BRAVE: A Monument to Compromise

Twenty years ago Pixar Animation Studios revolutionized cinema with the first full length completely computer-generated film. Two decades later and Pixar is still one of the most consistently groundbreaking studios in the business. Leading up to the release of their new film The Good Dinosaur, I will be going through Pixar's entire filmography at the rate of two movies a week. This time around we dig into the tragedy behind Pixar's attempt at diversity, Brave.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Mark Andrews or Brenda Chapman, Steve Purcell (co-director)
Writers: Brenda Chapman, Mark Andrews, Steve Purcell, Irene Mecchi
Cast: Kelly Macdonald, Billy Connolly, Emma Thompson, Julie Walters, Robbie Coltrane, Kevin McKidd, Craig Ferguson, John Ratzenberger
Runtime: 93 mins
2012

In every fiber of its being, Brave is a wholly and unflinchingly average movie. The character design is slightly amusing. The world is lush but unoriginal. The slapstick is inoffensive and unengaging. The voice acting is cartoonishly Scottish. The dialogue gets the job done. The action is functional. The plot is familiar. The story is a far more typical version of what Disney tried and succeeded in accomplishing a year later with Frozen.

When you add all that up, you can't help but be disappointed to find that Brave is no more nor less than the sum of its parts: a cookie cutter movie about fate and self-determination. I'd be hardpressed to name one truly interesting or groundbreaking choice in the whole movie. During my viewing I was so unimpressed with the paint-by-numbers proceedings that, without even realizing it, I got up and went to do something in another room while the climax was ramping up. I never abandon movies like that.

So Brave is an average movie. What's wrong with that? Well, the real tragedy rears its head when you start to pay attention to the context surrounding the film. On a surface level, Brave is a Pixar movie, and every average Pixar movie is tragic on some level. But the big picture is about more than that.

For years and years Pixar had been crafting masterful animated features about universal human experiences. Yet as each new movie came and went, every one of them written, directed, and performed by white men, that universality began to feel shallow. For a film studio with arguably more ongoing influence over our children than any other studio besides its parent company, Pixar didn't seem to concern itself too much with diversity onscreen or behind it. You could certainly point out that many of Pixar's movies don't involve humans, so race is an odd thing to be talking about, but even within that flimsy argument all of Pixar's major characters are explicitly gendered, and almost entirely male. At any rate, rationalizations wear especially thin when the troubling race and gender dynamics of Cars and its sequel are brought to the table.

Understandably, it was a huge deal when Pixar announced Brave. Following a couple years of sequels and preceding a prequel, this would be the Pixar original property to finally break through the gender barrier and tell the story of a young empowered woman who fights bears and has a real relationship with her mother! Sure, she uses a bow and arrow, which is apparently the only weapon we're allowed to give action heroines, but the trailer felt big and mysterious and cool.

Yet the biggest boon for equality was that Pixar brought on Brenda Chapman, an honest to goodness woman, to write and direct. The paltry number of female directors working in Hollywood is embarrassing. It's not because women don't want to direct. It's because women are systematically discriminated against. Go ahead and try to name three big deal female directors working today. Kathryn Bigelow, Ava Duvernay, and...? Even when women knock it out of the park with low budget indie movies, they aren't given the big opportunities that their far less worthy male counterparts are--here's looking at you, Colin Trevorrow.

In this case, we have Brenda Chapman, the woman who directed one of the most stunning animated films of the last twenty years: The Prince of Egypt. I grew up with that movie, and many of its images still haunt me. It's amazing. Yet not until Brave fourteen years later did she have another chance to direct. This announcement was very good news.

Then she got fired.

Partway through the production of Brave, Brenda Chapman was excised from the creative process. I have not done research into this recently, but last I heard the details of the schism were kept fairly under wraps and chalked up to creative differences. This decision must have been made by executives, but there was certainly input from the Pixar Brain Trust: the group of creative leaders at Pixar who oversee development of all of the studio's films. Allow me to list the first names of all the members of the Brain Trust.

John. Andrew. Pete. Joe. Lee. Brad. Gary. Bob. Brad.

Now allow me to list the first names of all the former members of the Brain Trust.

Brenda.

Whether or not Brenda was doing bad work on the film, whether or not the Brain Trust was justified in their actions,* whether or not the movie turned out better because of it,** the fact remains that this cavalcade of white guys briefly allowed a woman into their boys' club, only to decide they didn't like it very much. So they replaced her with a director named Mark.

MARK.

*As if anyone ever suggested taking John Lasseter off of Cars or Cars 2.

**I tend to doubt the movie ended up better than it would have; a great deal of what keeps Brave from congealing into something meaningful has to do with the impression of too many cooks in the kitchen, almost as if one director was striving for deeper interpersonal drama and another was injecting as much suspense as possible.

From what little I've read, Brenda's comments indicate that she is unhappy with how she was treated at Pixar. This is the great tragedy of Brave. This is what makes me dislike a perfectly adequate movie.

I gave better scores to the Cars movies than I wanted to because I despise them, but they are semi-functional nonetheless. I feel the same way about Brave. It is average, despite the cultural damage it has done to the Pixar brand (and the cultural damage the Pixar brand has done to gender representation). Years later we would get Inside Out to partially rectify the wrong of female representation in these movies, but Brave will forever be a real boner of a missed opportunity. So to speak.

2.5 / 5  BLOBS

The Short: La Luna

La Luna seems to be about a family of janitors who are tasked with cleaning up the moon. It's also about finding your independence amongst competing influences. It's about these things in a beautiful yet wholly simpleminded way. There's nothing wrong with that, although it's no Day & Night.

The characters talk like Sims and the main setpiece is heavily evocative of the art and physics style that Super Mario Galaxy pioneered in 2007. The tiny stars that cover the moon are probably this short's one wholly original contribution, a contribution that almost certainly acted as a predecessor to Inside Out's incredible and tangible memory globes. It's all rather lovely, though I've seen Pixar do far better.

2.5/5