WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 00:00:00.199 --> 00:00:03.580 Scribble Kibble is your weekly cup of animation. 00:00:03.580 --> 00:00:09.530 I’m going to split this topic into two mugs. For two episodes I’m going to ignore the 00:00:09.530 --> 00:00:15.160 methodology of the animation and instead talk about writing because, as Chris wrote on the 00:00:15.160 --> 00:00:21.660 Zootopia episode, “Good writing can save bad art. Good art can’t save bad writing.” 00:00:21.660 --> 00:00:26.550 Welcome to Good Writing Bad Writing. The featured animation is Tiger. 00:00:26.550 --> 00:00:35.450 [sigh] Yes, we’re starting with bad writing. But I promise I’ll make up for it next episode. 00:00:35.450 --> 00:00:39.500 First of all, I should mention that the animator, Pernille Kjaer, is devoted to the type of 00:00:39.500 --> 00:00:45.360 art you expect to see in a modern art museum. Aka: the weird stuff. In that respect, the 00:00:45.360 --> 00:00:50.540 animation does very well. It’s a confusing mess of symbolism with no definitive meaning. 00:00:50.540 --> 00:00:50.920 Perfect. 00:00:50.920 --> 00:00:56.670 Yeah. Yeah, I get it now. It’s abstract art, but animation. Like one of those films 00:00:56.670 --> 00:01:00.690 where you sit in a dark room and listen to 30 minutes of pops and clicks synced to images 00:01:00.690 --> 00:01:07.259 of colored smoke. 00:01:07.259 --> 00:01:11.079 But even that type of exhibit, there’s always a little plaque where the artist talks about 00:01:11.079 --> 00:01:14.840 what they intended to make you feel or think, and once you read that you can watch the movie 00:01:14.840 --> 00:01:21.209 and say, “Oh. I get it.” If you don’t read the plaque, you still feel something. 00:01:21.209 --> 00:01:25.459 In terms of writing, Tiger fails to make us feel anything other than confusion, and it 00:01:25.459 --> 00:01:30.039 defies interpretation. It’s the perfect example of someone wanting to make people 00:01:30.039 --> 00:01:34.560 think in order to figure out what is going on, but the final story is so contorted there 00:01:34.560 --> 00:01:36.959 is no way for us to find meaning in it. 00:01:36.959 --> 00:01:43.590 How to fix this? There are two paths to go down. Path one: become more abstract. If the 00:01:43.590 --> 00:01:48.109 intention is to be abstract, then as a writer, you need to decide what emotions you want 00:01:48.109 --> 00:01:52.409 viewers to feel throughout your film. Then try to capture that emotion without using 00:01:52.409 --> 00:01:56.799 a narrative or conventional symbols. Symbols have meaning. You don’t want that. You don’t 00:01:56.799 --> 00:02:01.029 want people’s biases getting in the way of their experience of the raw emotion. That’s 00:02:01.029 --> 00:02:05.380 why a lot of abstract art boils down to shapes and colors that look nothing like anything 00:02:05.380 --> 00:02:11.959 in real life. 00:02:11.959 --> 00:02:18.890 Path two: fix your story. The first way to do this is let some people read your script 00:02:18.890 --> 00:02:22.989 and then tell you what they got out of the story. If they get something out of it - even 00:02:22.989 --> 00:02:31.340 if it might not be what you expected - good. If multiple people are confused or bored, 00:02:31.340 --> 00:02:34.530 then that is poor writing on your part. You need to rewrite. 00:02:34.530 --> 00:02:39.700 I’m not going to pretend writing is easier than animation. Writing is more accessible 00:02:39.700 --> 00:02:46.459 than animation. Animation requires tools and knowledge, writing only requires knowledge. 00:02:46.459 --> 00:02:52.750 Many people can write. Only a few people can write well. And only a few people can write 00:02:52.750 --> 00:02:57.439 well for animations. 00:02:57.439 --> 00:03:02.189 Going down the less abstract better writing path, all that Tiger really needs is to be 00:03:02.189 --> 00:03:07.170 more clear. Even getting rid of the copy paste beginning and ending would let us make up 00:03:07.170 --> 00:03:12.930 a meaning for the story. Because it’s there, though, it implies that the whole cycle repeats 00:03:12.930 --> 00:03:14.340 itself. 00:03:14.340 --> 00:03:19.890 Let’s say Tiger is about a girl becoming an independent person and unwittingly pushing 00:03:19.890 --> 00:03:25.459 her fat round friend Olav out of her life. In that story, it doesn’t make sense that 00:03:25.459 --> 00:03:29.349 we would start over from the beginning. If it repeats, it means none of the characters 00:03:29.349 --> 00:03:30.810 have learned anything. 00:03:30.810 --> 00:03:35.790 Gee, if you got rid of the Tiger part altogether the story would be more clear and still have 00:03:35.790 --> 00:03:38.469 the open-to-interpretation feeling. 00:03:38.469 --> 00:03:45.890 What even is the tiger? The animation is called Tiger so it’s probably important. If the 00:03:45.890 --> 00:03:50.829 Tiger is the girl’s creativity or independence or imagination, then it makes sense that she 00:03:50.829 --> 00:03:52.519 can’t kill it permanently. 00:03:52.519 --> 00:03:57.150 Or perhaps she could. The ending would be her alone in the kitchen with a dead plant. 00:03:57.150 --> 00:04:01.989 Her friend Olav is gone, and she killed the wild part of herself that made him leave. 00:04:01.989 --> 00:04:03.859 The end. 00:04:03.859 --> 00:04:10.189 And that’s how you can mess up an entire story with a poorly written ending. If we 00:04:10.189 --> 00:04:10.599 mapped out the story, it’d look like this: rising action as the girl discovers the cube 00:04:10.599 --> 00:04:10.739 plant and it starts taking over the world. Growing tension between these three characters. 00:04:10.739 --> 00:04:10.900 Climax, where Olav attacks the plant and it eats him, forcing the girl to act. Slowed 00:04:10.900 --> 00:04:11.040 pacing leads to discovering Olav’s dead body, slight bump in action when the Tiger 00:04:11.040 --> 00:04:11.170 non-aggressively plays with the girl and she decides to kill it, utter confusion. 00:04:11.170 --> 00:04:14.370 Ugh. I can’t try to make sense out of Tiger anymore. It’s making me frustrated. 00:04:14.370 --> 00:04:19.910 Good art can’t save bad writing. And this is bad writing. 00:04:19.910 --> 00:04:24.600 Scribble Kibble, the show where I’ve given up on watching confusing cartoons and instead 00:04:24.600 --> 00:04:25.800 eat dog food. 00:04:25.800 --> 00:04:30.520 Wolves don’t bark. They bork. Bork! Bork! Bork! 00:04:30.520 --> 00:04:36.280 My blah reaction to today’s animation. And… my happiness at what I have in store next 00:04:36.280 --> 00:04:36.700 week. Eeee!