One way to get more structural variety is by watching foreign movies. For example, I think Tokyo Story (1953) is better modeled as a four-act kishōtenketsu[0] structure than a three-act hero's journey. It's widely considered one of the best movies of all time, and one that I rate very highly, but it's very different from Western movies. That difference was essential to my appreciation of it, because it's also slow paced and lacking in action; the novelty was enough to hold my attention until I could engage with the story.
I think loss of artistic variety as culture becomes homogenized is an underappreciated cost of globalization.
In children’s movies the antagonist/monster is often meant as a metaphor for the child’s lack of autonomy in an ambivalent world that they do not fully understand.
And then you have My Neighbor Totoro, where all the monsters are friends, and the bad guy is just chronic illness, children who have let their imaginations run wild and fear the worst, a sibling getting lost, and at the end basically nothing happens which is the best news considering. There is no metaphor for human struggle, it’s just human struggle.
While some of his movies like Castle In the Sky, Mononoke and Nausicaä follow a modified Hollywood bad guy arc (in Castle half the bad guys practically become chosen family, in Spirited Away they become allies), a lot don’t. Up on Poppy Hill is essentially two teenagers in love discovering to their horror that they are first cousins, despair, and then discover that one of them was adopted.
But in all of them is the self-rescuing princess. The child either has to save themselves or at least demand the help that they are rightfully entitled to.
I got to introduce some kids to Ghibli right as Disney started distributing them. If you’ve seen Lasseter’s introduction to Spirited Away that’s where we were at that time - I’m telling you a secret that should not be a secret. And they in turn “forced” their friends to watch them in the same way my generation forced people to watch The Princess Bride; like it was a moral imperative to postpone other plans and rectify this egregious oversight in their education.
It’s a standard trope in a mahou shoujo anime such as Sailor Moon or Futari wa Precure that the enemy tries to infiltrate the hero group and ultimately gets domesticated by Japanese society. I think of how the antagonist joins the party in Tales of Symphonia as a playable character.
And the tsundere: person initially thought to be an asshole is either just having the worst day possible, or softens and grows as the story progresses.
There’s a lot of western film where a minion is sent to infiltrate and ultimately either becomes a double agent or is convinced to do the right thing at a point of no return, by choosing to fail their task, or sacrificing themselves in a brief and tragic redemption arc, either directly or an implication of potentially fatal consequences from their boss.
In the high postmodern of anime about visual novels (Saekano or Date-a-Live) the Tsundere is confronted with being a Tsundere and violently denies it. (Whacks you with their twintails or something)
I watched The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya recently. The main character can bend reality to her wishes. She is unaware of this. But it makes her basically a monster, because the other characters are locked in a constant struggle to prevent her from getting bored or angry, in case she remakes the world without them in it. By the end of the series this is not resolved at all, she is still a monster with the other characters in her thrall, it's just that the last episode is somewhat calmer as if they've arrived at a kind of stability. Also there's eight episodes in the middle that are all nearly identical, because they get stuck in a time loop due to her unwillingness to permit the end of summer.
The book on postmodernism in anime is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otaku:_Japan%27s_Database_Anim...
but yeah, Haruhi Suzumiya stands out but I'd also reference the anime which contain the fantastic element of anime in an otaku frame such as Gundam Build Divers, 2.5-dimensional Seduction or Shangri-La Frontier.
To me Ghibli often seems closer to the medieval / early modern narrative of the knight's adventure, which is a variant of the classical Western arc (initial stable situation, incident, helping figure, self-doscovery, resolution), even without considering the "Princess in the Castle" aspect (which can also be considered the female narrative counterpart).
My kids (8 and 6) snuck out of bed and ended up watching Grave of the Fireflies with me. I originally didn't watch it with them because of the subtitles, but they were hooked.
How did they react? I would hesitate to show it to my children of the same age. It is a very grim and sad movie.
They were hooked until the end. It was quite late for them, but school vacation so I didn't push them to bed.
I didn't know the story going in.
At least if I was their age, I wouldn't have reacted to the end. I didn't become sensitive to tragedy until I was in my 20s, except that I cried when I read Bridge to Terabithia when I was 10 or 11.
I told mine I’ll watch it with them when they’re old enough to drink. Which is next year.
I’m not ready to watch it a second time though. I’m told it’s worse the second time.
