Yesterday afternoon was hot and muggy, which to me says “Let’s stay inside.”  Rather than stay home and watch human one trick ponies run around in a circle, we decided to go to a movie.  After much debate and horse trading, we settled on going to see the new Pixar movie, Brave.

Brave tells the story of Merida, a medieval Scottish princess who has a hard time dropping her tomboy habits and growing up to be the future lady her mother wants her to be. When pushed to marry, she creates havoc that threatens to tear apart her father’s kingdom.  In typical Disney manner, her pluck, intelligence, love, and all that come together to help her make it all right in the nick of time.

If you’ve seen The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Mulan, or any of the other Disney movies where a young girl is resisting fitting into her socially accepted role, this should all feel very familiar.  That being said, the movie grabbed Girlie Bear in the first five minutes and didn’t let go until the credits were rolling, so if the target audience was girls and young woman, Pixar seems to have hit the mark.

Boo, on the other hand, lost interest about halfway through the movie.  There just isn’t that much for little kids, especially young boys, in the movie that you would normally find in a Disney production.  There are three young boys in the movie, but they have non-speaking roles and only serve as comic relief a few times in the movie.  The movie has many funny moments, but it is the kind of humor that appealed to Irish Woman and myself, not our four year old boy.  An older boy might have gotten more of the jokes and enjoyed some of the action scenes, but that’s going to be a judgement call on the part of the parents. I honestly don’t know if a girl under the age of six or so would have enjoyed it more.

But don’t get me wrong, this is a very good movie.  It clocks in at 100 minutes, but doesn’t feel like it due to excellent story and pacing.  The voice acting is also excellent, and the characters mesh together to tell a fairy tale about family and duty.  Like I said, there is a lot of comedy in the movie, and the father character, voiced by Billy Connelly, was my favorite.  That’s probably because I could identify with him, being a semi-barbarian myself.

Like all Pixar movies, this film is beautiful.  The background scenery and the non-human characters were as close to photorealistic as I have ever seen, especially the bears that play a major role in the plot.  In fact, they were so realistic that the slightly cartoonish human characters stuck out a bit.  I think Pixar has done an excellent job in not making their characters look weird by trying to make them appear real, but the difference between the human characters and the world in which Pixar places them is becoming more and more apparent.  Pretty soon, if Pixar wants to tell a story in a realistic world, they’re going to have to find a path through the Uncanny Valley.

Overall, I’d give this movie a 3 or 4 stars out of 5, and would recommend it to families with girls and possibly older boys.  The characters and story are engaging enough for adults too, and the beauty of the movie is enough for me to recommend seeing it on the big screen.