Disney-Pixar’s BRAVE Movie Review

Ever since first hear­ing that Disney-Pixar was mak­ing a movie with a female hero­ine (it’s first by the way) set in ancient Scot­land, I’ve been intrigued. For many years, “Brave­heart” was one of my favorite movies. And, about 10 years ago, while study­ing abroad at Oxford, one of my best friend’s and I trav­eled up to Scot­land for a few days–even doing a “William Wal­lace” tour around the coun­try! It was fabulous–I love the his­tory, the views, the accents !! So, I’ve been excited to see this one. Big Brother has been get­ting more excited about the film too, espe­cially after meet­ing Merida at Dis­ney­land Resort last week!

ABOUT THE MOVIE:

Set in the rugged and mys­te­ri­ous High­lands of Scot­land, Disney-Pixar’s “Brave” fol­lows the heroic jour­ney of Merida (voice of Kelly Mac­don­ald), a skilled archer and head­strong daugh­ter of King Fer­gus (voice of Billy Con­nolly) and Queen Eli­nor (voice of Emma Thomp­son). Deter­mined to change her fate, Merida defies an age-old cus­tom sacred to the unruly and uproar­i­ous lords of the land: mas­sive Lord MacGuf­fin (voice of Kevin McK­idd), surly Lord Mac­in­tosh (voice of Craig Fer­gu­son) and can­tan­ker­ous Lord Ding­wall (voice of Rob­bie Coltrane), unleash­ing chaos in the king­dom. When she turns to an eccen­tric Witch (voice of Julie Wal­ters), she is granted an ill-fated wish and the ensu­ing peril forces Merida to har­ness all of her resources—including her mis­chie­vous triplet brothers—to undo a beastly curse and dis­cover the mean­ing of true bravery.

Our thoughts:

As soon as the movie opens, I was struck at the amaz­ing scenery. There are times through­out the movie where the imagery was so breath­tak­ing it was hard to remember/believe that it was ani­mated. Absolutely beau­ti­ful! And, I was pleas­antly sur­prised at the dif­fer­ent twist for a princess movie. (Spoiler alert)…There is NO prince charm­ing, no “true love’s kiss”. Merida doesn’t ride off into the sun­set with a new beau/husband. In addi­tion, there is a whole theme of fam­ily togeth­er­ness through­out the movie. No par­ent dies 5 min­utes into the movie; there’s no hor­ri­ble step-mother; no wicked queen/witch try­ing to “off” the princess. Instead, there’s a mom, dad, daugh­ter, and triplet broth­ers who are all involved and play active roles in the movie.

Really, at the heart of it, BRAVE is a com­ing of age story deal­ing pri­mar­ily with the mother-daughter rela­tion­ship. As a mom now, I could relate to both sides of the strug­gle. That aspect of the sto­ry­line was done in a very believable/relatable way. For that rea­son, I think BRAVE would be an espe­cially great movie for a mom & daugh­ter date–especially for moms & tweens/teens. So, if you’re a mom with a 10–18 year old girl, you totally need to plan a time to go!

Of course, it’s not just seri­ous mom-daughter stuff or teenage angst. There movie is filled with adven­ture, magic, fight­ing, peril, and humor too. Per­haps not sur­pris­ing for a movie set in ancient Scot­land, there’s quite a bit of brawl­ing amongst the var­i­ous clan mem­bers and jokes about kilts. You’ll even see a quick glimpse of some naked Scot­tish bums. While I don’t know that I would con­sider it “over the top”, I per­son­ally could have done with­out this kind of more crude/boyish humor stuff. It’s not “my thing” and I don’t under­stand the need for it, but it’s there nonetheless.

The scari­est parts of the movie involve bears–one of which is quite large & very mon­strous. With­out spoil­ing too much, the iden­tity of the other bear makes a cou­ple of these scenes all the more wor­ri­some, as you don’t want any­thing to hap­pen to it.  Big Brother (age 5) even picked up on that. He was def­i­nitely ner­vous & wor­ried dur­ing these scenes, which brings us to the question…

Is BRAVE “ok” for young children?

Not sur­pris­ingly, my answer is, “it depends”.  Big Brother was very clearly con­cerned and wor­ried dur­ing parts of the film. But, we had a dis­cus­sion before about the bear and he has quite a bit of movie-going expe­ri­ence under his wee lit­tle belt. So, even though he was a bit scared, he did fine dur­ing the movie and said he really liked it when it was over. And, for us it sparked some good con­ver­sa­tion about real vs. pre­tend and behavior.

I think two key fac­tors for mak­ing the deci­sion on whether or not to take a young(er) child are the sen­si­tiv­ity level of the child and the child’s movie going expe­ri­ence. If you have a 5 year old or under who’s never been to the the­ater before, this might not be the best intro­duc­tion as there are some pretty intense scenes with the bear. Note that this is rated PG, unlike the typ­i­cal G rat­ings that most ani­mated Dis­ney films get. Inter­est­ingly enough though, the only other Pixar films to get the PG rat­ing (The Incred­i­bles & UP) are the ones that cen­ter almost entirely around human char­ac­ters, like BRAVE. Many of the deeper con­cepts of the movie will likely go WAY over their heads until the upper ele­men­tary age crowd, maybe ages 9–10+. But, I think that for the most part, the aver­age 5+ year old could prob­a­bly han­dle watch­ing the movie. It’s a lit­tle more debat­able with the toddler/preschool crowd. In talks with oth­ers, some 3 year olds have done fine and some 6 years olds were really upset by it. So, I think the key is to just “know your kid” and be pre­pared for some ques­tions (pos­si­bly rather seri­ous ones) dur­ing and/or after the movie.

BRAVE hits the­aters every­where on Fri­day, June 22nd!!

Have YOU seen the movie or are you plan­ning on going? If you’ve seen it, what did you think?

Dis­clo­sure: We saw this movie at a free press screen­ing at the invi­ta­tion of Dis­ney.  All opin­ions and expe­ri­ences are my own and your opin­ion of the movie may dif­fer from mine.