BRAVE: I’ll Be Shooting for My Own Hand

Brave (2012) – The 13th Pixar Animated Feature – Directed by Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman – Starring Kelly Macdonald, Julie Walters, Billy Connolly, Emma Thompson, Kevin McKidd, Craig Ferguson, Robbie Coltrane, and John Ratzenberger.

In seemingly every conversation I’ve had about BRAVE over the past few months, or in things I’ve heard people say in person, on Facebook or in the theater, the idea has come up that Meridia (Kelly Macdonald) signals some kind of dramatic shift in the “Disney Princess.” People have said things like, they’ll “finally allow a Disney Princess into their house,” or that Disney has “finally made a positive Princess.” That’s all fine and good – it’s not my intent to tell you how to raise your kids, or point out there there are obviously several Disney Princess movies you’ve either not seen or critically misread.

I am here to say that I’ve just about had it with Meridia being called a Disney Princess. I know this probably matters to almost no one and I realize that given Disney owns Pixar that whatever Pixar does is Disney’s, but I like to think that there’s still a separation between what it means to be a “Disney film” and what it means to be a “Pixar film,” even if John Lasseter is now Chief Creative Officer for Walt Disney Animation and some college kid is probably already or soon to get paid to walk around Disney World in a Meridia costume. Perhaps over time a Disney film and a Pixar film will simply become the same thing, but for now, they’re different.

Disney acknowledges this, too. Despite all the talk about Meridia joining the ranks (as of BRAVE’s release, the Wikipedia page for Disney Princesses even mentions its expected, so you know it’s true), Disney’s official Princess site has yet to list Meridia among the ranks.

All of this Disney Princessification of Meridia rubs me wrong, too, because it completely ignores the very excellent TANGLED from two years ago, a film that wonderfully embraced the Disney Princess past while admitting its flaws and decidedly pushing it forward, too. Rapunzel is a great character and TANGLED is a great movie.

In fact, it’s a better movie than BRAVE.

That is not to say that BRAVE is a bad movie, because it is not a bad movie. It’s a good but not great movie. It’s enjoyable and moving, but it also feels oddly derivative and small. With all of the sweeping vistas and epic set-up, the movie’s ultimate focus on a daughter and her mom learning to put aside their differences and find a middle ground – while the mom has been transformed into a bear (we’ll get to it) – is touching but … lacking.

None of this is Meridia’s fault. The Pixar braintrust (so many people write, produce, direct, and generally have a say in these Pixar films it’s hard to think of them as belonging to a singular individual) has created a really great character. The daughter of a Scottish King, Meridia is a Middle Ages version of a tomboy caught by societal expectations.

Meaning, her mother.

All Meridia wants to do is shoot arrows and ride her horse Angus. All her mother wants her to do is be a proper princess – act like a lady, wear fancy clothes, tame her wild hair, and get married to protect the unity of the four clans. Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson) arranges for a contest to be held to marry Meridia off to one of the first-born sons of the other clans. King Fergus (Billy Connolly) is the kind of king who wants to not be bothered with unpleasant things; he loves his daughter and encourages her wild ways, but also doesn’t want to anger Elinor.

The relationship between Elinor and Fergus is a bit of a letdown because it feels like they’ve come out of Sitcom Casting 101 – he’s the loud, boorish, infantile, man and she’s the woman who’s way too good for him. I expect a bit more out of Pixar than to have their characters feel like discarded ideas for Tim Allen, James Belushi, and Kevin James sitcoms. (There’s a hint that the film is going to get into why these women marry these losers when Elinor indicates her own betrothal was not the most ideal of happenings, but then it just lets it fade away.) It’s nice that the focus here is on the child-parent relationship instead of on the husband-wife relationship, but that brings up another reverberation I felt while watching BRAVE.

How To Train Your Dragon takes this same premise of parents trying to pigeonhole their kids into a societal norm, and delivers a much better film.

In the best sequence of the film, Meridia is beside herself at the idea that she’s going to be forced into a marriage with a kid who wins her at a contest, so using the rules to her advantage, she declares herself an entrant in the contest (after she declared the contest would be archery), and “wins” herself. This sends everyone into a tizzy, of course, which leads to Meridia jumping on Angus and taking off for the forest. She comes across a will-o’-the-wisp, which blaze a trail to a witch’s hut, where Meridia gets a potion that will change her mother, and therefore change her own fate.

