Thoughts on Brave

We took our kids this past weekend to see the movie Brave.

How many ways do I love this movie?  So many that I want to write about it here at length with spoilers so I will put any of that after the jump so as not to ruin anything for anyone.

Also, believe it or not, I may have to rewrite/amend part of my first novel because of this movie.  I may include an excerpt in an upcoming post to get some opinions on that if anyone is willing to offer them.  (Hell, I may just put the whole damn novel up here at some point just to get it out into the world finally.  I'm up to 120-plus rejections and may soon turn to plan B.  The B may stand for Blog.)

So here are some general thoughts on our experience seeing Brave without giving anything away:

My girls loved it.  They are ten and eight and were appropriately nervous during the suspenseful parts, but not scared.  There was nothing about it they could think of they didn't like.  I'd read that there were some scary parts involving bears and warned them all ahead of time and that seemed to help.  Mona hugged my arm at one point, but otherwise did great.

Quinn, however, was quietly weeping toward the end of the movie.  The scene was not a scary one, it was a section with a lot of talking, and I'm not sure if he'd been crying for a while and I just missed it or if something in that particular scene actually set him off.  When I realized he was crying I offered my lap and tried to comfort him but he would have none of it.  He kept quietly choking out something along the lines of he wasn't scared and that wasn't the problem.  So I left him alone.  By the end he was fine and echoed his sisters that he liked all of it.  I wish he would talk to me about what happened, but my curiosity does not trump his dignity so that topic is closed.  He's only five, so I don't know how deep his understanding was of certain plot elements, but part of me suspects he was a little freaked out that something troubling was happening to the mom.  The boy loves his mom, and that may have been too intense.  (Most likely that's me projecting my sense of self-importance since I am his beloved mom, but I really can't pinpoint anything else that matters enough to him that might have made him upset since he was fine during parts with scary bears.  I have no idea.)

I find it interesting that all the less than completely glowing reviews I've seen are all written by men.  The complaint from some that the male characters are not written as well as the female leads is laughable to me.  Welcome to my world, boys.  The film was still primarily populated by men.  Most movies I'm lucky to have one female character to relate to, and she tends to be situated as an object of desire, a comic foil (who is physically atypical and therefore not to be considered desirable), or a pal who must be everything good (i.e. thin, capable, spunky, smart) because she's carrying the weight of all who are female in the film.  (The cartoon equivalent of the everything pal that springs to mind would be Jessie the cowgirl in the Toy Story movies.  She feels like she's there so when people say there are no female characters everyone can say, "There's Jessie!" and we are supposed to be satisfied.)  The male characters in Brave were not complex, but there was a large variety of them, and by the end I thought they were all left in a good light.  That is far better than female characters fare in most movies, so I have no patience for the complaints about the portrayals of men in Brave.  If it irks you, go watch, I don't know, every other movie in the world.

Visually, the movie is gorgeous.  We watched it in 2D because none of us particularly enjoy 3D so it's not worth the extra money.  I'm sure if you like 3D it would be great that way.  The music and sound design were wonderful, and personally I'm glad it wasn't a musical and nobody burst into song. (That always pulls me out of the story and leaves it all feeling less believable to me.)

Overall it was exciting, funny, moving, and I'm already looking forward to seeing it again.  I am glad this movie exists for my kids.

Now for spoilers: