Brave -- Pixar's 2012 release

see jon, when people have been discussing for days about how brave-haters have been exaggerating the film's flaws and pulling some WHAT HAPPENED TO MY PIXAR shit over princess content, and then you stroll in saying a film about teenage daughter's conflicted feelings towards her mother made you feel no real emotion and lacked "heart" compared to the near-silent three minute tale of a wide-eyed boy and his dad taking stars off the moon, a backpedal to "oh it just wasn't as witty" is just going to be more gristle for the mill.

You keep repeating the plot over and over as if that's going to suddenly make it resonate more with me. Also I'm not sure why it's confusing to you that a film I found to be fairly rote in its storytelling and joke construction didn't resonate with me. Also, my main beef with the movie, as stated in my first couple posts, had nothing to do with the princess stuff, more with the lazy "lol kilts" jokes.

oy. i know i said i was out of this but damn

the PRINCESS shit you are hung up on is shorthand among animation fans. It's disney's self-referential labeling for merchandising and vapid barbie adventures. this is not something we are making up.
http://disney.go.com/princess/#/home/
Over the past few decades, disney has ground out about five princess films that reveled in gender stereotyping and crass sexism aimed at little girls and they are not good movies. they are attempts to cash in on a market.

there is fear among afficianados of the form and stans of the studio that pixar is finally bowing to pressure from disney to mitigate its approach. that brave did not notably elevate above PRINCESS status is not ew girls, it is pixar fans' way of saying that it missed the mark. that you don't know or care about or are misreading the perhaps easily misinterpreted jargon of cartoon fans does not equal your consistent presumption that all us nerds are hella insensitive sexists or that we're bound and determined to hate this because it's a princess movie. I like a few princess movies: Castle in the Sky, sleeping beauty, princess knight. It's not the princess that's the problem. It's the tropes.

brave is bad pixar. it is bad pixar like cars is bad pixar. it is over focus grouped and pandering. if you enjoyed it, good for you; I'm glad you were able to overlook the weaker elements and find something meaningful.

with due respect though, you are not somebody who is a stan for the studio or who has even seen/enjoyed the majority of the work. most of the folks railing against this movie are. the reason stans in this thread keep saying THE FEEL and THE MOMENT is because many of us get touched by the work the studio puts out. When we get touched it's almost always the product of rigorous engineering, a "lubitsch touch" moment where our irony and sarcasm is shredded and they get us in spite of ourselves. Pixar is good about tucking in a few of these and keeping the butt jokes to a minimum. that's why they're beloved by grown up animation fans.

fuck i probably need an ilx break, i know i have more important things to think about than this.

xpost But it's not really about her conflicted relationship with her mother, it's about her being pissed off that her mother is marrying her off. Which is a legit grievance! And given that that is what sets this all in motion, her mother's decision to let her go her own way comes about through no process. She wants her to get married, she turns into a bear, then as a bear there's that scene in the dining hall where she basically just changes her mind and figures, heck, let her follow her heart. I wish the film did a better job of capturing the deeper dynamics of a mother/daughter relationship. I found the bear stuff got in the way of that.

"Brave" was miles better than "Cars," and at least both were gorgeous to look at.

it is over focus grouped and pandering. if you enjoyed it, good for you; I'm glad you were able to overlook the weaker elements and find something meaningful.

vs

When we get touched it's almost always the product of rigorous engineering, a "lubitsch touch" moment where our irony and sarcasm is shredded and they get us in spite of ourselves.

exactly: badly done engineering vs well done engineering

congratulations is if you were tricked, but you gotta be on some LUBITSCH shit to trick me!

I always forget which of you have kids. Because I find that watching these (or really any) films with my kids (two daughters) is really tied into their reaction or lack thereof, what I feel like the movie is aiming for vs. what the kids take away from it, which in turn affects, to some degree, what I think of the movie.

congratulations is if you were tricked, but you gotta be on some LUBITSCH shit to trick me!

I think it's interesting that Cars is considered bad Pixar. I know a lot of people didn't like it but I have also wondered if a lot of that was cultural cringe. I've been a Pixar fan from the start, and I haven't heard an argument against Cars that hasn't boiled down to 'ew nascar' 'ew Larry the cable guy'. Then again I don't travel in wide cartoon circles, so I'm sure there's more cogent arguments for why it's bad.