This is how her mother gets changed into a bear. What occurs from here out is that Meridia has to care for her mother as she tries to undo the damage she’s done. There’s some really nice, really touching scenes between the two as the proper mother is forced to learn how to catch fish. They’ve only got two days to undo the spell by mending the bond that was severed, which Meridia takes to mean fixing the tapestry that she sliced into during a fight with her mom, but really means (or also means, if you prefer) that they need to mend the damage between them and realize they love each other and accept each other, and it’s actually all very touching.

But it’s just not particularly memorable. The mother-daughter bonding is quite nice, but it serves to make the King-clan stuff come off as nonsense. The clans are all mad because no one is telling them what’s going on and Fergus is rather clueless, and all of them feel completely antithetical to Meridia and Elinor in nearly every way, including the most important: the ladies feel like real people and the men feel like what would happen if Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, and Danny McBride decided to remake Rob Roy. The film would have been better without them.

There’s a back story here of a big, angry bear that was tricked by the witch a long, long time ago but it only really seems to exist so that we can have a big final action sequence.

All of this sounds rather negative, but this doesn’t mean that BRAVE is a bad movie. It has a good message about parents needing to let their kids find their own way, and kids needing to understand that parents are often right, and it’s a solid end that Meridia ends up re-establishing her familial bonds instead of simply gaining a boyfriend. It’s an enjoyable enough movie, with Meridia’s triplet brothers providing some comedy as they’re always playing pranks and getting turned into bears and generally being a nuisance. It’s a stunningly beautiful movie, too, as Pixar’s animation techniques remain at the top of the class. Yet, there’s something off here, too, and the result is a movie I enjoyed watching but neither thrilled me nor challenged me.

BRAVE simply feels too simple, too safe, too unoriginal.

Maybe Meridia is a better character than some of the Disney Princesses, but she’s not in an entirely different class, either. For all of her talk of being independent and not wanting to conform to society’s expectations, after her mother is turned into a bear Meridia becomes the embodiment of those stereotypical gender roles: she becomes a caregiver, she sews, she cooks, and at the end they even damsel-in-distress her, as it’s her mother (in bear form) who defeats the mean, angry bear. The movie’s message that you can be yourself and conform to expected gender roles isn’t a bad one, but it’s not exactly a rousing one, either. I enjoyed that BRAVE didn’t simply give us a “kid is right, parent is wrong” story, and that as much as she conforms to gender roles to help her mom, her mother also sees that there’s real value in Meridia’s atypical abilities to hunt and shoot and be independent.

It speaks to the high quality of Pixar’s films that BRAVE is closer to the studios worst film than its best because any company would be proud to produce BRAVE. For Pixar, though, BRAVE is a bit of a disappointment. This is a good movie, but not a great one, and Pixar’s unbelievable success has led me to expect great ones.

WALL-E: This is What Happens When You Put the Doctor in K-9′s Body

WALL-E (2008) – The 9th Pixar Animated Feature – Directed by Andrew Stanton – Starring Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, Fred Willard, John Ratzenberger, Kathy Najimy, Sigourney Weaver, and MacInTalk.

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There are political, economic, and environmental issues writ on a massive scale in WALL-E, which is why the film’s unifying, universal image of better days coming from the simple act of holding hands is so powerful.

WALL-E is one of the finest movies ever made, a true triumph of emotional storytelling and the power of animation. It is a film rife with social commentary, presenting a world gone so off the rails that there are no humans left on Earth.

Early in the 22nd century, humans conditions have become so bad on Earth that humans have piled into a massive starship called the Axiom and left for deep space. They leave robotic cleaning units behind called WALL-Es (Waste Allocation Load Lifter – Earth Class) to pick up all the trash. The movie opens 700 years after the humans left, and we find that there’s only one WALL-E unit still in operation.

WALL-E (Ben Burtt) is a wonderful character, combining the programmed basics of robotics (he still dutifully reports for work every morning and returns home every evening), and a developed sentience (he has a fondness for collecting pieces of junk). This junk collecting robot strikes me a bit like a kid version of the Doctor; like our time machine stealing Time Lord, WALL-E is curious, a bit child-like despite his advanced age, lonely, awkward around women, and incredibly determined when he sets his mind on something and dedicated to those he cares about.

For all of the gorgeous scenery on display in WALL-E (and this is Pixar’s most visually magnificent movie), it’s this beautiful being, this young mind in an old robot’s body that carries this film. Yes, there are plenty of “big” messages here about how unchecked industrialization is killing the Earth, how the deepening integration of corporations and government is most definitely a Bad Thin, and how our increasing reliance on technology is making us dependent on technology. All of these messages are relevant and powerfully rendered without resorting to preachiness, but they wouldn’t mean a darn without the story of WALL-E falling in love with EVE (Elissa Knight).

