Oscars: Ranking Every Best Animated Feature Film
19. Brave
Brave tells a fresh and uplifting story of a fractured mother/daughter relationship, and benefits from a ludicrously funny role for Billy Connolly, but can't quite escape the convoluted way it goes about tackling its plot or writing its characters.
The mother/daughter relationship at its core is, on a whole, quite moving and sure to affect younger viewers, but how their conflict is brought to the forefront - a spell that turns the mother into a bear, forcing them to go on the run - feels a bit rushed and comes as an unearned twist.
On top of all that, the animation itself is just...dull. There's nothing new going on here that makes Brave stand out on an aesthetic level, and the fact that it managed to secure a win over Tim Burton's madly underrated stop-motion horror Frankenweenie is completely baffling.