Brave (2012)
Jul. 19th, 2012 13:49![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyBrave. Dir. Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman, and Steve Purcell, 2012.
I finally saw Brave with a colleague, and…I liked it. I didn't love it, but I liked it and I thought it was a good movie overall and also Hollywood is pretty bad at interpreting what audiences want, they have to be trained in Pavolovian fashion via the application of cash, so yes, I did want to actually pay money to see this.
The trailer is misleading to the point that I hallucinated there being a dragon in it and was waiting the whole movie for a dragon to show up. Although I'd heard that the female director was forced off the project for making a movie that was too focused on the strong mother-daughter relationship and the male studio heads at Pixar wanted more of an action flick, what we got was…a movie that focused on a strong mother-daughter relationship with occasional action sequences. Um, okay.
Although it hit me over the head the other day that if I want to talk about the global influence of anime and manga, Pixar would be exhibit one, in this movie I felt the studio straining towards the Ghibli touches rather than actually achieving them - the wisps, in particular, just aren't as mystically handled as the tree spirits in Mononokehime (this entire movie is very clearly influenced by Mononokehime). I'm told by my roommate N, who is of Scottish heritage, that people turning into bears and magical triplets are actually quite common in Celtic mythology, which does add another layer of appreciation to what Pixar has done here.
I've heard people say that this movie is desperately behind the times, and while I do think there's some truth to that (of course the first female protagonist of a Pixar film is a princess, the better to sell dolls at Target, my dear!), I also think that, thinking back to the kind of girl I was, i.e. one who stopped playing with Barbie at six because Barbie was unfeminist and bad for girls (these really were my thoughts, though I don't remember if I actually formulated them in terms of Barbie not being feminist - probably), I would have been really grateful for a story like Merida's at any age through middle school at least. She's a princess who kicks ass with a bow (and a sword!), doesn't have to get married to someone she doesn't want but does her duty to her kingdom? Rock on!
On that note, I found the entire "we should let our children love as they will" sequence impossible to read as anything else but a speech in support of gay marriage.
I really like Pixar movies in general, and I've seen all of them except Cars and Wall-E (I know. I even own Wall-E). This one, compared with the transcendent heights of Up, or even the not quite as sublime but still excellent and moving Toy Story 3, just doesn't quite measure up - there's a spark lacking, somehow. But I'm glad it exists, and glad I went to see it, and glad it's out there for girls to see.
I finally saw Brave with a colleague, and…I liked it. I didn't love it, but I liked it and I thought it was a good movie overall and also Hollywood is pretty bad at interpreting what audiences want, they have to be trained in Pavolovian fashion via the application of cash, so yes, I did want to actually pay money to see this.
The trailer is misleading to the point that I hallucinated there being a dragon in it and was waiting the whole movie for a dragon to show up. Although I'd heard that the female director was forced off the project for making a movie that was too focused on the strong mother-daughter relationship and the male studio heads at Pixar wanted more of an action flick, what we got was…a movie that focused on a strong mother-daughter relationship with occasional action sequences. Um, okay.
Although it hit me over the head the other day that if I want to talk about the global influence of anime and manga, Pixar would be exhibit one, in this movie I felt the studio straining towards the Ghibli touches rather than actually achieving them - the wisps, in particular, just aren't as mystically handled as the tree spirits in Mononokehime (this entire movie is very clearly influenced by Mononokehime). I'm told by my roommate N, who is of Scottish heritage, that people turning into bears and magical triplets are actually quite common in Celtic mythology, which does add another layer of appreciation to what Pixar has done here.
I've heard people say that this movie is desperately behind the times, and while I do think there's some truth to that (of course the first female protagonist of a Pixar film is a princess, the better to sell dolls at Target, my dear!), I also think that, thinking back to the kind of girl I was, i.e. one who stopped playing with Barbie at six because Barbie was unfeminist and bad for girls (these really were my thoughts, though I don't remember if I actually formulated them in terms of Barbie not being feminist - probably), I would have been really grateful for a story like Merida's at any age through middle school at least. She's a princess who kicks ass with a bow (and a sword!), doesn't have to get married to someone she doesn't want but does her duty to her kingdom? Rock on!
On that note, I found the entire "we should let our children love as they will" sequence impossible to read as anything else but a speech in support of gay marriage.
