A flawed but visually appealing movie

Rating: 7/10 (7 December 2012)

Brave is a beautifully animated movie. It truly looks amazing and the amount of detail in certain scenes is astounding. I haven't scene this much detail since Rango. And this is the movie's strong point. It looks good. Honestly I feel like the whole point of this movie was for Pixar to just share a little bit of their talented visuals. So I have established that the movie looks great. Now how about the rest of the movie? Well... it's OK. Nothing really special.
The plot is actually surprisingly predictable, straight forward, and unoriginal. Pretty much I would call it Brother Bear meets elements of Shrek 2. The Witch also looks shockingly similar to the witch from Spirited Away. Basically the plot revolves around a heroine who wants to change her fate from getting a forced marriage. Like so many other princess movies (there are a lot of them with this plot) she doesn't want to get married and wants a life of adventure and fun so she gets a spell to change her fate... which ends up turning her mom into a bear. That's as much as I will tell you though one thing that surprised me is how very little Mor'du has to do with the plot (he is the giant black bear). His real purpose is just to explain why people are scared of bears. That's it. He has a little back story but it's only trivial and unimportant to the plot.
If there is another thing I can compliment this movie on its that even though it is cliché, predictable, and unoriginal... it does a good job. A movie doesn't have to be original to be good and this movie proves that statement. The movie still has good enough characters, good dialogue, and is visually impressive enough to be good regardless of its generic plot. On a side note this movie has surprising amount of nudity jokes for a Pixar/Disney production. I mean that's not saying much and it's not terrible or anything but just a side-note.
So I would suggest seeing the movie. Is it a Pixar classic like Finding Nemo or The Incredibles? No. Certainly not. But is it better than your average animated movie or Car 2? Yes it is. So try and enjoy and don't have your expectations set too high.