This time, it's personal.
To put it bluntly, there is no way Brave should have won the Oscar for Best Animated feature, and this is coming from someone who adores Pixar.
No one is saying Brave was not an aesthetically gorgeous movie- one look at the animation sequence of Merida's hair alone is very impressive- but up against films like Wreck-it Ralph and Paranorman, beautiful hair should not have been enough.
Take a look at Paranorman. Hand-crafted stopmotion animation combined with a colorful assembly of dynamic characters, filmed frame-by-frame over the course of 2 1/2 years. And that was just filming- the actual idea of the story was perfected over the course of 16 years! It was also the first stop-motion film to ultilize full-color 3D printers for replacement animation, allowing greater working speed and quality.
Paranorman was just as gorgeous as Merida's hair, if not moreso, and relayed a message of anti-bullying, where the outsider is not just the hero, but ultimately celebrated for his differences.
Wreck-it Ralph, one of my favorite movies of all time, was also more suited to the award than Brave. Iterations of this movie's concept have been discussed at Disney since the late 1980's, and the thoughtfulness and caution in creating this movie the right way is obvious in how fantastic the result is.
Scale models of Sugar Rush locations were made out of candy and photographed, then incorporated into the animation of the movie so that each piece of candy would have the right qualities to their sheen. That is amazing.
So much thought was put into the design and purpose of each character- the voice actors' mannerisms were even reflected in their characters! But even if the animation wasn't as beautiful as it was, the film's writing is perhaps the best Disney has done in a while. The entire plot is centered on the "villain" and his desire to be good enough. Ralph's character development is so flawless, I lack the words to describe it. Without spoiling anything, Wreck-it Ralph highlights the message that we are all good enough, and we all have the potential to be a hero. I'm not ashamed to say I saw the film 4 times in theaters.
Now to the item of debate.
While Brave was very pretty, there were many flaws that should have eliminated it from the winner's circle. For one thing, Brenda Chapman, the woman that conceived the film and would have been Pixar's first female director, was replaced during filming, unsettling much of the production's flow. The Celtic mythology represented in the film as being fairly important, was left unexplored- focusing only on the "will o' the wisps" and nothing else.
Additionally, the movie's tagline "If you had the chance to change your fate, would you?" means absolutely nothing, as Merida's decision at the climax of the movie isn't to do anything surprising or interesting, but to directly follow the wisps- whose purpose is to lead you to your fate.
While Norman and Ralph both grow as characters through a series of challenging events, Merida remains stagnant and exactly the same at the end of the film as the beginning. She simply overcomes an argument with her mother and learns the value of compromise.
To be fair to Brave, Pixar did rewrite their animation system for the first time in 25 years for that movie, and the presence of a romance-resisting female protagonist is very important and similarly underrepresented- especially in movies directed at children.
For the latter fact alone (well, and the fact that the man accepting the award for Brave was wearing a kilt at the ceremony), I will accept the reality of Brave winning the Oscar. But I won't be 100% happy about it.
