Monday, June 25, 2012

Brave

This weekend, besides playing with our new camera, Jay and I went to see Brave with our friends Megan and Chris.

I was very excited for this movie and had very high hopes since I fell in love with Tangled last year. Sadly, Brave did not compare to Tangled (and all its glory) and I left the movie theatre wishing I had waited for it to come out on DVD.

(source)
Brave is about a princess, Merida, who is determined to change her fate as princess. The movie opens with a young Merida being given a bow and arrow from her father on her birthday. During the opening scene Merida also encounters a will-o'-the-wisp (which is intended to lead her to her fate) and her father is attached by a daemon bear.

Years later, Merida's father (King Fergus), at the request of Merida's mother (Queen Elinor) calls upon the other clans to compete for Merida's hand. Merida gets to choose the challenge in which her fate is determined. She chooses Archery since she excels at it and competes herself since she is not interested in any of her suitors and is the first born child (who is allowed to compete in the competition).

Merida dominates the competition but greatly upsets her mother. After a falling out, Merida flees to the woods to find another will-o'-the-wisp who leads her to an evil witches house. There Merida asks for a potion to change her fate. Instead it changes her mother into a Bear.

Now, this is the part of the storyline that shocked both Jay and I. We understood the story was about a girl who wanted to change her fate, but neither of us realized her fate entailed transforming her mother into a bear.

Regardless, Merida now has 2 days to "repair their bond". The remainder of the story shows how the mother daughter combo learn to respect each other and inevitably restore their bond.

The storyline was cute and had a nice lesson, but it was not my favorite Pixar movie. I would even say I was slightly disappointed in Pixar for picking a somewhat weak story for their first lead female character.

While Brave is not my favorite animated feature, it was fun to see it in the theatre opening weekend. We went to an 8 p.m. showing on Saturday, so the house was packed with little kids. Both Jay and I found the children's reactions really interesting! It was fun to hear them react and when the reacted. Obviously Jay and I do not have children ourselves, near the point to have children, or are around children on a daily basis to know how they would react.

Did you see Brave? What did you think?