At a casual glance, Brave may appear to be a just typical family movie, another late-summer outing aimed at a young demographic before they head out of the *cough* sunny weather *cough* and back to school. After all, this is Pixar, the company famous for the likes of the Toy Story, WALL-E, Up and Cars outings - the kind of movies that adults can take their kids to and yet feel they’ve been more than well catered for thhemselves. It’s every bit as good as you might expect and its tale of a Celtic princess, Merida (who has wilder red hair than Rebekah Brooks and twice the attitude and likability) as she tackles witches, bears, suitors and girl-power is actually a lot darker than might be presumed from its pedigree.
Though fans might not instantly cite the company as being at the forefront of the more adult-orientated action genre, it is Pixar that are one of the real movers and shakers within the world of technology and entertainment. Sure Woody, Buzz Lightyear and now Merida, may have that exaggerated caricature-like quality, but to call them ‘cartoons’ is to do the projects a disservice and even to refer to the film as merely 'animation' tends to downplay the quality of the finished results. Look closely and the artificially-generated detail on screen is quite breath-taking.
The technology at Pixar’s finger-tips is actually some of the most cutting-edge in Hollywood.
“It kinda seemed that the rest of the animation studios in Hollywood had turned their back on ever doing sincere fairy-tales again. To me, I never understood that because I loved them and I knew the audience still loved them. But I thought: ‘Great, if THEY’RE not going to do that, fine… Pixar will do its first fairy-tale and we’ll do it Pixar style!’” executive producer and Pixar mainstay John Lasseter explains of the decision to make Brave. “Our movies are translated into forty or something languages, so with great animation as Chuck Jones said, you should be able to turn the sound off and still tell what’s going on… I knew this movie would stretch the studio, technically, artistically and story-wise into areas we’d never been in…”
Lasseter says that the impact of the late and great Steve Jobs (with whom he originally co-founded the company along with Ed Catmill) on Hollywood’s attitude to computer technology in film, simply can’t be quantified.
“We’d talk all the time. He’d just stare off sometimes and he’d be creatively thinking something up. He said that back when he was making computers at Apple that the lifespan of these computers would be, at the most, three years. In five years, they would be door-stops. But he said to me… ‘If you do your job right, John, these movies could last forever…’ I thought about it and it’s true. Name a movie from the 1930s that people still watch today… it’s probably Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Animated films DO last forever.,” Lasseter muses. “His simple statements kept me focussed on the right things. Technology will never make a movie entertaining… it’s what you do WITH the technology.”
“He said how important quality is to what we do. It HAS to be great. The way that the audience feels about your brand is like a bank account. You can either make deposits or you can make a withdrawals. Deposits are making something great that everybody really loves. Withdrawals are putting out something you know isn’t very good but still putting your name on it. He refused to ever do that. It’s like anyone’s personal bank-account, if you make more withdrawals than you do deposits, you’re bankrupt and people don’t care about your brand. That was SO vital to him,” Lasseter continues. “We have 1200 people at Pixar now and its really permeated there… if you ask any one of them ‘What’s the most important thing to you?’ Well, in Hollywood, for most people the question is ‘What’s in it for ME?’ For our employees the answer would be… number one: Pixar, number two: the movie they are working on and finally they’d get to themselves. There is this culture about making things great…”
Lasseter and Brave’s co-director Mark Andrews (who took over from Brenda Chapman) agree that whatever technology is used on – or created for – the screen, it must always do two things… be necessary and be convincing.
“The art drives the technology. We wanted the design (of Merida) to make a statement about her character – her hair is wild and uncontained like she is. We’re telling a story visually. We designed the character, got what we wanted, but then the team has to create it. It has to look right and move right. We don’t always know what the hurdles will be and whether we can manage it or not, so we jump right in to figure it out. If something works it just works, but if something doesn’t quite work, it pulls you out of the story,” he explains. “So it’s a case of “Have we got the hair right? We’ve got it right FOR NOW. Someone will create another character that requires their hair or another aspect to do something else. It’s a constant evolution.”
“We got to the point where we’d got Merida’s hair to do everything we needed so we stopped working on it and then the story served up the challenge: let’s get it wet. So we had to get into it all again…” Tia W Kratter, one of the many artists working on the film, acknowledges.
Though not traditional Impact material, we’d still recommend Brave for all discerning film-goers. It's fun, dynamic and in a summer of mixed quality, it's superb at what it does. While you’re listening to the tones of the likes of voice talent Kelly MacDonald, Billy Connelly, Emma Thompson and Kevin McKidd, take a long hard look at the textures, styles and almost photo-realistic backgrounds that are pushing the boundaries of entertainment.
Steve Jobs and John Lasseter are probably right. Your laptop may be a door-stop in five years, but the likes of Pixar’s contribution to film will likely outlive every version of the iPad…