I'll be the guy to mention Grave of the Fireflies, which is also Ghibli, and which is the Totoro flipside as another, "There is no metaphor for human struggle, it’s just human struggle," situation. In fact, IIRC, they were released as a double feature (imagine being in THAT theater). As with Totoro's joy, GotF's devastation lies in its lack of concern for fitting events to any overarching metaphor. People make choices and there are consequences. That's all. The story ends when the viewpoint characters have nothing else to say.
Perhaps worth pointing out, that GotF was written and directed by Isao Takahata without involvement (afaik) of Miazaki who has written and/or directed most of the stories with more of a well-known 'Ghibli' feel to them.
Some years back I started wading into the "1001 Movies to See Before You Die". I'm still consuming — perhaps another 3 years and I'll be done? (Can die.)
Anyway, it's been a wild ride introducing to me early silent films, surreal films, art films, Italian neorealism, French new wave, etc. There very much are different narratives and structures outside "Hollywood films". Give them a watch.
I just learned about kishōtenketsu thanks to this great video on How To with John Wilson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-SwyF-Vvbs). I'm surprised that it's not as well known in the west, considering how many great directors use it.
Ozu is my favorite director, and learning about the 4-act structure helped me understand why - I always hated the third act of most movies, when character motivations go out the window in the interest of a big explosive ending. There is a lot of potential in kishōtenketsu structure to tell stories that are more realistic and introspective and don't require the kind of antagonistic conflict of 3-act structure.
Classic Thing, Japan. There are plenty of western movies that don't follow the three-act structure (off the top of my head, Apocalypse Now, Mulholland Drive (and probably most Lynch), Boyhood (and other Linklaters), basically any Robert Altman) and plenty of foreign films that do.
>Mulholland Drive
From the article:
"One of my favourite films, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), conforms pretty closely to formulaic structure, even if it is complicated by dream sequences: the inciting incident of the car crash; Betty’s quest to help Rita rediscover her true identity. I believe that one reason we don’t object, don’t groan with boredom, is that the scaffolding is – crucially – hidden."
I liked the movie, and I approve of this kind of creativity, but a disguised 3-act structure is still a 3-act structure.
A fun thing about story frameworks is that with a bit of creativity you can usually make any story conform to any framework you wish, both when writing or when analyzing someone’s work (maybe the actual protagonist is the city of Omelas or all of its residents, collectively).
The corollary is that the framework that we tend to over-focus on is not necessarily what makes or breaks the story.
Lately I am thinking that a good and accessible story is a challenge in map-making and map-breaking. First, you speak the language the audience understands, employ some baseline map of reality that everyone gets. Then, you take them on a journey showing how it is faulty, and maybe end up with a better map.
(A good story does not have to be universally accessible, of course. It can self-select a narrower audience. I suspect a lot of Ursula Le Guin’s work is like that.)
OK, now let's find a way to see it as a four-act structure. Introduction: car crash. Development: woman with amnesia and blue key. Turning point: take your pick, remembering a name, the corpse maybe. Outcome: silencio.
Kubrick frequently uses a two act - Barry Lyndon where he rises from nothing to peak at the exact midpoint and then falls to nothing at the end, or Clockwork Orange where he does a bunch of horrible things in the first half and the consequences are mirrored around the midpoint of the movie.
Agree on foreign films having tropes/plot beats which were locally grown, instead of borrowed from Hollywood.
Time is another dimension you can use to get to different tropes. Lots of old movies don't go quite how you would expect them to, given modern filmmaking plot beats.
Examples:
Rang de Basanti (India) features political corruption which causes the death of a man in a group of tight-knit friends. In revenge, they hatch a plot to assassinate the defense minister. And then they do it, and the second act of the movie takes place and they all die. What a ride!
Duck Soup (1933) is about as far away from a modern comedy as you can get, and it is entirely about sticking your thumb in the eye of the wealthy and powerful. Surprisingly watchable, for such an old film.
> I think loss of artistic variety as culture becomes homogenized is an underappreciated cost of globalization.
Loss of variety in terms of what's shown on traditional movie theater screens-- sure.
For everything else, technological advancement has lowered the price to create films of a base level of quality. And that has caused an explosion in artistic variety. I doubt the average American has enough leisure time to keep up with all the indie films produced in a year (nor even a sub-genre).
> One way to get more structural variety is by watching foreign movies.
That's a great point. My recommendation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasite_(2019_film)