The first chink in Pixar’s armor came with the Cars franchise. It was easy to ignore, though - the Cars movies felt like cynical plays for merch dollars, and the studio was still dedicated to new properties based on new ideas. Let them have Cars 2, we reasoned, if it pays for more interesting movies down the line. Download Brave | Its Easy to Get Brave with Single Click
One of those movies was Brave. An original story, Brave has the honor of being Pixar’s first female-driven film (after two decades). It also has the dishonor of being the studio’s first real creative stumble since 1998’s A Bug’s Life.
Like A Bug’s Life, Brave isn’t a bad movie. Were this film to be released by another animation house (and sometimes the movie does feel like it’s drifting into Dreamworks territory with a cavalcade of bad slapstick and bare butts), we’d be applauding. But as part of the Pixar canon Brave comes up just short, and the irony is that all of the problems lie in the one place where Pixar is king: story.
The company is asking that people keep the events of the second act secret (which I think is crazy as, a) that’s the crux of the story and b) while it’s the source of all the problems it’s also got some of the best bits in the movie), so I can’t fully go into the problems with the film. But here goes: Merida is a princess of the Scottish highlands sometime in the medieval period. She’s feisty and active, with little patience for the traditional trappings of princess life. She’d rather ride her horse with reckless abandon while lobbing volleys of arrows into targets than learn the history of her realm or the proper manners for court.
When Merida discovers that she’s to be married off for the peace of the kingdom she flips out and enlists the aid of a witch in the forest to change her fate. Things spiral out of control and Merida and her mother, who have been at loggerheads about how a proper princess behaves, are thrown together to... well, this is where the movie runs into problems.
The second act needs to be about Merida and her mother on some sort of a vaguely defined quest, but it’s mostly disjointed sequences - some of which are quite strong - that don’t quite add up to the proper beats needed to get to the finale. The second act beats all feel connected by ‘and thens,’ a similar problem that befell Prometheus. It’s the sign of a story that hasn’t been quite broken yet - the movie knows which beats it has to hit, it just doesn’t know how to get there. Events occur because they must occur narratively, not because they grow out of the actions of the characters.