Brave -- Pixar's 2012 release

idgi, what's wrong with princesses? Is it general anti-royalist sentiment (which I as a Yank don't really feel)? Brave's attention to the mother-daughter relationship is a corrective to Disney's history of films with young female protagonists and absent mothers, within which conventions it both deploys and undermines. What's more, to tell a story as they tell, they probably needed to focus on the aristocracy for it to have any semblance of familiarity to modern viewers, is my guess.

I think the number one reason there are so many Disney princesses is that so many of those movies piggyback off of public domain properties or other fairy tale stuff, which frequently focuses on princesses (and certainly royalty in general). The number two reason, of course, is that the princesses are huge properties from a bottom-line standpoint. There's a famous piece I may have mentioned or linked to before about the making and marketing of "Cars," and how the movie was specifically conceived to market something to boys for a change.

Pathological need to take a parent or parents (but especially mom) out of the picture - from Dumbo and Bambi on down - a much more disturbing Disney trend. But I suppose that's a necessary concession to the machinations of drama. Even my daughter now, when she's writing stories, begins by killing off one or both parents.

What's more, to tell a story as they tell, they probably needed to focus on the aristocracy for it to have any semblance of familiarity to modern viewers, is my guess.

Yeah, it's worth pointing out that this is the first Pixar film set primarily in anything resembling the real world.

though it's not disney, how to train your dragon is also set in ye olde land of funny accents, and the male protagonist is the son of a viking chieftain. i do wonder if there's a sort of plot shorthand at work there, where "this takes place in the hardscrabble past" is countered by "but our main characters are at the top of the food chain, so their lives are more familiar to you coddled westerners."

btw i saw lilo and stitch for the first time like two months ago, and that shit is harrowing. takes the disney trope of the orphaned child and treats it with utter seriousness, child protective services and all. the part near the end where lilo and her big sister are talking in the hammock had me bawling, even with the foreknowledge that everything would end up okay becuz they made a spin-off tv show from it.

Yeah, it's worth pointing out that this is the first Pixar film set primarily in anything resembling the real world.

I don't know that "medieval Scotland but people can be turned into bears and also magic voicemail" is per se more "real" than "contemporary Paris and also this rat can cook."

Fair point, though the fact that Ratatouille is about the rat first and foremost does skew things a bit.

Like, it matters where and when we are in Scotland, more so than that we happen to be in Paris now instead of Rome 100 years ago.

"Brave" and "How to Train Your Dragon" would make a great double feature.

There was a TV show called "Jane and the Dragon", it's like they demerged it to make those 2 films.

so like, if your memory is that disney is a princess factory and now they've put a princess in a pixar movie and OMFG i apologize for saying "girls, ew" when i should have said "princesses, ew"

Brave is not my favorite Pixar movie, but a lot of the criticism of it makes me uncomfortable because much of it does seem to boil down to "girls, ew".

Pretty sure most of the criticism boils down to "her mom turns into a bear and bumps into things a lot."

but those were the best parts of the movie! and yes, they tie into the whole mother-daughter stuff.

They were the best parts of some other movie. See also: talking dogs flying airplanes in "Up."

Pathological need to take a parent or parents (but especially mom) out of the picture - from Dumbo and Bambi on down - a much more disturbing Disney trend. But I suppose that's a necessary concession to the machinations of drama.

You can't have an adventure if you're safe! Yes, completely necessary.

Eh, I don't know why they do it. There's a single parent in "Toy Story," but of course that fact/she has nothing to do with anything. Same with "The Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast," "Aladdin" et al. (no moms, no explanation). There are a lot of Disney flicks with only one parent. Sometimes I think it just has something to do with ease of storytelling. (see also: Spielberg, who does this all the time, though almost always to jumpstart adventure). Lack of mom is important to "Finding Nemo," of course, a movie that dramatically kills her and most of her kids in the first two minutes!

Just scanning the list, it's pretty impressive how well Pixar has been able to avoid princess stuff, let alone families or traditional domestic scenarios, for so long. And when they did focus on an intact family, "The Incredibles," the hit it out of the park.

The mother thing there then is an implication that if you were having an adventure but your mother didn't know, she'd be a Bad Mother, but with fathers, fathers be off fathering somewhere! Or in short ♥ Finding Nemo.

