Brave - Reviewdom

So I was going to write about age-based discrimination (and will probably follow with a short post on it) but I realised that I hadn't revied the awesome Brave yet. 

BRAVE

                 -Disney/Pixar,
                 -conceived by Brenda Chapman,
                 -directed by Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman.


The first thing I have to say is that it doesn't remotely seem 93 minutes long, which has two implications 1) at no point is the plot uninteresting and 2) You leave feeling a tiny bit cheated because it was over so soon.

This possibly has something to do with a short animation (a delightful little piece entitled "La Luna") at the beginning, which accounts for about ten minutes of that running time, not to mention that credits always take much longer for animated features. But La Luna is worth seeing (7/10 at least), and Brave isn't all that short... it just finishes before you're prepared to leave.

The premise:

Our heroine, the fiesty Scottish Merida, who is also a princess, considers it grossly unfair that she has to get married just because otherwise her peaceful land will be torn asunder by war. This seems a little brattish, but we soon meet the suitors, whereupon we instantly forgive her.

Anyway, Merida picks up on the fact that her father is more interested in belching, role-play and hunting bears than he is in actually keeping the kingdom afloat, and thereby deduces that it is because of her mother, Queen Elinor (Shock, horror, a Disney flick with a living mother???). She quickly offends almost everyone present by ably demonstrating that anything men can do, she can do better, and with the assistance of teenage hormones and her lovable horse Angus, she storms out of the castle to have a private rant. 

The rest of the basic premise is pretty standard - she looks for a quick fix to her problems, it all goes horribly wrong and everyone learns something about themself in the process. But, in fairness to Brenda Chapman's story, no plotline is really original when you break it down to a single sentence. 

The finer details...

The major focus of this film - in a break from both Pixar's and Disney's general ideas - is the mother-daughter dynamic. As is Pixar's trademark, though, there are very few points in the film where the major focus is the only thing happening, and it does its best to make you laugh, cry and think all at the same time. 

Kelly Macdonald and Emma Thompson (Merida and Elinor, respectively) dominate the plot, and, in good old Disney fashion, their performances are perfect. Billy Connolly and Julie Walters, despite having a lot less to do with the plot directly, both voice very memorable characters that entertain without upstaging the main pair. Characters gain depth and fallibility within just a few lines, as much from the well though-out script as from animation so fluid that you can almost forget that it's not real.

I have to tell you that bears feature. This is shown in the trailer, so I don't consider it a major spoiler, but it needs to be said anyway because of the quality of the animation. It is extraordinary.

Forget Sulley's fur in Monsters, Inc. and the sea anemones in Finding Nemo (based on Sulley's fur) - they were ingenious and groundbreaking, yes, but they have nothing on this. The animators for Sulley, for those of you who don't know, went to extraordinary lengths to make the lovable monster's long hair look realistic - an onorous task which entailed animating thousands of individual hairs to respond to position and environment. In Brave, the animators have produced hair which is long enough to respond to environmental influences such as the wind, water etc, but short enough that it also shows the movement of flesh underneath this. And it is incredibly realistic.

Overall, it is the incredibly attentive animation that forces the viewer to take the plot seriously, and unlike many animations, make it easy for even older viewers to forget that the danger is imaginary. 

Any further ado will inevitably lead to spoilers, which I don't consider a good thing, so let's get straight to the scores:


Visuals: 10/10, although - as it moves the bar upwards - probably 11/10 when compared to any previous animation.
Writing: 8/10 - most of it was beautifully original, and it certainly flowed like a 10, but some details of the plot were annoyingly predictable.
Voice Acting: 10/10, easily. Accents were either real or pulled off beautifully, some complex vocal work was done and every emotion written was expressed precisely in the voice.
Score: 10/10. A touch of celtic goodness kept it out of the land of cliches for a Disney score, but still managed to create the mood and set the scene just as required.

so, Overall: 9.5 (brilliant)

I should, however, draw your attention to the fact that if you watch films just for the plot, you're looking at an 8/10 - very good, but not brilliant.

The Lorax - Reviewdom.

(and potentially a mini-rant...)


So I was intending to spend this post fuming about being told that getting a degree and not securing a job the day after graduation has reduced my prospects to nil - by the [SARCASM ALERT]ever-so-nice [SARCASM ALERT] lady at the centre of being-here-makes-me-wonder-if-it-would-be-fun-to-lie-down-in-front-of-a-truck-and-die (A.K.A the Job Centre). I will probably be completely unable to refrain completely from doing so, but that's by the by.



And the reason it's by the by is because I just watched the Lorax. In 2D. 3D isn't worth the price-tag Cineworld puts on it... although frankly, for someone on my income, neither is 2D, but I have an Orange Phone and a few people who wouldn't actively complain if I said they were my friends (well, one), so I got away with it.

I had misgivings about it - Zac Efron, who puts the smug, the git and the can't act in smug git who can't act(although in fairness I'm probably just jealous because he has a career) is in it, and that never bodes well for my enjoyment of a film. I reasoned that since he was just voice-acting in it, he wouldn't have the opportunity to do a pointless scene just to reassure the male viewer that yes, he is still better looking than they are. Evidently, this was a good judgement.