WALL-E is content at the start of the movie to keep doing his job. There’s a lot of trash lying about on Earth and he goes around collecting it, pulling it into his body, ejecting it in a compact cube, and then stacking the cubes in arrangements that eventually look like skyscrapers. Devastating as these images of Earth are, it’s the occasional glimpses of broken down WALL-E units that really strike home. As our WALL-E does his job, he (and the robot is definitely gendered male) takes note of various interesting pieces of junk and sticks them in a cooler he carries with him. While he works, WALL-E also listens to music, which plays an important role in his development. When he returns home each night, he plays old musicals and watches them with a sense of awe. When a particular piece of music strikes him (and this clearly seems to be determined by the scene in the movie more than the song), he records it so he can play it at work the next day.

The routine of WALL-E’s daily schedule is broken with the arrival of a spaceship that delivers EVE to Earth. There’s a humorous non-chemistry to them at first. EVE is powerful, bright, white, shiny, and rounded – nearly opposite WALL-E’s boxiness in every way. Personality-wise, EVE is all business, while WALL-E is a lovestruck suitor, following her around. When WALL-E eventually gets her back to his place, she notices the small, single-stalked plant that he found in a refrigerator, and her programming directive kicks in. She stores the plant inside of her and shuts down, waiting to be retrieved.

WALL-E doesn’t know this, of course, and he cares for her, trying to make her better by putting her in the sun, incorrectly assuming that because he uses the solar energy to recharge, she’ll need to do that, too. EVE is completely unaware of WALL-E’s concern because she’s in hibernation mode, but later she’ll see footage of his actions and be incredibly touched by them.

When WALL-E eventually decides to go back to work, EVE’s spaceship comes back to take her home and WALL-E freaks out. Rushing home, he tells the cockroach he hangs with to stay put, and then clings to the side of the spaceship as it blasts off. WALL-E clings to the side of that ship all the way across the vastness of space until they reach the Axiom, the corporate-built and controlled space liner that contains what remains of the human race.

Like EVE is to WALL-E, the Axiom is a bright, shiny binary to the desolate Earth. Humans have become so fat and lazy over the years through their reliance on technology, that the human race has become these large masses of doughy flesh. They wheel around the ship on floating lounge chairs and their heads are eternally buried in the computer screen right in front of their face. On the bridge, there’s a struggle for power between the human Captain (Jeff Garlin) and Auto (voiced by the old MacInTalk program). All of this is background for WALL-E’s dedication to getting EVE back, and there’s plenty of enjoyable escapades on board the ship (the ship’s computer is voiced by Sigourney Weaver), including a truly magnificent flying/dancing sequence with WALL-E and EVE outside the ship.

At the core of the disagreement between Captain McCrea and Auto is the plant that EVE has collected. According to protocols, evidence of plant life is supposed to automatically send the Axiom back to Earth. The cruise had been designed to be temporary, but things were so bad that 700 years have passed. What Auto knows that McCrea doesn’t is a second message send by BnL CEO Shelby Forthright (Fred Willard in a live-action role) ordering the ship to never return.

McCrea’s actions against Auto are the first real decisions of his life, and he, WALL-E, and EVE eventually get the Axiom back to Earth, where the human race begins to reclaim the Earth.

More important for the movie, however, is that EVE desperately repairs WALL-E with items from his home base. At first, the repairs make WALL-E work, but don’t contain any glimmer of his personality, but EVE holds his hands and leans her head close to his, and they share a kiss (personified by an electric spark that connects them) which brings WALL-E’s personality back to the surface. It’s a truly beautiful, truly emotional moment.

WALL-E might very well go down as the best movie Pixar ever makes; the company has a ridiculously successful track record, of course, but WALL-E, for me, operates on a higher level than any other film in the catalog. It’s not just that this is a very good main story (and Pixar has told better stories), but that it’s the combination of good story with phenomenal, unique characters, a multi-layered plot, and truly amazing, gorgeous animation. WALL-E feels important, too, in ways that most other films (animated or not) do not; from the first moment to the last (including the really good closing credits which continue the story), WALL-E feels like a completely special and unique film.

THE INCREDIBLES: Reliving the Glory Days is Better Than Acting Like They Never Happened

The Incredibles (2004) – The 6th Pixar Animated Feature – Directed by Brad Bird – Starring Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Sarah Vowell, Spencer Fox, Jason Lee, Samuel L. Jackson, Elizabeth Peña, Brad Bird, and Wallace Shawn.

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THE INCREDIBLES is a near-perfect film.

