YMMV / Gamera the Brave

• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Toru and the other child actors are considered the best of the franchise for being believable, well acted, and overall quite likeable. You will pretty much never find a series fan calling them "Kennys/Kendras".
  • Toto, roar aside, is well liked amongst kaiju fans as an earnest Reconstruction of what made the Showa Gamera good and incorporating elements of the Heisei version without making him dark and gritty.
  • The film in general could be considered this, as it underperformed at the Box Office but critical reception and fans liked for being able to use elements of the Showa and Heisei Gamera films in a way that they mesh well together and has good characters, effects, music, action and story.
• Harsher in Hindsight: As Mai watches a full-grown Toto fly off at the end, she hopes that they'll meet again someday. Unfortunately, that did not happen because the film flopped at the box office, preventing any chance of a sequel and killing the entire Gamera franchise stone dead for some seventeen years (indeed, the entire kaiju genre fell into a noticeable slump after its release).
• Heartwarming Moments: The children all standing up to the military, preventing them from recovering an unconscious Toto, their saviour.
• Nightmare Fuel: Zedus makes up for his lack of grandiose powers or an overtly scary design with his sheer aggressiveness and blood-thirst, as well as his tendency to appears out of nowhere for a good old Jump Scare. He is scary enough that the entirety of the film's tone turns darker the second he becomes active in the plot. To exemplify, his very first scene does a very effective homage to Jaws where a man that survived one of Zedus' rampages on a fishing boat is stranded at sea, and can only try and vainly swim away in horror when he sees blood-covered fishing equipment surfacing from the sea, right before Zedus pulls him underwater and eats him, noticeably a pool of gushing blood comes out as the scene ends.
• Narm: Zedus eating people would probably be a lot scarier if there were even a token effort to make it look like the puppet wasn't just chomping on air.
• So Average, It's Okay: General reception to the film is that it's competent and well-executed kaiju movie, but it doesn't take the franchise in any new direction, has a fairly generic plot, and the new enemy monster isn't anything remarkable, making it overall forgettable compared to the So Bad, It's Good Showa series and the Darker and Edgier Heisei trilogy (to which this entry had a Tough Act to Follow).
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: For some reason, Gamera's classic high-pitched screech was replaced with a stock dinosaur growl. The Gyaos also got generic monster snarls rather than their famous shrieks.
• Vindicated by History: It was a box office bomb when it first came out and consistently derided for not being like the Heisei trilogy. But over time most have come to accept it as a decent or even great entry, citing box office fatigue due to coming out after over two decades of constant and fatiguing kaiju film releases, rather than failure on the film's part. Even big fans of the Heisei trilogy often fondly look at movie now as a children focused kaiju film done right.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Toto gets repeatedly stabbed by Zedus' extending, spear-like tongue. First the neck is clipped, then his hand is impaled, then his thigh is stabbed, and then it goes through his shoulder while being bitten! There's also a scene where a person gets pulled underwater and eaten by Zedus, complete with the guy's blood staining the waves. The screams of the people he's about to chomp on can also be unsettling. Zedus's tongue later gets ripped out as well.

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