gripping tale of adolescence well worth seeing (very very mild spoiler)

Rating: 9/10 (23 June 2012)

I watched Brave a couple times today. I want to say this carefully: It's very very good, definitely well worth watching ...but it's not quite as great as some others.
The animation is superb. I didn't expect to see somebody pull rack focus in an animation (and especially not to have it be totally believable). I was so in the moment that when snot dangled from a little kid's nose, my automatic reaction was "ew, gross" ...just like most of the people around me to judge from all the noise in the theater. When a human transformed by a witch into a larger body size kept bumping into things and causing clatters all over, that was totally believable too. And a closeup of a galloping horse that came into full focus every mid-stride but raced just a little bit beyond the film at the beginning of each stride was so realistic I was looking for the sweat beads.
Fur and cloth, which as I understand it were once the frontiers of animation, are so natural they seem like just throw-aways here.
Pixar has gone beyond a full portrayal of reality into "hyper-reality". Everywhere you look, there's "more" than there would be in real life. The whole thing felt a little like the extremely lush vegetation in "Avatar". Just one specific example: there are more species of plant growing in the forest than I'd expect to see in a real forest. There's very little "squash-and-stretch" - probably it wouldn't mesh with such a "real" portrayal.
The story was thrilling too, especially at the end. But I did have some quibbles. The first half hour seemed a little off-stride. Although the title is "Brave" and quite a few story elements point that way, so many more point at "intelligent" and "level-headed" instead that the intensity seemed a little blunted. And the whole last part is very definitely built around the "chase" trope; don't get me wrong, it was extremely well done and gripped my interest big-time ...but after it was over I realized I'd been hoping Pixar would paint a little further outside the box.
I saw the preceding short "La Luna" during the Academy Award competitions last spring, so it wasn't new to me. It will be new to most viewers though, and it's magical. If you've ever been frustrated at not understanding a film spoken in some other language, this will cure you - there's not an intelligible word spoken anywhere, yet everything is completely clear.