The voice acting was good. I'm not talking about Anna Faris's performance in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, or Steve Carell in Despicable me (or anything else, for that matter), but the general range of emotions and tones suited the mood (and if you don't know that sometimes that doesn't work, see Flushed Away... Kate Winslet and Hugh Jackman are awesome, but they still didn't quite get it) and allowed the scenes to move as though they weren't in an imaginary version of this world where the only things trees are cut down for is -

I'm getting ahead of myself.

The voice acting was good. It more than satisfied requirements.

And then we get to the plot.

I'm going to go ahead and put a massive SPOILER ALERT here, in great big bold red letters, but I'll try and keep the details to a minimum.


The basic premise - dealing with the public push towards a sterile earth as a bad thing (unlike Meet the Robinsons, which treated the fake plastic future as an ideal) - was an automatic win for me. I like the environment (as should we all), and I feel that films that encourage adults and children to take a more active interest in protecting their environment are a must.

This plotline had a few flaws - first off, the original (and horrific) exploitation of the Dr Seuss-land trees seemed to be limited to a single purpose, where real trees are destroyed for just about every reason we can cook up (including biofuel... Grrr, sugarcane grown for biofuel irks me as much as oil palm and rape crops...). I'll forgive this, though, becuase they got in a lot of the innate usefulness of living trees, and it is possible to lose children's interest by overloading them.

The second big flaw was the same as Avatar's: yes, the film has a wonderful environmental message, but it's had a massive environmental impact, too.

I'm waiting for the DVD release to tell you how annoyed I am by this flaw. If it's in recycled, biodegradeable packaging, then all is forgiven. If not.... I shall be enormously irked by their lack of public commitment to a cause. Public commitment is the most important part for a film that aims to change people's minds, because if you're pressing a cause that you're not even seen to believe in, why should anyone think that it's important?

The more peripheral parts (beyond the natural levels of Dr Seuss-esque crazy, which are never unappreciated) were less consistent. There are two general plotlines - the plot which led to the historical destruction, and the plot which deals with a modern push for regeneration. The first one is flawless (although a number of details are annoying, especially the singing, I think that's intentional), but the second one feels like a couple of scenes were cut out.

Oh, also I loathe marshmallows. Just so y'all know. Because they may be delicious when you've charred the outside over an open fire, but a major ingredient (in most) is boiled hooves. Which is:
             a) repulsive;
             b) disgusting (slightly redundant, but worth saying twice);
             c) not given enough detail to allow children to safely keep Kosher, Halaal et cetera; and - most importantly for me;
             d) they're not vegetarian.

But the inappropriacy of a Walmart's worth of Marshmallows is nicely dealt with.

As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted by myself, the modern-day plotline has loads of potential, a few songs that could have done with being an eensy bit de-gained on the soundtrack (i.e. they were really loud) but seems to have been cut shorter to fit into the 94 minutes it takes up. A little more character development would have been nice before the Marvel Team-up, you know?

But it nicely represents the motivations of teenage boys, the typical three generation family dynamic, the conflict of corporate and public interests, and even the Mother Goose keep-the-world-tidy-and-sterile attitude which plagues the lawnmower and weedkiller nations (another thing that I think is an abomination against rationality is the weekly-mowed lawn. 2 weeks is healthier, 3 weeks allows lawn use and wildlife to interact on a much more positive level, and a single late winter scything, while not really creating a lawn, is the best thing you can do for wildlife while maintaining an open space in your garden). And it gets kudos for all of that.

There is one flaw which is done "for the children", which isn't really anything to do with this particular film, just irks me about a lot of children's films.  

Nothing ever dies. 

And yes, you could say that it's wrong to expose children to death. I disagree. You don't want to desensitize children to death, but it gives them a very unrealistic view of the world to insist that - for example - Spot the dog didn't die, he went to the farm. And we say it's for the children, but really it's for our own convenience, and it's another edge of the whole Mother Goose censorship that has permeated society and creates children who grow up to be people like me, with absolutely no real grasp of the functioning of real society.

So - and this is a spoiler - when the entire forest has been destroyed, the air turned to filth, and the water turned to gloop, not even one of the historical character's forest friends actually dies - they just leave. Sure, they're sad when they leave, because their beautiful home is gone, but it doesn't ring true. If just one of them had been shown to be suffering the effects of human greed in the realistic sense, it would have meant a lot more to the children than it actually did.

And yes, there would have been some children - like my sister - who would have made up a mother goose ending with a rose-tinted world in which everybody lived, but most children remember the tragedy of loss in the lion king far more strongly than they would have done if Scar had just deported Simba's father.



So, finishing that little side-track and going straight into the scores:

Visuals: 9/10 (because with Dr Suess, even the natural world is a little too kempt for me)
Writing: 8/10 (because some character could have done with a touch more development, and a little more realism would have helped drive the message home)
Voice Acting: 6/10 (it was good, but it had a way to go before it could be brilliant)
Songs/songwriting: overall, 8/10, but if it wasn't for each containing portions of pure genius, most of the songs would have got a 4/10.
Ambient Music: 10/10. Made the mood, set the pace, was quiet where it needed to be (Although the only animation I'd score less less than 9 for ambient music was Despicable Me, and that's entirely down to personal taste).

so, Overall: 8.2

and I went in expecting a six, at best.