Which is why I still take the Brave criticisms with a grain of salt, because Pixar fans can be so damn precious about what a Pixar movie is supposed to be that they crawl up their own ass. imo.

it's my personal feeling that Pixar fandom allows a weird kind of elitism over 'normal' cartoon movies, while ignoring the fact that most of the Pixar movies get their 'heart' from the evil Disney movies they're supposed to be better than.

I have a kid, but he's only 18 months old and aways from watching movies with us.

I'm at work and trying to type up responses between other tasks, so forgive me for not having time to really compile my thoughts here. But da croupier, can't it be enough to just disagree with us about the movie? I mean, it's 100% legit for someone to have found this movie disappointing without having to be pinned as sexist.

yeah i gotta admit this preciousness is new to me, probably since i haven't been on many pixar threads

and josh, that totally makes sense re: kids. i don't have any (saw the movie with my wife and sister, both of whom liked it a lot), but i already kind of judge kids movies to some degree on whether i'd want my hypothetical kid to see it so i can imagine their actual two cents would be very affecting. but there's enough sexist bullshit going on around brave that you're going to have to deal with it being called out.

i've said repeatedly i can understand someone being disappointed with for totally sympathetic reasons

its fair to call out the sexist bullshit, absolutely. i've seen a lot of stuff well deserving of your ire, fwiw. but you're painting everyone with the same wide brush here, there can be other reasons to find a film disappointing.

and, fwiw, maybe it was unfair of me to bring La Luna into this because i've always loved Pixar's short film work and often find it more affecting than the majority of their feature-length work.

i'm from the south and grew up next to a race track. i got no inherent argument with nascar or larry the cable guy except that they're not my bag. My argument against cars is that it failed as a story and that pixar did not find a way to make cars engaging as characters.

pixar films aren't the only animated ones with heart of course and they're hardly a perfect studio. Films like Incredibles and Bugs Life are just okay. When they're very good they're very good.

are you reading "a movie with animated characters touched me emotionally" as precious, croup? your degree of venom and head of steam seems out of proportion and i think you're reading something into the conversation that's invoking this level of snark.

i'm quoting vg, re: preciousness forks

xp short form work in animation can be much more emotionally effective; the thin needle bursts the bubble easier

also you should know by now that opinionated snarking requires seriously little effort for me

As someone who heard about this film like a year early and wanted it to be great but will not be seeing it based on disappointing reviews + this thread, I've been dipping in occasionally to see what the talk was.

Jon, I think it was the blitheness with which you sped past Brave having "no heart" despite being primarily about mother + daughter, and then praised a father + son film that was short and virtually speechless and explained almost nothing. It was probably an accidental juxtaposition but a really ill-fated one.

ah so preciousness is unrealistic expectations i guess. i'll cop to being guilty of that but with some justification: who the hell could've thought the third installment of a cartoon film about anthropomorphized toys would focus on the nature of the relationship between man and god and resolve with a sharp secular humanism moral

fwiw, i honestly didn't really read La Luna to be about a "father/son" relationship at all, or at least i didn't read that as being the driving force behind the story.

even this news that "hey princess is just shorthand for bad work" seems sketchy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Princess

Disney Princess is a media franchise owned by The Walt Disney Company. Created by Disney Consumer Products chairman Andy Mooney in the late 1990s, the franchise features a line-up of fictional female heroines who have appeared in various Disney animated feature films.
The ten current members of the franchise are Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas, Mulan, Tiana, and Rapunzel.
In July 2013, Mérida from Brave will be joining the line-up.

The Disney Princess franchise has received generally mixed reception from critics and customers. On December 24, 2006, Peggy Orenstein published "What's Wrong With Cinderella?" in The New York Times. In her article, Orenstein discussed her concerns about the effects of princess figures on young girls. Orenstein used the Disney Princesses specifically to present many of her points. Orenstein also noted the pervasive nature of Princess merchandise and that every facet of play has its princess equivalent. Tamara Weston of Time magazine criticized the franchise, referring to the princesses as "damsels in distress" and negative role models for young girls.

Hi, I'm an enormous Pixar fan and da croupier is on point here.

