REVIEW: Brave

Brave (2012): Directed by: Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman and Steve Purcell. Written by: Mark Andrews, Steve Purcell, Brenda Chapman and Irene Mecchi. Featuring the voices of: Kelly Macdonald, Billy Connolly and Emma Thompson. Rated PG (Mild bear slaying). Running time: 93 minutes.

2 ½ stars (out of four)

Disney/Pixar’s Brave features a princess, a castle and a witch’s spell but lacks the majesty needed to place it in the ranks of classic Disney fairytales. Neither is the film one of Pixar’s best, having little of the emotional depth or narrative subtlety we have come to expect from the studio’s finest works. Instead, Brave settles for being a lively and energetic, though mostly unoriginal, piece of kids’ entertainment.

The princess is Merida (voiced by Kelly Macdonald), a spunky tomboy who has inherited a love of archery from her father, a medieval Scottish king. She bounds about the woods on horseback shooting practice targets and boasting an impressive marksmanship, her red curls bouncing and billowing behind her. Her mother (Emma Thompson), however, has no patience for such unladylike shenanigans. As a future queen, Merida should be preparing for marriage not prancing around, pretending to be a warrior.

The King (Billy Connolly) encourages his daughter. He is a towering, barrel-chested brute of a man with one wooden leg in place of the one he lost in battle with a great bear. He is known in his kingdom as the Bear King, having a special knack for slaying the beasts (except, of course, the one that got away with his leg). Perhaps he sees something of himself in Merida – his only other children are his three sons, an impish trio of toddlers still too young for warfare – and he hesitates before inviting the Three Clans to the castle so that his daughter may select a husband from the first-born sons of the Clans’ leaders, as is tradition.

The Clans are a motley bunch and their sons aren’t much to choose from. At any rate, Merida rejects the idea of a forced marriage and sets out to change her fate. Enter the witch and the spell, the latter of which Merida hopes will change her mother’s adamant stance on marriage. What follows are some unfortunate misunderstandings and a few human-to-bear transformations, a plot development that should be whimsical and enchanting but is mostly silly more than anything else. The movie plays this magical turn for laughs; the big reveal occurs in a slapstick sequence that goes on far too long.

Around this point, you can feel the movie grasping for ideas. There is potential here for a grand tale, one that carries some real emotional heft, and to see the movie opt for an easier route is a bit disappointing. The development of the mother-daughter conflict (and their subsequent bonding and reconciliation) follows obvious and familiar paths; more than one scene seems primed for Brave-themed Mother’s Day cards.

The characters also have a tendency to over-explain themes and plot points. Pixar films are usually more trusting of their audience; the best of them expect us to get what’s going on without announcing (and repeating) it.

This is still a Pixar film though and the earmarks of their high standards for animation are all here. The landscapes are vividly depicted in sweeping wide shots and the characters’ faces are subtle and expressive in ways few animated films achieve.

But the arc of the story never matches the ambition of the visuals or the grace with which Pixar’s animators render them. Brave rests comfortably in that lower tier of Pixar films alongside the Cars movies and the latter portions of Up (the opening sequence of that film remains something of a self-contained masterpiece), which is to say that it is solid family entertainment on par with or exceeding the output of other animation studios. It is bright and cheerful and full of clever moments in spite of the loudly grinding gears of its predictable plot. That the film might have been better makes its modest success more than a little underwhelming.

- Steve Avigliano, 6/22/12