So whatever the hell happened (Chapman was at one point said to have been taken off the project entirely owing to all-encompassing "creative differences", which many of us supposed to mean that Pixar is still something of a boys' club), Brave is not necessarily a movie that, in its current state, has a single artistic vision backing it up, and this might be all the reason that it can't muster itself up to the studio's top tier, quality-wise.
And the screenplay is credited to Andrews, Purcell, Chapman and Irene Mecchi, in exactly that order with exactly those commas. The film was conceived by Brenda Chapman some years ago as an attempt to work out her feelings about motherhood, making this the first female-centric Pixar film not just in that it has a girl protagonist (which is, undeniably, an important first), but in that its themes and perspectives are somewhat more feminine than the rip-roaring boy's own adventures that have made up the bulk of the studio's output to this point, and also, depending on how you want to parse out a very knotty production history, it's the first Pixar film to have a woman share directorial duties, though the truth of this matter is hidden beneath some very defensive official credits: Mark Andrews and Chapman each get their own separate "directed by" card, with Steve Purcell receiving one of those "co-director" credits Pixar is so fond of that I've never entirely understood.
At the very least, this much has to be said, and said loudly: there is absolutely no excuse for considering Brave to be predictable or redundant or a sign of creative failure at a time when Madagascar 3 has opened to generally positive reviews. And, heck, if I were all that concerned about this trend, surely I would have started my own review any other way. Thus it it has gotten stuck in the one place that "awfully nice and deeply felt and extravagantly damn pretty but also a bit simplistic and certainly not a medium-defining masterpiece" could not survive being stuck, and so we've arrived at a place where nobody can bring themselves to simply talk about the film on its own terms, but only as a moment for reflection on the state of a studio that was, in very recent memory, the most reliable brand name in the modern history of Hollywood. Instead, it has to be a Pixar movie, and not just a Pixar movie, but the Pixar movie that had to come out right after Cars 2 and prove one of two things, according to your tastes: either that Pixar had regained its footing after one and only one (but one extremely massive) artistic stumble, or that Pixar has officially settled into its role as a more technically accomplished marketing department for the Walt Disney Company to sell toys. It could have survived, and thrived, as just an animated family-friendly adventure movie.
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