Brave: Interactive Comic reveals frames one at a time.
Now to the apps. There are two apps which are basically story books — one is more of a picture book and one is a comic book — but each has its own extras to go with it. The Brave Interactive Comic ($1.99 for iPhone or iPad) is a comic book version of the story. It’s only vaguely interactive — you tap to reveal each successive frame — but there are little icons (the blue circle with a gold pot) which appear from time to time. Tap these, and you’re treated to some concept art.
Concept art in the Brave Interactive Comic app.
These are some of the same images as in The Art of Brave book — so if you didn’t want to buy the book you could spend two bucks on the app and see a lot of the same images. The downside, of course, is that you can’t zoom in and see them in such detail, and you don’t get all of the stories about the artwork. (That, and you have to go through the comic to find them.) The comic itself follows the plot of the movie and is pretty much a novelization of it. The one other thing the app adds is the “how to draw” section:
Learn to draw Merida, Mor'du, and other characters
The app gives you some step-by-step blue lines to draw a few of the characters using colored pencils. As you progress each step, the previous blue lines vanish, leaving only your marks, and more blue lines are shown. The difficulty with this is that (as you can see from the images above) some of the steps are incredibly detailed, and it also doesn’t tell you which lines to erase. So you start with the basic oval and gestural lines, but you’re never instructed on when to erase those and which final lines to leave. And some steps (like the last step for Mor’du the bear) add a whole lot of new lines. While this may be a good way to learn to draw on paper, it doesn’t really work on a simple app like this which won’t let you selectively erase pencil lines while leaving the inks.
Overall: the comic is fine and the concept art is a good bonus, but the “how to draw” is pretty weak.
Next: the storybook.
