually know better, she was the one causing the chaos. I thought it was great on that level.
Now none of this means anything if you don’t find the movie itself to be entertaining. I did, YMMV.
I had fairly low expectations going in because of reviews and a quick scan of this thread. And for the first half hour the movie fell below those low expectatations and the characters and the situation felt very trite.
But then the movie grew on me and I was quite moved by the end. I think the mother/daughter character arc was nicely done. I disagree that Merida remained the same; she clearly matured and learnt that she had responsibilities as a daughter and princess and couldn’t just do as she pleased. And her mother also compromised. I also liked the link drawn between the mother/daughter story and the larger political context through the legend. Selfishness and pride can tear apart a nation just as it can a family.
I agree with most of what NAF1138 says above. It may have started as a How to Train a Dragon knockoff but it went in a different and IMO more interesting direction. Someone also mentioned mediocre pop songs and I agree about that as well; a real disappointment after the wonderful Newman songs in Toy Story 1/2. Overall not one of Pixar’s best but a solid B+ IMO.
Incidentally Brenda Chapman was apparently fired for creative differences though she still got a directing credit. I am curious about what the differences were about and I hope the DVD extras shed some light.
Mostly but I have to agree with Merida that being forced into a marriage with some dude she had never even met was not a Good Thing, and she was right to rebel there.
Well, no, my point was that the law didn’t necessarily have to be new. Just because you have a new king doesn’t mean all the laws from the past were abandoned.
Indeed, one can observe just from the histories of the kingdoms of the British Isles that law didn’t reset when a new dynasty was established. England/Britain itself still refers some laws as far back as the Magna Carta and even before, to Roman times, despite the fact that the country’s line of governance hasn’t been a contunuous one; in the last thousand years you have the Normal conquest, then the transition to the Angevins and the Plantagenets, then the House of Lancaster, the deposing of Henry VI, the Yorks, the Tudors, and then the transition to the first unification of the Scottish and British crown, then the complete abolition of the monarchy in 1649 and its restoration in 1660, then the Glorious Revolution and things have been kind of steady since then. But nobody ever said “let’s throw all the laws out.” Ever. It never would have crossed anyone’s mind that England had to be reset.
From what we know of the kingdom of Brave - which isn’t actually called Scotland, it has some other name - King Fergus’s rule is a recent one, but the nation existed beforehand, it’s just that there was a period of time when the crown was up for grabs, and apparently was unified by necessity when invaders came. So there might have been a time of chaos but these people would still have thought of their land as a kingdom in wait of a clear decision on who was king.