The only problem I have with Brad Bird’s animated masterpiece is that the film falls into that old comic book trap of having the bad guy be a physical oddity. Buddy Pine/Syndrome (Jason Lee) is the weirdest looking character in the film and the largest social misfit; this is a simple and frankly childish typing of the “abnormal” character as the bad guy. We know Buddy is evil because he’s got crooked teeth and a misshaped head and he’s a geeky nerd, so of course he’s going to grow up and be an evil scientific genius-slash-super villain.

Buddy is annoying, sure, and he has no business inserting himself into the super-powered life of Mr. Incredible (Craig T. Nelson). Mr. Incredible has every right to send him home and rebuff Buddy’s efforts to be his sidekick, and it’s totally on Buddy that he grows up to be a megalomaniac, and that he can’t realize that he’s a freaking rich man with his own island a super-smoking assistant named Mirage (Elizabeth Peña) and enough cash to pay for an army of henchman.

That’s not enough for Buddy, though, so he pulls a Hank Pym and builds a giant robot that looks like the Death Star sprouted Doctor Octopus legs. Buddy’s plan is to kill all the retired heroes (a federally-mandated retirement), sick the robot on Metroville, and then swoop in and save the day.

Buddy and Mr. Incredible are both dissatisfied with their lots in life, and both look past the people around them to feed their own egos. Mr. Incredible liked being a hero. The film opens in the glory days of super heroes, with Bob Parr (Mr. Incredible’s) dressed in a tux and on the way to an undisclosed event. He’s in a great mood and as criminal activity reports come in on the police scanner, he checks his watch and decides there’s time to play hero before his date. He does, stops one bad guy, but then Buddy inserts himself as “Incrediboy,” Mr. Incredible’s sidekick. Buddy’s interference causes Mr. Incredible’s attempt to stop Bomb Voyage to be less than successful, but he does make it to the church on time.

That’s right, the church. Mr. Incredible is marrying Elastigirl/Helen, with a sparsely attended service of supers in attendance. It’s a bit odd, but perfectly comic book, that Bob and Helen are dressed in civilian attire, but much of the crowd is dressed in their costumes.

Shortly thereafter, everything goes to junk. During the Bomb Voyage episode, Mr. Incredible saved the life of a man that was jumping to his death. As a result, the man in alive but injured and he sues Mr. Incredible for “ruining his death.” This starts a flurry of lawsuits against the supers. The public opinion swings against them and in response, the government shuts the heroes down. They institute a “Supers Relocation Program” and force the heroes to play normal.

Fifteen years or so later and Bob and Helen Parr are living in suburbia, raising three kids: Violent (Sarah Vowell), Dash (Spencer Fox), and Jack. Really, its Helen who’s raising the kids. Bob works in the city at an insurance agency and hates everything about it, which is effecting his role as a parent. Which is basically to say, he’s a fat, depressive shell of who he used to be. Helen’s job as a mother would be incredibly difficult raising a teenager, a pre-teen, and a baby under any circumstances, but her two oldest kids have super powers that they’re not allowed to use, and Dash is completely full of attitude.

Bob is of no help to Helen. During the day he’s forced to play company man, screwing people out of their insurance claims. To Bob’s credit, he hates doing it, and helps them on the sly because it gives him some of the old thrill of being heroic. When he gets home, though, he’s a miserable human being. Helen and he have reached a point in their relationship and he’s reached a point in his life where he’s almost completely checked out of being a husband and a dad. Helen has to do everything, begging Bob to take his role as father seriously.

Bob would rather lock himself away in his private study, sitting among his old costumes, newspaper reports, and trophies.

When Helen catches him after a night out of playing hero (“Is that rubble on your shirt?) with Frozone (Samuel L. Jackson), Bob snaps, “Reliving the glory days is better than acting like they never happened!”

Bob has set up a false binary; it’s not about reliving them versus pretending like they never happened, at all, it’s about living in the past versus living in the present, and Bob isn’t living in the present. Bob is so depressed and so entrenched in his own pitiful stupor that he’s completely failing as a family man. The only time he shows any life at home is when Dash talks about using his superpowers – an act that Helen is trying to discourage because when they get caught using their powers, they have to be relocated yet again, and the inference is that they’ve been relocated several times, already.

Bob ends up getting called into his the office of his supervisor (Wallace Shawn) to get read the riot act about how his clients always seem to know the ways to get the insurance company to pay up. Frustration at his job and his supervisor’s insistence that Bob not leave the office to go help someone being mugged causes him to snap. He knocks his boss through multiple walls and gets fired.