I wasn't idly speculating, I was stating a fact. Adventures for children can't happen if their parents are at the top of their world keeping them safe and keeping anything interesting from happening to them. You can only be a hero on a quest if there's an element of uncertainty or danger to your fate, even if it's only as perceived by the child's mind.

Identifying with characters who are left alone or put in danger is an acceptable way of experimenting with independence and unprotectedness for a child.

There are a lot of Disney flicks with only one parent.

Are you being fair and balanced here, or do you have a long list of those with only the mother?

Well, it'd probably be easy to cobble one together. I'm lazy, but I saw some claim that"out of 27 prominent Disney heroes (as of the end of 2010), only eight have onscreen mothers who aren't killed before the credits roll.

Here's some big piece I saw: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1308584/Why-does-Disney-hate-parents-Ever-noticed-favourite-films-kill-Mum-Dad-.html

Don't have a prob with lack of parents myself, and yeah, it's no doubt to spark adventure. Also, like I mentioned earlier, it's far from unique to Disney, and indeed it often stems from the source material:

http://www.snopes.com/disney/waltdisn/mother.asp

This guy is more thorough in his (already outdated) list of "Disney animated features where one of the parents is missing from the beginning of the story without any real explanation:"

http://theformer786.blogspot.com/2011/07/disney-and-single-parent.html

He sums up toward the end that "out of the 50 theatrical animated feature films that the Walt Disney Animation Studios has produced to date, 35 prominently feature a single-parent family, an orphaned child, missing parents or parental death."

Finally watched this last night, it was gorgeous to look at but everyone itt saying it was like a boilerplate Disney movie is right. I mean, watching the La Luna short afterwards just shows how much heart Pixar is capable of injecting in their films and reinforced how little of it was actually in Brave.

what exactly do we mean by heart

i mean jesus it was a cute fantasy about a lil boy and his elders working on the moon

human organs

I guess by "heart" I mean that intangible "something" that made me feel real human emotions instead of "lol those Scottish guys are naked under their kilts!" for the third time.

if only pixar had put more heart into brave - like, i dunno, made her a small child with big eyes who only says three words

less joeks more accordion

I mean, I haven't kept up with this thread closely because I hadn't even seen the film until last night, but it seems super obvious to me why this particular one would feel less like a Pixar movie and more like a Disney one. But I guess if we didn't like this movie we are supposedly sexist or something? idgi

dude you're the one saying there was no emotional content in a movie all about mother/daughter drama

What's wrong with being sexy?

Ha, just made myself laugh imagining the shit Disney would get for making a sexy Scottish mother/daughter drama.

I didn't say there was "no emotional content"! Sure, there was, just none that resonated with me in the least. Guess I should have been more clear in my post about La Luna.

sorry, there was nothing that made you feel "real human emotions" as opposed to the little boy and his dad scraping starfish off the moon for three minutes

sorry, there was nothing that made you feel "real human emotions"

But did you feel any bear emotions? I did, a little.

Jeez I kinda feel like I've personally offended you by not liking this movie, da croupier.

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.

that sounded way snottier than I meant it to be. oops :)

exactly. i just think it's hilarious how shitty a job the anti-disney squad is doing defending itself from the possibility they're being reflexively antipathetic to "for girls" content. can't just say it's not a pixar highlight. it's gotta be the WORST - just a bunch of broad jokes and PRINCESS shit!

I feel like there's a lot of projecting going on itt about why people might not live this. For me the biggest thing was that the writing wasn't nearly as clever as other Pixar movies.

"live" = "like"

so you're ditching the "heart" theory

Dude, you are just being willfully obtuse about this now. I still think La Luna emotionally resonated with me more than Brave did, that hasn't changed. The clever writing thing was an attempt to get at why Brave failed to resonate with me, but it seems like you've already got it figured out for me, so why bother arguing with you anymore?

Now I remember why I hate talking about films on ILE and I really regret chiming in with my thoughts.

Honestly, I think the problem with "Brave" - which is similar to the problem I had with "Princess and the Frog" - is that it's not enough girl stuff. Like, "Princess and the Frog" was a big deal, because it was the first black princess, and then she spends 95% of the movie as a frog (and is rescued at the end by a deus ex whiteperson). In "Brave," they set up this great, strong female character, but then she spends much of the movie dealing with bumbling bears and magic, which might be fine but was not at all what I was expecting, which was more of an adventure/quest with a strong female lead, not a movie that featured said lead mending her relationship with her mom by literally learning to sew.

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.