Also? Talking about how these male-led films have a specific FEEL that the first female-led one is missing? There's a limited number of ways to do that and look good, and you're not really hitting any of them imo. I'm not saying it's your only argument, but by itself it's another shitty "lady, if you have to ask".

i think vg's post got straight up ignored in this swordfight so

La Luna has the the qualities that ppl associate with Pixar, because of their shorts - and that is telling stories with imagery over dialogue.

But Pixar movies themselves don't have this quality. Toy Story, Monsters Inc, Cars, Incredibles, are all the same KIND of movie that Brave is. It's just that Brave told the story with a bunch of bears and a princess and that seems to make people clench up way more than a bunch of toys/monsters/superheroes.

It's like Brave wasn't Pixar enough. Which I take to mean that if the princess was a mr potatohead doll this would have all been cool right?

I get it. I just think it's kind of funny and a bit like hairsplitting.

gosh, when a man says it i'm suddenly struck by how true it sounds

also fyi forks, re pixar fan preciousness i'm mostly referring to "shins will your change your life shit" like every moment of these films is carefully calibrated; there's nothing in them that hasn't been considered.

croup do you understand how digital animation/CGI works? there are no accidents. moreso than any other filmic artwork, this stuff is meticulous because IT IS BUILT BY COMPUTERS. so injecting the human into it is the magic trick and that's why it's hard to do it well and why so many studios ***coughcoughdreamworkscoughcough*** do it poorly

xpost "Cars" was terrible on its own merits (animation aside). The NASCAR-stuff and Larry the Cable Guy were just gratuitous hedges/sops. Like, the world of "Cars" didn't even makes sense on its own terms - driverless, autonomous but still functioning cars going to tracks to watch other driverless, autonomous cars race? Going to the movies? Making fart and bathroom jokes?

Basically, want I want to know is: who built the cars? WHO BUILT THE CARS!!?!?

Hopefully they'll delve into that in "Cars 3." I still like the idea of a "Planet of the Apes" scenario, where the humans destroyed the planet and everyone died, and these cars evolved to supplant us. Ergo, "Cars 3" should be about the discovery of the last surviving human, and then go into a bunch of religion/free-will bullshit, who is the driver, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jvqPvDUEW8

anyways, this is on my mind because tomorrow i am finally seeing PADAK the korean take on finding nemo in which the action takes place in a sushi tank and i think this is gonna be MUCH better than brave but if one of the fish is a princess i will report back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIFy35o1Vwg

i mean, if you wanna talk about increasing the stakes

smh at this thread taking off while I'm working! anyway xxxxxp what was the deus ex whiteperson in princess + frog? whiteperson doesn't end up saving her, True Love does.

even this news that "hey princess is just shorthand for bad work" seems sketchy

Not sure why princess = "vapid barbie adventures", or why barbie is any more vapid than a transformer.

did you click that disney princess link upthread and explore the website?
Transformers is vapid too! Who said they weren't?

forks there's a difference between feminist writers critiquing disney's princess culture and guys who think no one appreciations animation like they do using "princess" to mean shitty shit that's shitty

appreciates, rather

xpost Barbie is far worse, because there are body image issues going on, not to mention the blatant materialism/outright sexism of the very scenario. Transformers are toys, too, and designed to sell, but no one would accuse Optimus Prime of setting an unattainable standard for impressionable boys.

idk, i'm still trying to grow my shoulder-mounted rocket launchers.

Hey, you're either born with it or you aren't.

Barbie is far worse, because there are body image issues going on, not to mention the blatant materialism/outright sexism of the very scenario.

Disney Princess dolls are not exactly, uh, body-positive; and at least Barbie has actually been a doctor, astronaut and banker unlike SOME ROYALTY.

Barbie is far worse, because there are body image issues going on, not to mention the blatant materialism/outright sexism of the very scenario. Transformers are toys, too, and designed to sell, but no one would accuse Optimus Prime of setting an unattainable standard for impressionable boys.

Sorry, but I think that's horse shit. The Transformers send out a message that problems should be solved with violence and destruction. And there's a lot of materialism wrapped up in the idea of collecting all of the different action figures.

I'm sure we can agree that mass-marketed, gender-distinguished toys aimed at the lowest common denominator of attention span and leveraged to the freaking hilt by multinational entertainment industry GIANTS are horrible for everyone involved. There's probably even a thread for that, somewhere.

Definitely.

except for sectaurs

And Star Wars.

and stretch armstrong

and the bible