Depressed at having to tell Helen, Bob gets a message from Mirage and is brought to an island to capture a robot. It’s Buddy’s island and Buddy’s robot, but Bob doesn’t know this, yet. His defeat of the robot sends his spirits soaring and he’s making enough money working for Mirage that he doesn’t have to tell Helen he got fired. With his spirits boosted, Bob starts working out again, and while he never gets back to his glory days’ weight, he loses enough weight that he could model for a very successful “before” and “after” advertisement.

Eventually, Buddy makes himself and his plan known to Bob, and captures him. Back in Metroville, Helen notices that Bob’s old costume has a new repair job, so she goes to Edna Mode (Brad Bird), the fashionista/costume designer. Edna has a surprise for her – a new costume not only for her, but the entire Parr family. Helen realizes that Bob has been lying to her and she sets off to find him.

Well, she makes a pit stop at home first, and her insatiably curious son sees the costumes and before you know it, Helen is on a plane to the private island with Violet and Dash hidden in the back. Buddy, who now goes by the name Syndrome, sends missiles after them and destroys the plane. It’s a well-executed, high tension scene that sees Helen panicking a bit and ordering Violent to extend her force field bubble around the whole jet. Violent can’t do it; she’s never’s extended her bubble that far and especially not under these circumstances, so the missiles hit the jets and the family falls to the ocean below. Helen saves them and they swim to shore, hiding out in a cave. Helen leaves the kids behind and goes on a rescue mission.

The rest of the movie pours on the action. We get fantastically executed sequences on the island, inside Syndrome’s compound, and in Metroville as the Incredible family becomes a family of superheroes.

THE INCREDIBLES works from start to finish on nearly every level. The look is bright and inviting, the characters are well-rounded and human, and the music (from Michael Giacchino) is brassy and upbeat.

All of the main characters have multiple aspects to their personality. Helen can be playful, cross, sly, focused, and frazzled. Dash is scattered and a troublemaker, but he’s not lacking in intelligence. When his mom gets on his case about using his powers, he shoots back, “You always say, ‘Do your best,’ but you don’t really mean it. Why can’t I do the best I can do?” Violet is shy at school but a force at home. As they progress through the film, we see them functioning as a real family unit; they can get angry with one another but when it counts, they’re there for one another.

Mirage is a fascinating character, too, as she betrays her loyalty to Syndrome to help the Parrs out. Now, we don’t know if she was involved in all of the previous superhero murders that Syndrome has brought about, but here, at least, we see the decency of Mr. Incredible (which is there, once you get past all the self-despair and then let him burn out his ego boost) and the power of family causing her to turn against Syndrome.

And then there’s this:

THE INCREDIBLES really isn’t totally a superhero movie, at all.

It’s also a James Bond movie.

Now, practically the only thing keeping Bond from being a superhero is a costume, and Bird wonderfully combines and exploits the two genres to take the best of both. Giacchino’s music is clearly Bond-inspired, and while the first-half set-up is superhero based, the rescue and island battle are reminiscent of plenty of Bond films. Where the Bond films usually use the big island action piece as the final act, INCREDIBLES uses it in the middle of the film, then sends everyone back to Metroville for the big superhero finish. I love the retro vibe of INCREDIBLES, though, that cleverly folds the superhero family in with a James Bond villain, making this feel like a very different, very fresh movie.

Actions and costumes bring the Parr family together, and after the big robot has been defeated and Syndrome killed, we see that they’ve adjusted to normal life. Dash gets to go out for sports, though he’s not allowed to win. I’m not sure how this is any better for Dash than not competing, but it seems to make him happy. It’s a shame some non-super powered kid doesn’t get a trophy just to satisfy Dash’s ego, but I suppose it’s a small price for humanity to pay in exchange for Dash playing a role in saving it.

It’s easy to see why Brad Bird jumped at the chance to direct Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol because THE INCREDIBLES is the same kind of movie. I respect Bird’s decision to go live action, but it’s a bit of a shame, too. This is the guy who’s written and directed three huge animated winners: The Iron Giant, THE INCREDIBLES, and Ratatouille. There’s lots of folks who can put together a really good action film (which is what Ghost Protocol is) but there’s not a lot of people who can match his track record in animation. Ultimately, I believe we get the best stories when artists are doing what they want, and if Bird wants to do live action movies, we’ll probably get better movies. Hopefully, that desire will lead him back to animation at some point in his career.

If not, well, he’s left us three winners. THE INCREDIBLES is first-rate film making, from a film maker and a company at the height of their powers.