Beautiful animation can't make up for the lame feminist storyline

Rating: 3/10 (1 February 2013)

Before anything else I will get the good stuff out of the way. Brave is a beautifully animated film. The characters and textures are all very detailed and nice to look at and the landscapes are, quite simply, breathtaking. The Celtic scenery is incredibly lush and just really pops out. Visually, this movie is stunning. If the technical aspect of how this movie was drawn was the only metric used to assign a score, Brave would be a 10/10. Yet alas, there is also this little thing called "plot" that also has to be taken into consideration.
The first 20 or 30 minutes aren't all that bad. The story at least is coherent by that point if not good. The bulk of the story ends up centered around the heroine's mother being transformed into a bear and their quest to reverse the spell (by repairing their mother/daughter relationship) before the deadline makes her new form permanent. Nonsensical slapstick ensues. Seriously, was that really the best the writers could come up with? A bear?! Ugh...so stupid.
The worst aspects of this movie, by far, are the attitude of the heroine and the depiction of the film's male characters. Every single one of the men in this movie is portrayed negatively. The most favorably depicted male character is the father, Fergus, who while being a competent warrior is also a bumbling, stupid, savage, lovable idiot who jumps whenever his wife cracks the whip. The other males are even worse, notably the suitors and their fathers. They are all portrayed as pathetic, ugly, oafish morons who spin incredible lies in order to make themselves seem competent. Meanwhile, the women are shown to be just the opposite - calm, rational, beautiful, collected, competent.
Merida is the worst, which is unfortunate since 90% of the screen time is devoted to her. She is one of the most selfish main characters I have ever seen in a movie. She is unwilling to accept responsibility and is willing to risk the lives of thousands of people as well as the stability of the entire kingdom and to poison her mother all to shirk her responsibility to her kingdom. And she even steals the "positive" physical characteristics of the men by trouncing the suitors in archery and besting her father in a sword fight.
So basically the moral of this story is "screw everyone else, it's all about me me me me me," and "women can do anything men can do, and they can do it better, and they can do it in heels." Basically Feminism 101.
Seriously, don't waste your time with this nonsense.