Worn Will-o-the-wisp

Rating: Null/10 (4 November 2012)

Animation is an uphill struggle. On top of constructing everything right down to the wardrobe and hair on the characters, you have to construct the impression of spontaneity and emotion. Pixar constructs probably better than anyone else right now, but their human intuition is still much less adventurous than the machinery used in the process.
You only need to compare the two halves of Wall-E for a clear effect - superb artificial emotion when it's just a robot in an empty world, mirrored in the musical on TV as another case of artificial-staged emotion (and in a workshop much like where they work), and on board the ship mechanical and plodding 'human' emotion.
And this is entirely a human story and has to labor at the same time under the Disney moniker. So we get the cutesy (and gnarly) animals, the spirited princess, mother-daughter dynamics intended as usual for parents and kids and much sentimental magic in the journey of stitching back together broken hearts.
The story really is as trite as you heard. The gentle notion, the rift between two hearts as the rift in a fabric where an ideal image is woven, is handled in as obvious a way as it gets. Too bad.
But of some interest is the fact that magic - illusion - drives this world.
Here's the causality: Merida has feelings of animosity towards her mother, spitefully enters a pact with magical forces, whose outcome however reveals more ambiguous desires than she knew, transforming-seeing the mother in the hated image of childhood fear. Boring.
The point lost in too much Disney clutter is that though illusory, in the sense that they are really no-thing, urges in the soul really do have the power to perturb reality and create images that last.
Given the topic, there's the contemporary branch of chaos magic (post Crowley) where the effort is to construct urges to yield the desired outcome, this is very similar to the way Pixar constructs emotion. Better yet to read up on the history of will-o-the-wisps, a purely cinematic subject that has carried a medieval tradition of magical belief masking optical illusion well into the cinema.