At its worst, it would be tempting to say that Pixar is playing on rival DreamWorks' turf - all one-liners and blocky character designs - if DreamWorks hadn't stepped up its game recently with Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon. Beyond the strong core relationship between Merida (voiced by Kelly Macdonald), the film's frisky Celtic princess, and her equally iron-willed mother, Elinor (voiced by Emma Thompson), Brave creates a universe that's beautifully rendered yet thinly imagined, with rote mythology and a wealth of lowbrow gags. Pixar may specialize in reinventing genres and creating new worlds, but this theme draws from a vast emotional reserve.īut there's a lot that isn't good about Brave, too, or at least that's woefully conventional by Pixar standards. Everything that's good about Brave - beyond the expected eye candy, anyway - stems from the push and pull between the princess' ambition and the demands of family tradition.
Yet they've also solved the problem the Pixar way, which means family comes first, whether it's the surrogate bonds of Cars and Toy Story or the close-knit units of Finding Nemo and The Incredibles.
With the vibrant Scottish adventure Brave, the company sets about solving that political problem by offering a distinctly 21st-century princess - strong and rebellious, swift with a bow and uncompromising in her quest for self-determination. Over the years, the only persistent knock against Pixar is its lack of one thing Disney movies had in spades: female heroines. Not since Walt Disney's heyday has an animation company enjoyed a creative - and technically innovative - run like Pixar, now on a two-decade stretch that started with Toy Story in 1995 and continued with modern classics like Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc., The Incredibles, WALL-E, Ratatouille and two Toy Story sequels that took on improbable depth and complexity.
0 kommentar(er)
