Review - Saving Mr. Banks

Saving Mr. Banks takes us behind the development of the Disneyfication of the Disneyfication of Mary Poppins (how meta!), the movie rights to which author P.L. Travers was notoriously resistant to sign over.

Emma Thompson plays Travers ('Mrs.' Travers, as she'll quickly tell you she prefers to be addressed), at the end of her rope and in need of money, urged by her agent to let Walt Disney Studios turn her beloved childrens book Mary Poppins into a feature film. She is loathe to let her precious creation become trivialized by the kid-friendly brand, but reluctantly agrees to travel to L.A. to work with Disney's writers and tunesmiths. Among her many insistences are that the film not be a musical, not star Dick Van Dyke, and contain no animation nor the color red. As history tells us, Disney reneged – or at least changed Travers' mind – on those stipulations.

Review - Brave

There's a point in Disney/Pixar's Brave – the latest animated effort to be ushered in under the watermark of Luxo Jr. and (more imposingly) Cinderella's castle – when an impatient character declares, “We've all heard this story before!” The teller of said story defends by emphasizing that stories and legends ring with truths, however familiar they be. The same point can be made of Brave itself, a decidedly predictable fairytale more aligned with the traditional morality tales of the Brothers Grimm than with the wild inventiveness upon which Pixar's brand was built, but that doesn't make the story any less beautiful or touching.

At the centre of this earnestly conceived fable is Merida (Kelly Macdonald), princess of the clan Dingwall who reign in the Scottish highlands, gorgeously rendered here by some of Pixar's most stunning animation to date, courtesy of their newly programmed Presto animation system. Merida is in the illustrious but unenviable position of being able to sire peace between hers and three rival clans if she would only willingly marry one of their first born sons, as prescribed by tradition. No pressure, kid. It would certainly please her mother, Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson), who spends no small amount of effort primping her daughter to be a perfect lady. But Merida is a tomboy of fiery, untamable disposition – with fiery, untamable hair to match – who would much rather spend her days riding out with her trusty bow and a quiver of arrows than resign herself to a lifetime of wifehood. After one particularly heated confrontation with mom, she takes off into the woods, where the mystical will o' the wisps, lighting up the forest floor like floating pilot lights, lead her to a witch's hut. She bargains with the batty old woman (Julie Walters) for a spell that will change her mother's mind about the whole marriage thing, but failing to be specific, gets a spell with more ursine consequences than she expected.