Not Pixar at its best but still intelligent, engaging and entertaining

Rating: Null/10 (3 November 2013)

I'm not sure why I let Brave pass me by for as long as I have. Perhaps it was the general impression that Pixar is falling off its game since the merge with Disney or just that the mother/daughter theme probably wouldn't appeal to me. Whatever the reason I watched it recently and, while not the bet that Pixar have offered, it is certainly no "Cars" either. The plot sees a Scottish princess frustrated that her fate is one of marriage and goes against her mother's wishes to be more the self she wants to be. At this point the film employs a rather unusual plot device to force mother and daughter together and force them both to come together and accept one another. The device didn't really work for me but it was nicely done so I went with it.
Although from here there is a lot of device-related action, it never loses sight of the central theme of the mother and daughter, in particular the daughter finding her own path but doing so with the mother rather than despite her. This is mostly nicely done and I was surprised by how some of it was quite moving. Again it doesn't bring the emotional punch that Up, Wall-E and others did, but it still works as more than what it appears to be on the face of it. The comedy is also refreshingly free of pop-culture references as well, which I do enjoy a bit of but sometimes it is nice to just get an entertaining and well told story without all the knowing nods and winks.
The voice cast is pretty unimaginative in terms of casting since it seems that someone wrote a list of people with Scottish accents and then worked down that. That said, they are all good so this isn't a problem. Macdonald leads the cast really well and makes for a very positive wee character. Connolly, Coltrane, Ferguson, Thompson and others are all good in support and generally make the most of the material.
Brave may not be up to the level of Pixar at its best but this isn't Cars or anything like that. It has intelligent content and heart, even if the narrative device didn't totally convince me.