'Brave' Heart

Brave
Directors: Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman, Steve Purcell
Voice Taent: Kelly Macdonald, Emma Thompson, Billy Connolly, Julie Walters
Released: June 22, 2012

Oscar nominations:

Best Animated Movie (won)

Brave marks the first Pixar movie with a female as the lead. To be honest, it had never really crossed my mind that a female had never headlined one of their movies, probably because they've made movies with toys, fish, cars, and robots and even those characters were male or voiced by males or considered male, they still weren't human characters. In Brave, all the characters are human (well, most!) Merida, the main character (voiced by Kelly Macdonald, who I know best for playing The Grey Lady in the last Harry Potter movie) is a 16 year old Scottish princess who has hair, while incredibly realistic and amazing, would drive me crazy. It's so long and curly and if I had hair like that I would either want to pull it back or at least chop most of it off! She is a free spirit and loves spending any free time she can get riding her horse (more like galloping!) and perfecting her archery skills (while doing this upon her galloping horse) and climbing 100 foot cliffs with a gushing waterfall right next to it. Ahh, with animation you can do anything!

Merida's mother (voiced by Emma Thompson) teaches her daughter how to be a lady and is getting her prepared to be betrothed by one of three young gentlemen from royal families who are each the oldest in their clans, but Merida wants none of that. When she learns that the first born that completes a task of her choosing gets her hand, she immediately chooses archery and after the three of her suiters take their turns, announces she will be competing her for own hand and wins the contest. This greatly upsets her mother and they have a huge fight. Merida ends up running away where she runs into a witch who tells Merida she can cast a spell on her mother that will make her change her mind on Merida being married. Well, Merida's mother does "change" for a lack of better word, but it's best not to give away any spoilers. I didn't know anything about this movie going in and didn't expect it to go in that direction and I was glad I wasn't spoiled about anything.

Merida is very selfish and quite the brat. Of course she learns her lesson at the end and she and her mother do come to terms on the situation. I would be lying if I said I didn't shed a few tears, but that's Pixar for you! Their movies always have to go and make me cry!

This movie feels like Scotland threw up on it. Scottish accents, Scottish music, red hair galore, everything is just Scottish. I love the Scottish accent and don't have any problem with it, but sometimes it was like, enough already! We get it! These are Scottish characters who live in Scotland and listen to Scottish music. I'm surprised there wasn't a Scottish terrier to be seen!

I had low expectations seeing this movie because it seemed like everybody didn't like it. I had heard comments on how it would be considered a a great film if it had not been Pixar, but the Pixar name always makes a huge target on their movies to be perfect, so therefore it was only "good" or "decent", but not great, but I actually quite liked it.