The Pirates! In An Adventure With No Oscars

The Oscar for best animated feature of 2013 is awarded to Brave. I am in two minds. On the one hand, Brave is groundbreaking in many ways. A lot has been said about the character of Merida - a female lead is still a rarity in animation, and Brave's release is also a breakthrough moment for redheaded toons. Brave also succeeds in completely overthrowing the tired old Hollywood plot about reconciliation with father, by giving us a reconciliation with mother instead.

On the other hand I do believe The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists! was the better film at almost every turn: script, animation, artistry, subversive humour. It's a personal opinion but only one of these films took me on such a journey that I left the cinema exhausted, and it wasn't Brave.

The Oscars often reward films that are thought to be "important" for some social or political reason, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. Brave also fitted perfectly into the theme connecting all this year's winning films - gross historical inaccuracy, in this case playing fast and loose with Celtic culture. By comparison the psychopathic pirate-obsessed portrayal of Queen Victoria in The Pirates! is pretty much in line with most of the history books.

Cinema Just For Fun makes a good case for Brave in her review here, along with some great reviews of other Oscar winners and about a million other films.