

And in the latter department, this newest good-but-not-great release-while representing admirable progress-suggests Pixar still has a way to go.īrave tells the story of Merida (voiced by Kelly Macdonald), an irrepressible Scottish princess with a mane of red ringlets that approximates a solar flare. In the first department, Pixar's trifecta of WALL-E, Up, and Toy Story 3 set the bar so stratospherically high that the studio was bound to fall short of it, as it did with Cars 2 and has now done again with Brave. Two notable exceptions, however, have been the managing of expectations and the creation of indelible female characters. Over its brief history, Pixar has excelled at almost every conceivable aspect of animated filmmaking.
