Brave

A marked improvement over last year’s underwhelming Cars sequel, Brave follows a Scottish Princess (Kelly Macdonald’s Merida) as she’s forced by her parents (Billy Connolly’s Fergus and Emma Thompson’s Elinor) to participate in a husband-finding archery tournament – with the film subsequently taking a rather unexpected twist after Merida runs away from her castle in an anger-fueled huff. There’s little doubt that Brave gets off to an impressively captivating start, as filmmakers Brenda Chapman and Mark Andrews kick off the proceedings with an engaging and thoroughly exciting pre-credits sequence that instantly captures the viewer’s attention. The promisingly entertaining atmosphere is, at the outset, heightened by the expectedly jaw-dropping visuals and emphasis on irresistibly affable supporting figures, although it’s immediately clear that the biggest attraction here is the central character herself – with Merida, anchored by Macdonald’s superb performance, effortlessly confirming her place alongside the animation realm’s most memorable female protagonists. It’s only as Brave segues into its admittedly unpredictable midsection that one’s interest begins to flag, as the aforementioned plot development, when it does arrive, proves to be something of a disappointment – with its decidedly (and almost aggressively) conventional nature standing in sharp contrast to the majority of what precedes it. There are a few standout sequences sprinkled here and there (eg Merida rallies the troops with an engrossingly impassioned speech) and the Pixar touch persistently sustains the watchable vibe, yet the film, once the narrative proper kicks in, is never quite able to recapture the fun, easy-going feel of its opening half hour. The end result is an entertainingly middle-of-the-road animated endeavor that isn’t, for the most part, able to live up to the high-water-mark of such previous Pixar releases as WALL-E, Up, and the Toy Story trilogy, although, to be fair, the film is certainly yards better than the majority of the animated fare flooding multiplexes.

*** out of ****