Jul 26 2012

A Few Points In Defense Of The Film Brave

(Merida and Angus, drawn by me in the style of E.C. Segar)

If you read my blog you know that movies aren’t really my thing. My main passions are comics and music (and I try to keep the music chatter to a bare minimum here). I do, though, very occasionally make it out to the theater. These days my theater-going is usually confined to kids’ movies, since I can haul my daughter along with me. Such was the case when my wife, daughter, and I went to see the most recent Pixar film, Brave, a few weeks ago.

I absolutely loved Brave.

I make a point to read/know as little about a film as possible before seeing it, and so I knew very little about Brave going into it. Not too long after I returned from the film, though, I decided to get online and see what kind of reviews the film had received. I was really surprised by the lackluster reaction to the film among critics. Not only was this contrary to my own feelings about the film, but it also contrasted sharply with the very positive online Brave chatter I’d seen via Twitter. So here is not so much a “defense” of Brave, but just a few random thoughts on what might be behind the odd disparity between the critics’ reviews and casual viewers’ reactions to this film. Needless to say, beware spoilers:

  • Reviewers are dudes – I suspect that at the core of this weird discrepancy there’s something gender-related. I’m betting that the audience that saw Brave probably skewed a lot more female than the guy-dominated movie reviewing community. Just grabbing the main page from Rotten Tomatoes here, you can see that among the 25 or so featured reviews, only two are written by women:
  • There’s a princess = people be freakin’ – A surprising number of the lackluster Brave reviews I read mentioned how disappointing it was that Pixar had done a “princess movie.” Some even theorized that this was the result of some insidious corporate mandate from Disney to make Pixar fare fall in line with the Disney “Princess” features like The Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, etc. If you think that there’s any real narrative similarity between those films and Brave, you’re not paying attention. If anything, Brave is a reaction to and refutation of the standard Disney princess story–the “the tired and unrealistic plot of waiting around for your true love to come and find you, sweep you up on his majestic white horse and save you” as Brave writer Brenda Chapman puts it in this excellent post about the Princess trope.
  • It’s a message people don’t want to hear – Brave sends a message that’s starkly at odds with today’s dominant “me, me, me” culture. In the film, Merida ultimately realizes that she needs to sublimate her own desires and do what’s best for her family/clan. No, she doesn’t wind up actually going through with the marriage, but she decides that she’s willing to. Relating back to my first point about general gender disparity, I wonder if this concept isn’t something that resonates more with women, who have historically often had to sublimate personal ambitions for their families? At the very least, I suspect that this message of self-sacrifice–of not getting what you want when you want it–probably didn’t fly with the notoriously narcissistic baby boomers who dominate the movie reviewing sphere.
  • Compromise is not a “Hollywood ending” – My wife mentioned to me how much she liked the fact that the ending of Brave was a compromise. This is a very astute observation and I think this aspect of the story may also contribute to the film’s tepid reception. American audiences expect films with the good guy beating the bad guy, with the crime solved and the killer in jail, etc. In Brave, though, the film’s essential point of conflict–the relationship between Merida and her mother–is resolved via compromise. Each party here “gives” a little; neither gets 100% of what she wants, but ultimately everyone is better off at the end. Blowing up the Death Star, it ain’t.
  • Not enough bells and whistles – Many of these reviews compared Brave unfavorably to the two recent Pixar films Up and Wall-E, suggesting that Brave wasn’t as ambitious or imaginative as either of those two movies. Up is arguably Pixar’s best film and the first hour or so of Wall-E is pretty amazing stuff, but I think here people are conflating the number of moving parts for quality. Up and Wall-E are “big” films with lots of fantastic characters interacting in fantastic places–jungles, outer space, etc. Frankly, though, I’m more impressed by Brave‘s narrative elegance. Brave is a story with basically two characters–Merida and her mother–and the entire film hinges on their relationship and how it changes. I saw Brave described as being “safe” compared to previous Pixar fare. There’s nothing “safe” about a 90 minute kids’ film that hinges on a complex mother/daughter relationship instead of flying robots or anthropomorphized animal characters. That’s daring.

Jul 23 2012

J is for Jonathan Strange

Today’s post is from one of my most favorite books of recent vintage, 2004’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell by Susanna Clarke. The book is an odd combination of fantasy, historical fiction, and alternative history. The basic premise is (as Wikipedia puts it), “that magic once existed in England and has returned with two men: Gilbert Norrell and Jonathan Strange.” When the novel opens, there are many “theoretical magicians” working in England, who acknowledge the historical existence of magic and study it. Norell–and later Strange–though, appear on the scene and much to the dismay of these men (“The Learned Society of York Magicians”) begin actually practicing magic.

