Movie Review: Brave

My wife has been battling a nagging cold for a while.  She finally fought it off only to have it return again this weekend.  We canceled our weekly roleplaying and I went out and bought Brave for her to watch so we could have a quiet evening in.

I wanted to see the movie a while back but never got out to the theater to do so.  We’re both big fans of Pixar movies, so we had high expectations.  The movie hit everything we wanted.

The plot is pretty straight forward (as most children’s movies are).  A young girl wants to rebel against her overbearing mother and forge her own path rather than doing what her mother wants.  Being a child, though, she is constantly overruled.  As the daughter of the king, she has come of age to be betrothed, and the local clan leaders all bring their sons to fight for her hand in marriage.  She is furious about this and enters the contest to win her own hand, defeating the boys and nearly driving the clans to war against her father.

Her mother tries to mend situations as her daughter fights harder to get away from her.  Neither one sees the value in the other.  Finally, the girl flees the castle to try to find a magical way to change her destiny.  From there, things go awry and the mother and daughter have to learn to respect the differences in each other, and both grow as a result.  (I won’t get into the details in case you want to see it yourselves).

I have to say, overall I enjoyed the first half of the movie a bit more than the second.  Once the princess heads out to carve out her own destiny, the story moves out of the realm of having her solve her problems in a normal, relate-able way and into the realm of magic and mystery.  Not altogether bad, but I was much more interested in seeing the conflict between the mother and daughter resolve with some basis in reality rather than through the help of a grand adventure.

Overall, it was a lot of fun.  A very cute movie (the three younger brothers are fantastic) with a good, original story.  Even with its faults, I did enjoy the movie thoroughly and would not mind seeing it again.  I can already see myself enjoying it with my nieces and nephews.