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Things To Know About Miyazaki Films
1. MIYAZAKI’S FILMS FEATURE A TECHNIQUE CALLED ‘PILLOW SHOTS’ A “pillow shot” is a cutaway, for no obvious narrative reason, to a visual element, often a landscape or an empty room, that is held for a significant time (five or six seconds). It can be at the start of a scene or during a scene. Dangerous Minds […]
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Must Fictional Heroes Be Likeable?
Short answer: Main characters don’t have to be likeable. But they do need to be interesting.
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The Snail Under The Leaf Setting
In many folktales, visitors to fairyland see magnificent palaces and comely people until they accidentally rub the fairy ointment on their eyes. Then fairyland is revealed as a charnel-house, grey and grim, with the fairies as the grinning dead. Diane Purkiss, Troublesome Things The Utopian World is prevalent in contemporary children’s literature. Move into young […]
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Bluebeard Fairy Tale Analysis
“Bluebeard” is a classic fairytale — the O.G. tale of domestic violence. Any story in which a fearsome husband murders his young wife is probably a “Bluebeard” descendent. The husband in this tale is monstrous, and related to the archetype of the ogre. If you’d like to listen to the tale, I recommend the (free) […]
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Homes and Symbolism In Film and Literature
Homes are an outworking of the characters who live inside. Sometimes, in fiction, the house even seems to come alive in its own right.
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The Bus To St James’s by John Cheever Analysis
I bought The Collected Stories of John Cheever as a salve to heal my Mad Men withdrawals, and this is one of Cheever’s stories that absolutely reminds me of Mad Men. Stephen Bruce is a Don Draper character; his daughter is a Sally Draper type. Matt Weiner has cited Cheever as one source of inspiration for Mad […]
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Reflection and Delusion In The Cure by John Cheever Analysis
In his story ‘The Cure’, Cheever comes pretty close to writing a supernatural thriller story, with a few typical thriller genre beats. The stars are ordinary heroes, or to use Northrop Frye’s terms, mimetic heroes.
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Must Characters Change? How Much?
Theorists have been interested for a long while in the question: What makes a story? Aristotle noticed in The Poetics that a plot must allow for a significant change in the fortune of a main character. But you’ve surely read stories in which characters don’t seem to change at all. Perhaps that’s why you’re here, […]
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Television Endings
It’s impossible to say anything about television endings without first drawing a sharp line down the middle of two very different narratives: The storytelling in each looks quite different. CASE STUDIES The Sopranos When I was talking to HBO recently, I told them about a big learning experience I had thanks to the finale of […]