The Situation vs. The Plot

Have you ever watched a movie that never seemed to end? And then, when it ended, you sorta felt that it ended too soon. That might prompt you to think:

“Wow. That was a pretty short movie.”

In actuality the film was, most likely, the right length for a feature. Perhaps the filmmakers didn’t go far enough with the plot.

You see, this is the way that I feel with most animated films of today. Not enough potential is being milked out of a meaty subject. It’s almost as if the filmmakers decided beforehand that the story just has to be a certain length, else it won’t get distributed/aired. Then, that could be the fault of the writers, who focus too much on developing a situation instead of an actual, active plot for the characters. This happens way too many times in today’s animation.

Like, in the seven-minute short cartoons. The characters get a situation. The characters devise plans to get out of it. The characters have either triumphantly succeeded or triumphantly failed. The End.

This leads to redundancy in motion. Too many times have we seen the story set up that way. It is almost getting as repetitive as the Three-Act Structure of stories. This has me saying, “Thank God for the ‘Net!” It is, perhaps, only on the Internet that we can experience tales told in a fiercely diverse style.

Being that I am an armchair deconstructionist, let me analyze for a paragraph or two, Hayao Miyazaki’s “Princess Mononoke”. (I know that referencing “Princess Mononoke” endlessly doesn’t serve to convey my point effectively--it only serves to contrast it, and label my stance “hypocritical”. I can’t help that.)

“Princess Mononoke” is a 135-minute film. Okay, so that would amount up to about two hours and fifteen minutes. We know that most (if not, all) of Disney or Dreamworks or Warner Bros. animated films are under two hours. Half are under ninety minutes. What animator can tell an epic story, under ninety minutes? And that assumes that each character is fleshed out, and the maximum dramatic value of the story has been used to its potential.

Truth is, I don’t think that any animator can--tell a story under ninety minutes and retain the above qualities--without sacrificing its potential. So what you end up with, is a movie that “coulda been a contendah” but wasn’t, due to restrictions of various sorts (budget, upper management complaints, etc.). Hayao Miyazaki was interested in telling a compelling tale, with multi-dimensional characters.

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