“How is she going to get out of this?”
That’s what I said to my kids the other day as we watched 2010’s Disney movie, Tangled. It had all gone wrong for Rapunzel. She’d escaped her tower, but now her beau appeared to have abandoned her, sailing off on his own. And her only choice was to embrace her ‘mother’ who was the one keeping her captive all this time in order to enjoy eternal youth from her hair. All was lost.
At that moment, I was so struck by the skill of the storytelling that I paused it and remarked to my kids how brilliant this movie was.
They were already grinning at me. They knew the movie was brilliant. They’d seen it before. And they were excited for me to see it.
My kids also knew – as might you from last week’s post – that I had been bitterly disappointed with Pixar’s latest movie, Soul.
I had wondered if I was being hyper critical. I have been spending a lot of time thinking deeply about stories, as I’ve been putting together a video course on how to write sitcoms. Was I being too technical? After all, lots of critics and friends liked it.
The World’s Large Pony
Watching Tangled confirmed that it really is possible to have a brilliant story where one thing leads to the next bringing delight, drama or suspense, without making you question it.
The moment a story takes an odd turn, rather than a surprising one, you are taken out of the world that the animators and designers have worked so hard to create. Disney really didn’t want that with Tangled, for which they ponied up $260million. That’s what it cost to make in 2010. Two hundred and sixty million dollars. For which you could by an Airbus 330 passenger plane. It is a truly eye-watering amount of money, even for Disney. That’s placing a huge bet on one pony.
One could argue that it’s hardly a risk. Disney are established. They can assemble the talent. Spend the money. Make it look amazing. Promote the heck out of it. They were always going to double their money at least.
But that is forgetting that for many years, Disney had lost their way. At one point, they were making movies like The Great Mouse Detective. This is not a good movie. I rewatched it last year. But they found their mojo and came roaring back with the Lion King, and Aladdin. By then, they had competition.
Pixar were really showing how it was done. Toy Story is good. Toy Story 2 is perfect. Then we got Monsters Inc, Wall-E, Up, Inside Out. The hits kept coming. Pixar knew story.
You can buy talent to execute a story. But you need that elusive perfect story. And that’s one thing that can send a $260million plane like Tangled into a tailspin. When someone doesn’t enjoy a movie, it’s normally the story that’s the problem. Music can be annoying. And accents can be misjudged. A few jokes can misfire. But they will forgive those is the story just works.
The Sheriff of Nottingham Stole My Movie
People can enjoy serious flaws in a movie if the story is right. Over Christmas, I showed my kids Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. I relived the disastrous central performance of Kevin Costner as Robin Hood. But who cares? Everyone else is brilliant, especially Alan Rickman and Mike McShane. The main thing is this: the story just works.
Costner went on to make Waterworld which was a financial disaster. It was nominated for an Academy Award. For Best Sound. (It didn’t win) Renowned film critic, Roger Ebert said it was “a decent futuristic action picture with some great sets, some intriguing ideas, and a few images that will stay with me. It could have been more, it could have been better, and it could have made me care about the characters. It's one of those marginal pictures you're not unhappy to have seen, but can't quite recommend.” Ouch. YOu’re hoping for more when you’re spending $175 million on a movie. The problem? The story.
Story transcends taste, music, performance and craft. Whilst these art forms can be sublime, they don’t quite transcend like a story. In fact, they often sit on top of, or augment, story. They provide context for the melody, the colour or the brushwork.
Humanity is hard wired for story. The Bible isn’t a series of commands or assertions. The law and the epistles make up a small part of the overall canon. Most of it is story.
The Bible: From Here To Eternity
And what does God do when he shows up? He tells stories. God has wrapped up story with the eternity in our hearts. Eternity isn’t a state of being. It’s a story without end, going from glory to glory, from Eden to the New Jerusalem the long way round. And then on again.
It’s hard to imagine what happens after the New Jerursalem arrives, although CS Lewis has a good go. “Further up and further in”, say the characters in The Last Battle. It is hard to imagine eternal being, so Lewis puts it into a story which gives us a sense of it.
Eternity won’t fit into our heads. But the alternative is literally unimaginable. It’s unthinkable. There is always hope in our heads. We know when a story is over. And it’s not over until its over. We know how stories work, and how they should work. We know what needs to happen.
My podcast co-host, Barry Cooper used a great phrase we talked about this on the Cooper and Cary Have Words podcast, Episode 57. He talked about our sense of ‘oughtness’. We know how a story ‘ought’ to go. We know what needs to happen. And when the story is just wrong.
As You Wish
In the movie of The Princess Bride, the boy (Fred Savage) yells at his grandpa (Peter Falk) for getting the story wrong. (Is that bit in the book? I’ve read the book, but I don’t remember). Children have a burning sense of justice and will tell us when the story is all wrong.
Adults are less sure of themselves, and self-consciously assume that if the story is going wrong, they are somehow missing the point, and they should probably keep quiet, nod and talk about the ‘refreshing storytelling’ afterwards, when actually they just didn’t like it.
“si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses” - or as Sir Humphrey Appleby translated it to the PM Jim Hacker "If you'd kept your mouth shut we might have thought you were clever."
Why Mention This?
I mention all this partly because my new sitcom writing course was launched this week. And one of the emphases of the course is story, which seems obvious and basic. I’ve read dozens of scripts from aspiring writers in the last couple of years. All share one characteristic. The story doesn’t work. The characters are normally okay. The situation might be interesting. There are often jokes. But the story never joins up all of the above. The story normally stalls, fails to launch, dribbles away or takes a weird turn. In the course, I therefore urge people to spend far far longer on their story than they had assumed necessary.
The very hardest part is the resolution or climax, which I always say should be both ‘surprising and retrospectively inevitable’. Easier said than done. Although it quite hard to say.
I know I’m onto something there because that is a description of the greatest story in human history: the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As Jesus was arrested and sentenced to crucifixion, the disciples must have felt like pressing pause and saying “How is he going to get out of this?”
And then he doesn’t. And then… the joyous resolution that was there all along.
Christmas is done. Easter is coming. Hallelujah. Happy New Year.
And here’s a picture of a pony.
Would LOVE your take on Frozen 2 in this case. I was so furious with it in terms of story. 6 years in the making and they came up with that, I was so cross. I need to go and listen to the Soul podcast, I was somewhat disappointed with it also.