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Rating: Preceded by an interminable and spasmodic wait fueled by infinitely evocative and spectacular trailers, Brave, the thirteenth film from the U.S. animation studios Pixar, was finally released in Italian cinemas on September 5. For the writer, it was an event long, long-awaited due to the blind faith placed in the studio; the stunning images that gradually, tactically trickled from California only served to increase the general hype for what promised to be the definitive triumph of the studio. The first teaser moved many fans to tears: a world of infinite suggestion in which a heroine battles incarnate evil, my god what it must be. Then came the definitive trailer with a few more details: clans challenging each other, the weight of a crown, breaking traditions, the presence of magic, oh dear now I’m going into hyperventilation. It all seemed absolutely wonderful, stunning, grand, and instead.
One of the problems with Brave, apart from this unfortunate choice for the Italian title (let's ignore the original title Brave which risks people mistaking it for a film about a group of well-mannered girls, but was the unaesthetic subtitle The Brave really necessary?), is that it completely betrays expectations. It's none of what it seemed: it's not an epic story of combat, it's not an epic story of breaking traditions, it's not an epic story of magic, it's not even an epic story. Scottish Middle Ages: Merida is a Vivien Leigh like character reluctant about her role as a princess imposed by her mother, but she is forced into an arranged marriage with the heir of a friendly clan to maintain the lineage; she obviously doesn't want to and turns to a witch for magic that can change her fate. End of the part about traditions, combat, magic, etc., the rest is a sort of long episode of Gilmore Girls with a fantasy twist which could even prove to be contrived and redundant: the witch's magic transforms Merida's mother, the queen, into a brown bear, and thus the film is based on the journey that mother and daughter must undertake to restore her human form. Animal metamorphosis is an extremely common element in all mythologies and global folklore, and in the realm of fairy tales, it was brought to its highest expression by Andersen in his masterpiece The Wild Swans, so there's nothing wrong with using such a trope anyway, but seeing it replayed in a Pixar film, ever a synonym for extreme originality and breaking the mold, and furthermore very shortly after an extremely similar equivalent as Brother Bear from 2003, provides a certain element of perplexity. If this film had come from Sony Studios (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) or Illumination (Despicable Me) or Blue Sky (Ice Age) or the worst of the worst, the very worst Dreamworks, the outlook on this film would certainly have been more generous: it’s not a bad film, but it’s noticeably below the Pixar standard.
Alfred Hitchcock would not have been happy with this film, because for him the foundation of a film is the screenplay, and he was perfectly right: if you follow a trail of will-o’-the-wisps and at the end you say the phrase “oh dear, why ever would the will-o’-the-wisps have brought me here?”, you are mocking any viewer who is at least 6 years old. The whole film is written really, really simplistically: it always seems like it’s necessary to spell out every single event with words, as if the images alone weren’t enough. The dialogues then are really the basis of commedia dell’arte; all characters are standard and they converse in a standard way, with spikes of maximum annoyance in the dialogues between a pre-menstrual Merida and a newly menopausal mother, but at least they provide the true key to reading the film: the target audience. If the majority of Pixar films enjoy the rare gift of managing to captivate every audience segment, lately the studio has dedicated itself with more precision to selecting specific audiences for its films: create a film for young children, and out comes Cars; create a film that can be appreciated by the elderly too, and here's Up; here Pixar realized it had never intercepted the teenage girl audience and thus dedicated this film to them. Choosing a specific target audience is not a fault note, in fact, it makes it more understandable where an artwork should be placed, but in this case, there’s a risk of overdoing it with the thousand quarrels Merida vs. mother that make up over half of the movie, quarrels seen and re-seen in thousands of other occasions and even in reality at home. The story is then very, very standard and predictable and only aims to give a moral lesson to young female viewers; the entire film talks about destiny, but that’s not the theme of the film: it’s family harmony. Ratatouille, now that is a film about destiny that can be forged with one’s own hands, making it one of the best films about the American dream ever made. But Brave just tries to show that mom is always mom and even if you quarrel with her, if you’re very, very sorry she certainly forgives you, so perhaps you also exchange clothes and lipsticks. A 100-minute long episode of Gilmore Girls, really, in which all the male characters are mere wallpaper and are only there to stage gags without having any role in the plot. As perhaps only on an implicit level and perhaps (?) unintentionally, Brave could be the most feminist, no rather the most misandric, no indeed the most matriarchal film of all time. Perhaps unintentionally, sure, but from a film conceived, written, co-written, directed, produced, performed, and sung by women, it was honestly difficult to expect otherwise.
There are then aspects for which Brave is an extraordinary film: the animation and rendering of the film were executed with software developed by Pixar itself, respectively Presto and RenderMan, which render the film an experience of unimaginable visual beauty. Film after film marks a step forward in the technology used, but here 100 steps have been made: every leaf, every hair, every drop of water is of a hyperuranian, unreal, poignant beauty, truly miserable compared to Cameron’s Avatar not just for the technique, but also for the poetry that pervades every frame of the film. Brave is not only the most visually beautiful Pixar film, it is also the most Japanese: no mystery that directors Brenda Chapman and Mark Andrews love Hayao Miyazaki, and it shows, with a huge amount of citations and sometimes real thefts, especially from Howl’s Moving Castle, Porco Rosso, and Princess Mononoke. What about the will-o'-the-wisps that dangerously resemble certain spirits seen in Final Fantasy? And how can we not notice the cuteness, actually the kawaii of Merida’s little brothers, also transformed into little bears ready to be cloned into plush toys that will break the banks of Disney Stores in Tokyo (note that the brothers, the only males with a role in the plot, have no sexual characterization). Even the short film La Luna before the film has the same characteristics of Brave, namely female target audience, perfect technique, and free plagiarism: this time the defrauded ones are Saint-Exupéry and especially Italo Calvino with one of his most beautiful cosmic tales, which if the director hadn’t admitted to drawing inspiration from would have been good old-fashioned plagiarism.
Brave is not a bad film and it is not the beginning of the end: it is a film that sacrifices the typical originality and eclecticism of Pixar films to offer a film directed with surgical precision to its audience. Let's wait for the next ones, shall we?
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