Very interesting ideas were presented in class of what certain conventions a writer should follow in order to create a narrative. The TED talk by Pixar’s Andrew Stanton raised some unique conventions such as rebelling against the normal. For example, at the time of the making of Toy Story, Stanton and the other writer’s of the film were told by Disney to have musical numbers in the film. Animated films of this time were all musicals as it was more appealing, but Pixar rebelled against this and create a great non-musical animated film. This interested me as I believe that Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds was using this convention of rebelling against the normal standards of story telling, as the radio play used realism to tell the story.

 

Another point that Stanton spoke of was that as an audience we should feel empathy for the characters, mainly the narrative’s protagonist.   This idea works in Welles’ War of the Worlds as the success of the story comes from having empathy of the normal civilians being attacked in the radio drama, which can be considered to tie in why the radio drama caused such a mass panic in audiences, as the empathy of these civilians made the audience that this attack could happen to anyone, themselves included.

 

The last idea that Stanton spoke of was that characters’ have to have an “itch” that they want to scratch. Mainly it’s the characters’ desires and intentions. This is noticeable in all conventionally storytelling. In Frankenstein, Henry Frankenstein’s itch is to create life, bend medical rules, and play god. Where is a in class peer group discussion it was analyzed that in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ Norman Bates’ itch is too please his mother.