Survived the last episode eh? Darn. Shaking you off is proving to be harder than I thought.
Let’s continue Good Writing Bad Writing with The Shepherd. Here is the place to watch
it.
It’s just so fricking good! The end hits you with the big reveal that it’s not just
the shepherd with all the sheep, it’s the lady with all the cats, the guy who feeds
flocks of pigeons - these people are protecting the earth from monsters. Way to paint your
small story into the bigger picture of the world.
If I could stop vibrating with excitement that’d be good.
The Shepherd is the complete opposite of Tiger, which we saw last episode. Which makes it
interesting that the creator of Tiger is part of the team that made The Shepherd because
Tiger is a mess. It tried to gradually build up a world of mysterious things happening,
but in the end all it did was leave us confused - or arguing about what it means. Tiger is
better suited as an attempt at surrealism than anything else.
The Shepherd also tries to gradually build up a world. And holy fright, it succeeds.
Because, unlike Tiger, The Shepherd is clear. It gives us a mystery and clues and then answers
them. Tiger didn’t give us any clues, it was just like pbtbhtbth this happened. Then
this happened. Here’s a strange event, and uh… no hints about what it means.
Yes, it’s cool to leave some elements of your story open for imagination, but if you
don’t resolve anything it gets very frustrating for viewers very quickly. Lobbing unanswered
questions at us is lame. Honestly, if you build a good story, fans will make up their
own questions and answer them, like figuring out characters’ pasts and relationships
and futures and other parts of the world that might exist. Fanfiction. Fan art.
So that’s the comparison between Tiger and The Shepherd, but it’s hard to see what
builds any good story without taking the wall apart and looking at the individual bricks.
Here are the building blocks of a story that you probably learned in school.
Characters, Setting, Plot, Conflict, Resolution.
And here’s my short list.
Characters World
These other things are conventional storytelling methods. You can tell stories in unconventional
ways. You don’t need resolution. Drop your readers off a cliff if you want. Slice of
life stories usually don’t have a central conflict that affects every episode. Heck,
individual episodes may not even have a conflict. They could just be a fun vacation day at the
beach.
The short list is Characters and World because you can tell a character driven story or you
can tell a world driven story. Anything else is totally dependent on these two elements.
You don’t have a plot, conflict, or resolution without a world or characters. And you will
find that a good story has either an interesting world or relatable, flawed characters - if
not both - and that information about the world and characters tends to be gradually
revealed instead of dumped on us all at once.
As far as animations go, most are character driven. As you watch these animations you
get to know what the characters are like, and you’ll become able to anticipate how
they will react to a situation. Your interest is mainly in the characters and how they’re
doing.
The Shepherd is more a world driven story. We have characters, yes, but the point of
the animation is to reveal this secret space alien side of the world. This is one of the
reasons there is no dialogue in the animation. If the characters talked, it would, well,
give them more character, and that would make them distracting. Keep the characters simple
so the focus stays on the events that are happening.
The Shepherd is all about the gradual reveal. Let’s take a stroll through the story to
see how it smoothly moves us from small village life to secret sci fi space hero.
Starting off with a bang. I immediately forgot this happened because the next scene is an
action chase scene, but I remembered the comet later when some hints kicked me in the short
term memory.
First hint is how the villagers react to the shepherd. They’re scared of him. We don’t
know why right now, but it’s enough to tell us something is up here. Why would a guy with
a meat cleaver back down from an old man? Knife beats stick. Yet the butcher is scared
of the shepherd.
A sheep eats a bird. I loved this shot. I laughed. It’s so out of place. I thought
the animators were just being funny but no, this is also a clue that this world is weird.
It’s great because you should know the sheep are monsters just for this, but everything
else is so normal that it seems impossible. So you write the carnivorous sheep off as
a joke.
As a result, it isn’t until the three minute mark that we realize this is more than a simple
boy, sheep, and shepherd story. A strange beeper goes off and the camera pans up to
remind you about the mountain at the very beginning of the film. Plus, creepy nightmare.
Sheep eyes are creepy.
At this point the audience knows something is wrong. Now the writers are free to start
revealing the big guns. We go into the sci fi part of the cartoon. Strange doors, suits
with multiple arms, schematics for a shepherd’s crook, fancy maps and weird languages.
From here, the story could have gone to default save the world mode, no more growth. But the
momentum keeps building.
We find out the shepherd is the one with multiple arms. So he doesn’t have a weird space alien
collection, he is a weird space alien.
Big battle, and oh my gosh what horrible thing is going to happen to the alien, oh. Oh my
gosh all the sheep are aliens. That’s why they eat birds!
The writing guides you to be able to understand the world. To make sense of what didn’t
before. You went from being an average person to a person who is in on this big secret.
Just like the kid protagonist here.
Story over, good story, NO, this event isn’t exclusive to one small village. There are
more fighters out there! More monsters! Protect the planet! Heroic overture yay!
A very satisfying ending, but still with lots of room for more stories. That’s a good
ending.
Of course the interesting thing is that if there were to be more stories, there would
need to be character development. The cartoon would move from being world driven to being
character driven because we’d be hard pressed to watch a thirty minute episode without any
dialogue, and without any more information about the characters’ feelings, motives,
and histories. We get a sense of personalities from The Shepherd, but in this short time
we don’t really know the characters. And right now, we don’t need to. It’s a good
story about secret heroes in a normal world.