Moana
Went to see Moana yesterday! And it was gorgeous, really stunning animation and beautiful songs - quite different from the usual Disney song style; more epic maybe? I'm not sure how to define it, but it was a lot of fun, very epic sounding, quite appropriate to a magically intrepid ocean voyage.
Other things I enjoyed: the underwater sequences, the beautiful lush jungles, Moana practicing her speech to give to Maui (and the way that speech changes over time, gathering emotion like a snowball rolling down a hill gathers snow), Moana just in general, in particular Moana's beautiful hair, Maui's moving tattoo that talks (or I guess gestures) back at him when he's making bad life choices, and also the fact that there wasn't a romance, and that the lack of a romance wasn't a big deal. It kind of annoyed me in Brave how the entire movie revolved around the non-romanciness of it.
However, it strikes me that perhaps Disney/Pixar needed to get Brave out of their system before they could make movies like Inside Out or Frozen or Moana - to grapple with the past of romance-centric princess movies before before they could move on to movies with female leads without a romance or where the romance is only a subplot.
...This makes it sound like I hated Brave, which I didn't at all: I think it's a charming movie, if flawed. But I was worried when it came out that it meant that the princess movie was the only kind of movie Pixar could envision with a female lead, so it's nice to be able to look back now and say "No, the princess movie was a jumping-off point, and they've found lots of other stories to tell since then."
Other things I enjoyed: the underwater sequences, the beautiful lush jungles, Moana practicing her speech to give to Maui (and the way that speech changes over time, gathering emotion like a snowball rolling down a hill gathers snow), Moana just in general, in particular Moana's beautiful hair, Maui's moving tattoo that talks (or I guess gestures) back at him when he's making bad life choices, and also the fact that there wasn't a romance, and that the lack of a romance wasn't a big deal. It kind of annoyed me in Brave how the entire movie revolved around the non-romanciness of it.
However, it strikes me that perhaps Disney/Pixar needed to get Brave out of their system before they could make movies like Inside Out or Frozen or Moana - to grapple with the past of romance-centric princess movies before before they could move on to movies with female leads without a romance or where the romance is only a subplot.
...This makes it sound like I hated Brave, which I didn't at all: I think it's a charming movie, if flawed. But I was worried when it came out that it meant that the princess movie was the only kind of movie Pixar could envision with a female lead, so it's nice to be able to look back now and say "No, the princess movie was a jumping-off point, and they've found lots of other stories to tell since then."