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Brave (2012)
Brave. 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.