Merida is strong, capable and courageous. Pixar is full of brilliant, flexible minds, the kind that made credible heroes out of a stuffed Wild West sheriff, an assortment of worker-bee types, including an ant and a robot, and a rat that dreamed of creating haute cuisine.
It has been 17 years since the studio released its first movie, Toy Story , an awfully long time to get around to a female lead. Full disclosure: Orenstein and I were once in a writing group together, and she also blurbed a book I wrote. The animation is beautiful, but the story is staid. The article starts mentioning the basic background.
Yes merida is a tomboy and functional she is not ugly. Her body shape is the most accurate for a 15 y. Is a normal girl, stubborn, courageous, strong-willed and lazy in some aspects. Although she aknowledges that she will become the ruler of an entire land. To make us what they are,what they want and need. Of course she has learnt more than she would like to accept from her diplomat bossy mother. Brenda Chapman and Irene Mecchi are Disney folk, through and through, which is precisely why Brave feels like a Disney film.
Is it any shock that writers and directors steeped in Disney storytelling cranked out a Disney story? So then, where was Pete Docter?
John Lasseter? Brad Bird? Lee Unkrich? Andrew Stanton? In other words, where were the people who made Pixar into the beloved brand it is today? Evidently the answer was "doing other stuff," which is all well and good until you realize that Brave never had a prayer of feeling like a Pixar film given the total lack of Pixar-ites involved. And don't give me the "they were executive producers on Brave!
You can throw the logo on any project you like, but culture shines through, and that's why Brave feels so disparate. Every single Pixar film before Brave had Lasseter, Unkrich, Stanton, Docter, or Bird directly involved, either writing or directing, a run of twelve straight films. Not so for Brave , which might have suffered for the absence. Magic is a giant crutch for Brave , it's employed in transition scenes "Let me just follow these blue lights" and in massive second and third act plot thrusts.
Magic, in the case of Brave , is used to explain and inform the plot, and this is in direct thematic conflict with Pixar's methods up to this point. The toys in Toy Story are clearly magical, but the story does all the work and allows them to function under rules we can all easily follow along with. They can't be animated when humans are around, but other than that, "real" life is fair game. The Cars of Cars are sentient, but the "magic" is in the friendships.
The Incredibles have super-powers, but no magic. Wall-E and Eve are robots, a triumph of tech, not magic. The reason magic is a bastion of fairy tales is that it's a simpler form of storytelling, requiring far less heavy lifting. Sure, there are exceptions, and a few recent films have done really well Stardust , Lord of the Rings with the idea of magic as a modern plot construct.
The risk though, and Brave falls through this trap on occasion, is using magic to explain things away, patting your audience on the head with a "just because I say so". Why does Merida's mom become a bear? Because I said so. The "magic" method can work if you emphasize the wonder, but unfortunately Brave uses it to explain a way many critical questions.
Which brings us to our final difference The reason Pixar's brand is so sterling? Depth and complexity, featured prominently in their previous works. Here are some of the questions Pixar has tackled over the past two decades, see if you can match the theme to the film:. And so on. Pixar has always asked the big questions, made us think, made us ponder, and eschewed any predictive powers of an audience.
In Pixar films villains become heroes and back again, because their rules for storytelling were the opposite of Disney's. Where Disney made you feel safe and warm, Pixar wanted us to consider the world around us.
Which leads us to Brave 's central theme: Don't poison your mom. Or the thing that you know right from the start: she's not marrying any of these dudes.
By making all of Merida's suitors so woefully inadequate they allow the audience that comfy, complacent feeling. Princess Merida is better than these guys! Kristy Puchko. Your Daily Blend of Entertainment News. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands. Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors.
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