ABC's review on Disney/Pixars Brave!

My response is below, but I would consider there to be a pretty major spoiler in the review. Click with caution.

adisneymuse:

vintagedisneyparks:

ohhh someone is gunna get in trouble!

caution. reveals plot line, but no real spoilers. 

Well, it reveals one major spoiler.  But alas, my efforts to avoid all spoilers has been for naught.  How movie critics manage to forget how to write around spoilers is beyond me.

But.  This “review” tells us absolutely nothing as far as why they felt that the second-half of the movie was “not up to Pixar caliber”.  Seriously.  As a writer and film critic myself (I write freelance reviews for an animation news online magazine), there was no real explanation behind the paltry 2.5 out of 5 stars this writer gave the movie.  All we get is a (possibly mild) spoiler about the second half of the film and then “it’s all downhill from there”.  … Ok.  Why?  Why is it all “downhill” from there?  Is there no happy ending?  Is this the Princess Mononoke of the Pixar family?

You better believe I’m psyched about this film.  And y’know, when I first saw Ratatouille, I wasn’t a big fan of it.  But I grew to be the more times I watched it.  So maybe this reviewer just needs to give the movie a few more tries and embrace Pixar for possibly trying to do something a bit different.  Y’know, like they always appear to try to do?

I’m posting this here because I kind of doubt that abcnews.com is going to post this reply I wrote to the review on their website and I need to let it out.

Remember the good old days when movie reviewers knew how to review a movie instead of just summarizing its story? And WHY was it “all downhill” from that major plot point that you decided to spoil for people? Was it technically inferior? Was it a bad story?

And why does the author think, as he says in his final sentence, that this film should have pandered to kids? Since ABC is a subsidiary of Disney, you’d think the author would know that Walt Disney himself once said “I don’t believe in playing down to children, either in life or in motion pictures. I didn’t treat my own youngsters like fragile flowers, and I think no parent should. Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature.”

And, by inference of saying that Brave isn’t kid-friendly, does that mean that Mr. Blaustein considers the fire-breathing dragons and black magic and tales of death in movies like Sleeping Beauty and Snow White to be more kid-friendly than Brave? Brave must REALLY be sick if it doesn’t live up to that family fare!

I just wish the author had reviewed the film with some level of actual critical thinking instead of taking the easy way out and just retelling the story and then saying “and I didn’t like it” without saying a single word about the performance or story that adds any credence to WHY he didn’t like it. I give this review a half of one star out of five stars. And unlike David Blaustein, I took the time to say why instead of just repeating his review and then saying I didn’t like it.

[EDIT — Well I’ll be darned. They actually published it. ABC rarely publishes my comments so I didn’t think they would.]

Source: vintagedisneyparks