Brave -- Pixar's 2012 release

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.

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.