Pun Salad

It's Pixar. It's got John Ratzenberger. What more do you need to know? Of course it's good. Maybe not as insanely great as Up, The Incredibles, or Toy Story( (2|3))?, but still a decent way to spend your entertainment dollar.

It's set in medieval Scotland, just barely out of savagery. In a few centuries, it would be producing geniuses like Adam Smith, James Watt, Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Craig Ferguson, etc. But that would have made a different tale, laddie.

The heroine is Merida, a princess parented by oh-so-proper Elinor and nae-so-proper Fergus. She's blessed with hair so red and wild it's practically a separate character. She's a tomboy, excelling in horsemanship and archery. She's also a tad spoiled and willful, at constant loggerheads with her mom, and is extremely put out that tradition demands that she be betrothed to one of the lunkhead sons of the neighboring lords. She views this prospect with such alarm that she accepts supernatural help from a local witch. But this turns out—as usual in such situations—to make things much worse.

There's a lot of hilarity, gorgeous scenery, amazing animation, a gripping plot, sympathetic characters (eventually) in great peril. What's not to like? We didn't spring for the 3-D. Maybe would have been even better.

Consumer note: in our case Brave was playing next door to Magic Mike, and the timing was such that we got to see a couple of exiting crowds. We estimated that the female percentage was somewhere north of 95%. I guess that's not surprising.