Determined to make her own path in life, Princess Merida defies a custom that brings chaos to her kingdom. Granted one wish, Merida must rely on her bravery and her archery skills to undo a beastly curse. Although far away from being one of Pixar's best animated features like Toy Story and The Incredibles 'Brave' is packed with terrific animation, a sweet storyline and likable characters even tho it's not perfect and it could have been if it had done some better things storywise but still check it out it's pretty and quite fun too for both kids and parents. (8/10)

As a movie, this is alright. But it's just very simple and doesn't really do anything. This movie could've been summed up in about 20 minutes without all the unhilarious jokes.The animation is a big complaint, yeah. Disney has a reputation of great and clean animation. They team up with Pixar for many franchises you know (their cleanest studio for this stuff), but this is Walt Disney. And those movies are also good. This was kind of bad for a Pixar standard around the time. he movements looked choppy at times and the characters look like dolls. Not much texture was put in to it. And then, the whole color tone of the movie was just a dark gray smoky tone.The story is a retelling. A retelling of "A girl asks a witch to cure her life, but it hurts her instead." There's many versions of this kind of thing. So nothing special, her mother just turns into a bear, how original. So then the movie tried to make a Brother Bear theme trying to "bond" and stuff. Just very boring. Nothing grand was explored, and it definitely didn't give justice to the Scottish culture they tried to use.Instead of making it grand like they hyped it up to be, we get a one dimensional story. The girl never showed her skills for any real fight. She's always teased throughout the movie as a skilled fighter and archer, yet at the end she doesn't show it off. The story just goes of the curse she's trying to heal. There's nothing "brave" about this. It's just another copy and paste story.Oh, and I don't hate jokes that much, but was this terrible with it. It's the biggest disappointment i humor. The three brothers were honestly annoying and the three kingdoms coming made no sense. They added ANOTHER plot with this reverse the curse plot which made it worse. So of course they just made the three kingdoms plot to make them for humor, and focused more on the reverse curse.This wasn't good in a fresh sense, and the reverse cursing thing they tried to teach was alright. It wasn't grand with anything they tried to do (like the three kingdoms not helping with any of the plot or the souls which made the protagonist less brave). I don't think this just had a right mindset of how to handle this.

The early trailers for this film convinced you that this was going to be an epic and magical adventure (with some whimsical humor) that the geniuses at Pixar were going to take you on--a redemption of Cars 2 of the previous year. As time went on, I began to see newer trailers/tv spots for the film, that left me in question. Why are they marketing this as a down-right comedy now? What's with the bear cub and the boobs thing? Has Pixar lost their minds?I saw the movie in theaters. I went in alone (as a film critic), still with very high expectations for the film despite the recent questionable advertisements it had.The film starts out with Merida (the main character) as a little girl. It's her birthday, she gets a bow from her father as a gift. Little Merida goes into the forest to find her lost arrow, and finds what they call "wisps". She retrieves her lost arrow, and goes back to tell her parent what she saw, and then her party gets crashed by a 15 foot monster bear. You'd think all of these things would connect later in the movie or help along the plot... but no. Seriously, this opening sequence has nothing to do with what the film is really about.Turns out that Merida's mother arranged for her to get married, and the suitors are on their way. Merida doesn't want to get married, and tries to break tradition in her own way, and runs away to find a witch in the forest who gives her a cake that changes her mother into a bear. And because the spell didn't do what she wanted, Merida is trying to get a refund. That's it.Really there's no need for the movie to be called "Brave" since there were no achievements in bravery in this film. I personally though that "Rebel" would've been a better title since it was basically all about Merida's rebellion against her mother, family, and cultural traditions. And they for some reason throw the 15 foot bear back into the movie, as well as comic nudity (which I found to be more on Dreamworks' level) and a "hilarious" moment where the bear cub lands in a heavy-set servant woman's boobs (which I found had Disney written all over it).Basically, the animation was beautiful, but the story was a mess. They had too many ideas for the story and it felt like they wanted to please all the story writers so they shoved everything in. This is sad because at one time, Pixar prided themselves on story. Everyone knows if a film doesn't have a good story, it's not going to be good. There are so many examples of that courtesy of Dreamworks Animation (Shrek the Third, Bee Movie, Madagascar 1).I really wanted Brave to be my new favorite Pixar movie, but it came up short. Just like Cars 2, I enjoyed the Pixar animated short film more than the actual feature film. I will buy Brave on DVD in due time, (since I am a hardcore Pixar fan, and I own every movie), but like Cars 2 (which I also have on DVD) I will rarely watch it.Disney has very much taken over Pixar, and it's really starting to show ever since Cars 2.

"Brave" is very much unlike most Disney movies. Its princess not only wants to break tradition: she wants to go out and do things on her own, even to the chagrin of her parents. I guess that part of what was most enjoyable about it was the setting in medieval Scotland, complete with lots of Celtic imagery (and they made sure to have a mostly Scottish cast: Kelly Macdonald, Billy Connolly, Robbie Coltrane and Craig Ferguson, among others).Admittedly, there are some goofs - as revealed on the YouTube series Cinema Sins - but overall I thought that it was a respectable movie (and I say this as someone who's not usually into Disney movies). As to the issue of whether it deserved to win Best Animated Feature, I did think that "Frankenweenie" was the cooler movie.Even so, worth seeing.