Movie Review: Brave

Not the best Pixar film, but still pretty good. Brave is about a young Scottish girl named Merida who is upset with her mom who wants to marry her off to one of these three guys she doesn't like. After the two get into a fight, Merida runs off into the forest and stumbles upon a witch's hut. She pays the witch for a potion that she hopes will change her mom for the better. Instead it changes her into a bear.

The plot... not terribly generic, although once you got the gist of the story down it was pretty easy to see where it was heading. The characters were alright. Not as original or memorable of some of Pixar's other characters, but still pretty likable. The soundtrack was pretty great, one of the movie's strong points aside from fantastic-as-usual animation.

That being said, I was also disappointed with a couple things in this movie. First off, although they picked a beautiful location for the setting of the movie, they hardly took advantage of it. Most of the movie it seemed like you were looking at the inside of an extremely bland castle, even though there were sparkling waterfalls and majestic mountains just outside.

The second thing was that the movie had no real antagonist. Is it just me or are the Pixar films with actual set-in-stone antagonists always better? Toy Story had Sid, A Bugs Life had Hopper, Monsters Inc. had... that purple lizard guy. This movie just had... the mom I guess? Except you were kind of supposed to like the mom, and the mom was good most of the time, and... I don't even know.

If you like films like these I say give it a go. It's enjoyable and pretty well made. If you usually don't like films like these I doubt this will be any exception seeing as though it's not particularly amazing or anything. I give Brave a 7.5/10. A good movie with a .5 bonus for a great soundtrack.