The way magic is depicted in the book is really interesting in that it deals mostly with manipulation of natural phenomenon rather than the more typlical Harry Potter-esque imagining of magic. The book is written in a style reminiscent of literature of the general period in which it’s set–similar to 19th century writers like Dickens or Austin. It also features extensive footnotes that are in the continuity of the novel. I’m a total sucker for that kind of thing. Anyway, here’s Jonathan Strange:

J is for Jonathan Strange – From Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell by Susanna Clarke

Of the two magicians, Norell is stodgy and staid; Strange is more flamboyant–a risk taker. Here’s the initial description we get of him:

In person he was rather tall and his figure was considered good. Some people thought him handsome, but this was not by any means the universal opinion. His face had two faults: a long nose and an ironic expression. It is also true that his hair had a reddish tinge and, as everybody knows, no one with red hair can ever truly be said to be handsome.

As far as the drawing goes, I’m happier with the pose than with the slightly generic face I wound up with. It’s of course a well-known rule that any time you draw a magician named “Strange” you have to give him “Steve Ditko hands.” To get the full effect, when looking at the picture, play this song:

 

Process: Drawn with colored pencil and graphite, inked in Digital Manga Studio, colored in Photoshop.

The color halftone/off-register effect I’ve been using tends to obscure fine detail–in this case, a paisley pattern on his vest. Here’s how it looked pre-effects:

Jul 19 2012

From The Sketchbook: Ball Point Pen Doodling (7/18)

For some reason last week I decided to grab a Bic ballpoint pen from the “pen cup” on top of our refrigerator and fill a sketchbook page with ball point pen doodles. I hadn’t drawn with ballpoint pen in a while, and I’d forgotten what an interesting drawing tool it is. It’s sort of halfway between a pencil and a fountain pen: it’s permanent and non-erasable like a pen, but it can be applied lightly or heavily depending on applied pressure, as with a pencil.

I always tell my students that there are three types of drawing that you should be doing in your sketchbook: goal-directed drawing (character designs, thumbnails, etc. for projects), drawing from life, and drawing from imagination. Back in my high school and college days, drawing from imagination was what I did almost entirely to the exclusion of the other two. As I’ve gotten older, though, things seem to have flip-flopped: my sketchbook is pretty much entirely goal-directed things like working on hands or drapery from photo reference, the occasional life drawing, or drawings for my own comics or things like AlphaBooks. I really need to up the amount of drawing from imagination I do. This ballpoint pen exercise was a fun way to do that.

Jul 17 2012

Merida from Brave, done Popeye/E.C. Segar-Style

I recently saw Brave and absolutely loved it… but was mystified by the lackluster reviews of it I read after seeing it. I’m going to write a post with some of my thoughts about this discrepancy between how good I thought the film was and the critical reaction to it, but I just haven’t had a whole lot of time for writing. I did, though, do this little illustration for the post and I thought I’d go ahead and post it here, since who knows when I’ll get around to writing that post:

That version is digitally colored in Photoshop. I wanted to put the original up for sale, though, so I colored it with watercolors. Here’s that version:

I sent this out on Twitter last week and it sold within about half an hour so, sorry, it’s no longer available, but I hope you dig the drawings. Full post on Brave to come… eventually.

Jul 16 2012

I is for Inigo Montoya

Most folks don’t seem to know this, but the 1987 film, The Princess Bride, is based on a book of the same name by William Goldman from 1973. The book is built around a clever and hilarious conceit that for obvious reasons couldn’t be incorporated into the film: it’s supposedly a modern abridgment of a classic Renaissance story written by “S. Morgenstern.”  Princess Bride is in truth entirely Goldman’s work and S. Morgenstern is entirely made up. It’s worth reading the wikipedia entry on the book which details all the clever additions to this whole literary spoof, including a subsequent book Goldman published under the S. Morgenstern name, a supposed lost chapter you could get mailed to you by the publisher, and Buttercup’s Baby, a sequel mentioned in some editions of the book. Anhoo…

I is for Inigo Montoya – From The Princess Bride by William Goldman 

As I’ve done with any previous AlphaBooks subject who’s from a book which was later adapted to film, I’ve gone back and used the original text as my start-point. In the case of Inigo Montoya, there’s surprisingly little description of him in the text. This is just about all we get:

The second, also dark, probably Spanish, was as erect and slender as the blade of steel that was attached to his side.

Beyond that quick description, I dug up a bit of visual research on Reniassance-era Spanish clothing that helped me get a general look for him which wound up being a lot different than Mandy Patinkin’s version of the character from the film.

Process: I did a pencil/colored pencil drawing of the character in my sketchbook, then inked in Manga Studio, colored in Photoshop.