Storywise, it is strikingly reminiscent of Disney's Brother Bear, to the point where one wonders how such a similar tale of transformation and perspective-based betterment could move ahead within just a few years. Like those widely embraced films, it has an accessible past setting with fantastic adventure and family drama in the foreground.
Hardly evoking Pixar's colorful past triumphs, Brave more quickly calls to mind two of the biggest modern hits from DreamWorks and Disney in How to Train Your Dragon and Tangled, respectively. Chapman would retain a directing credit (albeit a secondary one) and stay at Pixar until the film's release, but she has since left to become a consultant to Lucasfilm Animation, a job which last month's industry-shaking acquisition put back in the Disney family. Chapman would not get to see the film come to fruition, with creative differences bumping her from the project and giving One Man Band's Mark Andrews his first feature directing job. It also gave us our first female Pixar director in Brenda Chapman, a story and storyboard veteran of the '90s Disney Renaissance who helmed DreamWorks' The Prince of Egypt and alone conceived Brave with the title The Bear and the Bow. Brave gave us our first true female Pixar protagonist in the fiery redheaded princess Merida. Humans were front and center as was a very real setting of the Scottish Highlands around 1,000 years ago. It was also a fantasy and not in the same sense as the Toy Story and Monsters, Inc. Here was a film marketed as more of an adventure than comedy. The thirteenth entry in the feature canon and the studio's first original movie in three years, Brave stood out from past Pixar works in a number of ways. It did little to temper the sky high expectations with which the newest Pixar film has regularly been met. That curious sequel, seemingly the principled studio's unprecedented succumbing to commercial temptation, was a minor blemish on Pixar's long impeccable track record. Last year's Cars 2 derailed that streak as the company's first feature not given instant "masterpiece" status, first completely overlooked by the Academy Awards, and first to gross less than $200 million domestically since the 1990s. The films have generally won rave reviews and the Best Animated Feature Oscar, while displaying something of an upward box office trend. Since deciding that the bustling warm season was best for them, Pixar has released a new film every June, save for one that opened three days before it.
The Pixar summer movie has become one of the few constants in an ever-changing industry.
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