At the very least, this much has to be said, and said loudly: there is absolutely no excuse for considering Brave to be predictable or redundant or a sign of creative failure at a time when Madagascar 3 has opened to generally positive reviews. And, heck, if I were all that concerned about this trend, surely I would have started my own review any other way.

Thus it it has gotten stuck in the one place that 'awfully nice and deeply felt and extravagantly damn pretty but also a bit simplistic and certainly not a medium-defining masterpiece' could not survive being stuck, and so we've arrived at a place where nobody can bring themselves to simply talk about the film on its own terms, but only as a moment for reflection on the state of a studio that was, in very recent memory, the most reliable brand name in the modern history of Hollywood. Instead, it has to be a Pixar movie, and not just a Pixar movie, but the Pixar movie that had to come out right after Cars 2 and prove one of two things, according to your tastes: either that Pixar had regained its footing after one and only one (but one extremely massive) artistic stumble, or that Pixar has officially settled into its role as a more technically accomplished marketing department for the Walt Disney Company to sell toys. It could have survived, and thrived, as just an animated family-friendly adventure movie.

Who wrote the screenplay for brave 2012