Brave Reviews
Top CriticNo, not another Pixar classic, but for full-on family fun it's a brave effort.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
The story, with its patchwork of plots (involving feuding clans and disastrous spells), holds together enough to thrill intermittently.
Though it falls short of the studio's best in many respects, Brave is ravishing to look at. Merida's carrot corona is alone worth the price of admission.
The tone is uneven and more often morose than joyful. The pacing is slow and at times almost tedious. The end result is something that feels like it was put together from a jumble of Disney clichés tacked onto the skeleton of Beauty and the Beast.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Saying that Brave is entertaining but not astonishing is pretty much admitting your straight-A student got a B.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
It's a safe experience; but safe, in this case, is better than sorry.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
The Pixar name used to mean something. And it never quite meant pleasantly safe, safely forgettable movies like this.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
What we get would be fine from another studio, but too safe and familiar for Pixar.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
This Celtic-themed story hews so closely to classic fairy-tale tropes, it's the studio's most Disney-fied production yet.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Youngsters with a taste for adventure will no doubt overlook the movie's workmanlike outlines and applaud its spirited, self-reliant heroine, who proves to be as appealingly unruly as her tumble of Titian curls.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
It's a lively, psychologically astute tale filled with humanity, wit and charming performances.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
It's a subpar story that seems to exist mainly to sell a new Disney Princess in the form of wild-haired Merida.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
In terms of story and emotional power, "Brave" comes up short.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
If the Walt Disney Studios logo were the only one on "Brave," this film's impeccable visuals and valiant heroine would be enough to call it a success.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
I really hope that people will give this imaginative little fairy tale a chance, and I can't wait to show it to my 6-year-old daughter.
The standout characters, exciting set pieces and memorable songs that we've come to expect are absent. The truest advertising tagline would be, "From the studio that brought you 'Cars 2.'"
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
It's enjoyable, consistently beautiful, fairly conventional, occasionally surprising and ultimately disappointing.
While co-directors Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman and Steve Purcell have successfully made a family action fantasy featuring a girl hero - a long-overdue revolution - the story is not as special as the princess inside it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Gorgeous visuals, terrific message, but a decidedly second-tier plot and not a single unforgettable character.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
While the character of Merida answers Pixar's cultural critics emphatically - and offers young girls a spirited wild card to add to their gallery of satin-gowned Disney princesses - the studio hasn't imagined a vehicle worthy of her.
Although Brave is satisfying and spirited and laced with humor (haggis jokes, kilt jokes), it doesn't quite mark a return to form for Pixar following the digital house's disappointing 12th feature, Cars 2.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Brave is a rousing, gorgeously animated good time.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
While the mother-daughter clashes may make the story "relatable," they drain it of its mythopoetic potential, turning what could have been a cool postmodern fairy tale into another family melodrama.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
We would expect this kind of overstuffed joyride from Dreamworks Animation or the folks at Fox or even Disney itself. But it's terribly ordinary for Pixar, and ordinary is no longer enough.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
"Brave" offers sweep, a few songs about touching the sky and following your dream and at heart a story of a daughter and a mother learning to cut through society's expectations.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Unusual for Pixar, Brave follows an entirely predictable trajectory, but it's not without its amusements.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
It's a lushly colorful and appealing tale, never quite sublime but always entertaining and often delightful.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The good news is that the kids will probably love it, and the bad news is that parents will be disappointed if they're hoping for another Pixar groundbreaker.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Turns out to be much less about the qualities that mark a heroine built to interest a 21st-century audience of girls, boys, and accompanying adults, and much more about the complexities of mother-daughter relations.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
"Brave" is either a welcome throwback to old-time animated fairy tales -- albeit one with all the latest high-tech advantages -- or a stalling pattern for Pixar.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
...what seemed a relatively conventional family film gets downright eccentric.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
Moms and girls everywhere deserve this movie, absolutely, and I hope they have a great time. But they also deserve much more, and much better.
The animation studio's first film with a female protagonist, a defiant lass who acts as a much-welcome corrective to retrograde Disney heroines of the past and the company's unstoppable pink-princess merchandising.
Merely a dull amalgam of modern Mouse House idiosyncrasies
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
It's a rousing adventure and a hilarious comedy, and if its athletic and intelligent leading lady creates a new paradigm for animated features, so much the better.
A good, often entertaining work that kids will love.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Pixar is long overdue for a feature with a strong female character at its center. Now that she's arrived, it's clear that she deserves better.
In addition to being fast, funny, and unpretentious, Brave is a happy antidote to all the recent films in which women triumph by besting men at their own macho games...
Adding a female director to its creative boys' club, the studio has fashioned a resonant tribute to mother-daughter relationships that packs a level of poignancy on par with such beloved male-bonding classics as Finding Nemo.
A film that starts off big and promising but diminishes into a rather wee thing as it chugs along, with climactic drama that is both too conveniently wrapped up and hinges on magical elements that are somewhat confusing to boot.
