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Jun 12, 201280Brave offers a tougher, more self-reliant heroine for an era in which princes aren't so charming, set in a sumptuously detailed Scottish environment where her spirit blazes bright as her fiery red hair.
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70Visually stunning and strongly voiced, but doesn't take any real risks.
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80No less lovely than former films, in many ways lovelier, but Brave is boutique Pixar: less ambitious, more succinct, excellence at a lower ebb.
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Jun 25, 201280For the animation studio's debut foray into fairytale, Pixar has delivered a rousing family melodrama.
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85My heart belongs to Bear Elinor, whose movements and mannerisms are a tender echo of Human Elinor's – her character is designed and drawn just that carefully.
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63The end result is something that feels like it was put together from a jumble of Disney clichés tacked onto the skeleton of "Beauty and the Beast."
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75No envelopes are pushed in Brave, which was directed by Brenda Chapman and Mark Andrews, and no genres are subverted. It's a safe experience; but safe, in this case, is better than sorry.
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75Just misses living up to its name.
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Jun 22, 201250You can't help wishing they'd thought a little further outside the box.
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80The magic is back at Pixar.
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63Brave feels like a merely good-enough children's movie.
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75It's a lively, psychologically astute tale filled with humanity, wit and charming performances.
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80It's a rollicking children's entertainment, gorgeously animated and wittily cast, and also an unusually astute exploration of the complex bond between mothers and daughters, a relationship that's often either elided or sentimentalized in children's literature and film.
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50In terms of story and emotional power, Brave comes up short.
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63The conflicts, magic spells, chase sequences and reconciliations feel strangely by-the-book for a studio so well known for throwing the book out entirely.
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70Brave simply doesn't feel as much like the Pixar movies we've come to expect.
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60This is less a film in the lustrous Pixar tradition than a Disney fairy tale told with Pixar's virtuosity. As such, it's enjoyable, consistently beautiful, fairly conventional, occasionally surprising and ultimately disappointing.
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70The tussling between Elinor and Merida is familiar, but while the mother-daughter clashes may make the story "relatable," they drain it of its mythopoetic potential, turning what could have been a cool postmodern fairy tale into another family melodrama.
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60Gorgeously animated and featuring a tapestry of real-looking wonders, Brave is certainly a thing of beauty. But its emotional layers don't yield the same depth.
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58Tepid, boilerplate production.
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75Satisfying and spirited and laced with humor.
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63Eventually it straightens out into a fast, funny, emotionally resonant story about mothers and daughters, but it takes a while to get there and it's never less than weird.
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88A rousing, gorgeously animated good time.
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75At this point in Pixar's history, the studio contends with nearly impossible expectations itself. This is what happens when you turn out some bona fide masterworks. Brave isn't that; it's simply a bona fide eyeful.
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100Brave has a manic, almost daffy energy and sense of humor.
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80Visually the most ravishing and complex Pixar movie, Brave evokes memories of Walt Disney's early experiments with the multiplane camera, but with the more persuasive intricacies available to CGI artists.
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67The core family relationships ring pleasingly true, and the rebellious Merida is, alongside Katniss Everdeen, an intelligent, capable, and empathetic proto-riot grrrl with stupifyingly kickass hair and even better aim.
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75At its best, Brave accesses all the complicated feelings involved between a parent and a rebellious adolescent: the mutual frustration, the lack of communication, the way conflicting desires can mask love without weakening it.
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75This is a great-looking movie, much enlivened by the inspiration of giving Merida three small brothers, little redheaded triplets.
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75Merida may be a headstrong heroine, a feisty animated hybrid who calls to mind Katniss Everdeen, Bella Swan, and the neo-fairy-tale protagonist who faces off against her evil stepmother in "Snow White and the Huntsman." But she is also, for safety's sake, a nice girl in a pretty green dress who loves her family and believes in dynasty.
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70You won't find a lot of jaw-dropping elements in Brave. But what you will find is really well-done.
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80The animation studio's first film with a female protagonist, a defiant lass who acts as a much-welcome corrective to retrograde Disney heroines of the past and the company's unstoppable pink-princess merchandising.
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70Moms and girls everywhere deserve this movie, absolutely, and I hope they have a great time. But they also deserve much more, and much better.
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40This isn't the NASCAR-fellating cash grab that is the Cars franchise, but it's still Pixar on preachy autopilot.
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80In addition to being fast, funny, and unpretentious, Brave is a happy antidote to all the recent films in which women triumph by besting men at their own macho games.
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Jun 15, 201250There's no denying the film's refrain that legends are lessons, but Brave is sadly remedial.
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Jun 15, 201250Pixar's latest ultimately offers nothing more than a caricature of a well-worn conceit.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 97 out of 122
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Mixed: 14 out of 122
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Negative: 11 out of 122
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10
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3This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.