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Wednesday, August 08, 2012

Fate Be Changed

"There comes a day when I don't have to be a Princess. No rules, no expectations. A day where anything can happen. A day where I can change my fate."
- Merida

So I saw Pixar's Brave last Monday. It's a take on the rebellious princess trope, which is a welcome change from all the previous Disney princesses who can't seem to do their own legwork (except Mulan, I think).

In a nutshell Brave tells the story of Merida, a tomboyish princess from medieval Scotland. Her parents decide to get her betrothed to the firstborn prince of one of three competing clans. Merida strongly opposes the idea, and decides to find a way to change her mother's mind by any means possible. When a magical spell she got from a witch goes awry, Merida has to seek a way to fix the things that have gone horribly wrong.

Brave explores the themes of breaking age-old traditions, seeking one's own fate and learning from the mistakes of the past. The movie employs a lot of fairy tale tropes and was definitely made for a younger audience, seeing that the film had a lot of those signature Pixar comic relief moments. I enjoyed the film's Celtic setting, especially with most of the characters speaking with Scottish accents.

It wasn't as thought provoking for more mature audiences as Wall-E was, but the movie gets its message across. Then again, I guess I was just looking for the next Coraline so my opinion doesn't count.

I was actually more interested in La Luna, the animated short that was shown before the actual film. It's a story about three generations of folks (a grandpa, a father and his son) whose task was to clean the full moon of its stars to continue the cycle. Even if the characters were spewing gibberish, La Luna doesn't need words to convey a sense of poetry and vision from the creators' part.

All in all, Brave isn't really a film-of-the-year contender, but it gets its job done and is worth watching.

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