I really like Pixar movies in general, and I've seen all of them except Cars and Wall-E (I know. I even own Wall-E). This one, compared with the transcendent heights of Up, or even the not quite as sublime but still excellent and moving Toy Story 3, just doesn't quite measure up - there's a spark lacking, somehow. But I'm glad it exists, and glad I went to see it, and glad it's out there for girls to see.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-19 21:55 (UTC)(I enjoyed it a lot. And then Signifier grew bear-people. Sometimes my brain is like the universe's compost heap.)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-19 23:44 (UTC)The thing I liked about this one I think, which I honestly think is being missed or overlooked when people complain about blah blah princess movie is that unlike the other Disney Princess movies (and I include MULAN, MOVIE OF MY HEART, in this), this really could easily have been a story about a boy/prince and his father or a boy and his mother and overall I think it wouldn't have changed things a whit. Character-wise the story wasn't "Merida is a princess but is so headstrong" so much as "Merida is troublesomely headstrong and also happens to be a princess." Pixar could have made a movie about a boy without changing much at all (hair length (?), the specific role being forced on him), but they opted instead for a movie about a girl. Unlike most of the Disney Princess franchise, this is a story about a female character that doesn't HINGE on her gender - the movie's much more about family and expectations and responsibilities and love than it is about MERIDA SO FEMINIST, which honestly I found refreshingly ...feminist? Sobbing I'm sure there is a specialized feminist word for this, help me, I got on a plane at 3AM est this morning.
Gosh I'm bad at articulating my movie thoughts! I would also have been ALL OVER MERIDA as a kid, she's such a refreshing semi-amalgamation of Tamora Pierce heroines. All I ever needed growing up!!
(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-20 01:56 (UTC)Unlike most of the Disney Princess franchise, this is a story about a female character that doesn't HINGE on her gender - the movie's much more about family and expectations and responsibilities and love than it is about MERIDA SO FEMINIST, which honestly I found refreshingly ...feminist?
*nods* I agree! And it's one of the reasons I don't agree with the reviews and posts I've seen excoriating Pixar. This is definitely a movie that I'm glad exists.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-19 23:51 (UTC)Now you mention it, I can definitely see the Ghibli touches. What really got me about the film overall, though, what made me love it, was its relationship to Scottishness. I went in expecting an animated Braveheart; I came out homesick. It wasn't even so much the Celtic mythology, though I do see that in touches; Scotland's actually fairly peripheral in Celtic myth, a lot of the time, compared with Ireland and Wales. But the iconography –– I've seen the ruined remnants of those standing stones, those carvings,those castles, and although I am fairly sure the film is not archaeologically accurate, it rang true in a way I simply was not expecting. And the writing: the characters talked like contemporary Scottish people, with real accents (even the incomprehensibly-talking guy is speaking in a specific dialect, Doric, that is famous *within Scotland* for being really difficult to understand). I couldn't quite understand how Pixar managed that until I read that the Scottish voice actors had a lot of input into the dialogue and delivery. I went in poised to be irritated by the comic/heroic-cliche version of my culture, and came out feeling that I had seen a product of and contribution to my culture. (Which is not the ancient Highlands, of course, but I confess I'm not too fussed about the authenticity of it all.) So that was nice. It might have made less of an impression if I weren't so far from home... I'll be fascinated to see how it goes over in Scotland when it comes out there in a few weeks.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-20 00:58 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-20 01:38 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-20 00:06 (UTC)I don't like this as much as Wall-E, but more than any other Pixar movie I've seen, include much more than Up (which was infuriating from the premise on). I especially liked that we finally got a mother-daughter relationship movie where both sides had to grow-and-change within it, and the acknowledgment of political consequences for personal decisions of people in inherently political position. (The resolution of those consequences was, for me, the weakest part of the story, but at least it tried.)
I liked it quite a lot.
---L.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-20 01:55 (UTC)I need to watch Wall-E. I liked this one, but it's not my favorite.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-20 02:08 (UTC)(I also found some of the dog pack interactions problematic for reasons that I no longer clearly remember, three years later.)
---L.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-24 22:37 (UTC)I kind of wish I loved the movie more, because I really wanted to love it, but I'm glad it wasn't what the previews promised, and I'm glad it exists in general.