And That Has Made All the Difference?

Guten Tag from Berlin! Thanks to my awesome cousins Deb and Seb for the Internet link-up to post this and to them and my cousin Emily for an all-round fantastic time :)

When doublechecking my overall analogy for this blog entry, I was surprised to learn that many dictionaries define labyrinths and mazes as the same thing. I’d always thought — had read someplace, though where exactly I couldn’t say — that the two were distinct. A labyrinth is a single path that loops and turns and bends but ultimately offers no choices in direction. A maze, on the other hand, is a twist of mixed passageways where you might have to choose which fork to take, where turning one way might lead you to a dead end and turning another to a whole new section of the maze.

Because I’ve never been one to let facts stand in the way of interesting analogies, I’m going to continue with these evidently erroneous definitions to describe why I wasn’t thrilled by Disney’s new feature film, Tangled.

Now, Tangled didn’t rouse me into bouts of hatred or paroxysms of regret, either. Instead, it just left me feeling… empty. Like, okay, that experience was pleasant, but not meaningful. I didn’t hate it, I didn’t love it, I probably won’t remember it in a day or two. (In point of fact: I forgot I was even writing this entry for two months because more interesting stuff came up.)

The plot, as I recall it: the character we all know as Rapunzel is a princess kidnapped and imprisoned by an evil witch who uses the girl’s magical singing powers to keep herself forever young. But Rapunzel longs to journey outside, and when a handsome thief named Flynn crosses her path, she does exactly that, although with much angst about upsetting “Mother.”

For a traditional Disney animated feature, the plot has a couple twists. Example that is not a spoiler because it’s literally the first few minutes of the film: Flynn acts as narrator, and he starts off with something like, “Let me tell you about the day I died.” OMG! The lead male, dying? In a Disney film? Actually, if you remember the end of Beauty and the Beast, you’ll recall that this isn’t that uncommon — in good Hero’s Journey fashion, the protagonist or someone very important to them is usually dead, dying, or obviously about to die at the climax… and then the protagonist (usually) turns the tables and saves him or her.

The fairy-tale aesthetic is beautiful: lush forests, lively towns, beautiful landscapes. And some of the characters’ animation is awesome. Case in point: Flynn, a thief, is being tracked by a Javert-type police horse that acts like a dog in its body language and movement. I admit, this didn’t move me personally very much either way, but every other person around me found it hilarious, and it was really well done.

However, despite all these enjoyable aspects of the film, as I sat there in the darkened theatre, I couldn’t shake a feeling of… this is all there is to this world. What exactly do I mean? Well, to use my established-as-wrong analogy from above, this story was a labyrinth. I felt like there was only one way it could go because that was all there was to this fictional universe.

Let me describe it better by borrowing from another medium. In many video games, action-adventure ones like the Zelda series or first-person shooters like Half Life 2, or survival horror like Resident Evil, or RPGs like The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion … etc., your character is apparently free to wander around, doing what he or she pleases as though you were an actual being living in this imaginary world the designers have created for you.

Of course, in most games, that’s not true. There’s a linear story the designers have created for you to follow, and you’re free to kick around following side-quests and forgetting about the main one for as long as you want. However, when you return to the Big Plot, no matter how urgent that guy was when he told you to get to the dungeon and save the princess as fast as you could, and no matter how much time you’ve spent racking up points at the fishing pond instead, you’ll still find the story sitting there in limbo, exactly as you left it.

Similarly, the entire world consists of a single map screen. Sure, there’ll be a few villages and forests and islands, but if you want to explore outside of what you’re given, you’re out of luck. You can’t go to places that have no relevance to the story the designers want to tell; travel too far or pry too closely, and you’ll find yourself with a virtual face full of pixellated textures or, worse, you’ll run into an invisible wall.

Some books, movies, TV shows, and plays are like video games of this type. The world and characters are coherent and vivid as long as you don’t pry outside the boundaries of the particular story being told. If Rapunzel and her new friend are what interests you, no problem: everything in this world is constructed to make their journey exciting. But the world itself isn’t expansive enough to feel like an exciting place to tell stories in general. You (well, I) can’t imagine, say, the real life story of the thieves Rapunzel meets in the tavern, because although the world supports having ruffians with exciting stories to tell to the protagonist, it doesn’t really seem to support those ruffians actually having complete lives outside what Rapunzel sees. Likewise, it’s hard to picture the peasants who joyfully dance around in a big musical number having day-to-day lives when protagonists aren’t tromping through — like the costumed staff at Disneyland, it’s easier to imagine them going home to watch TV in their apartments after this whole kafuffle is over.

So what’s missing for me is tough to pinpoint, in contrast to the comparatively simple way I could discuss plot mechanics or characterization. I guess the best way to describe it is: lack of possibilities.

I treat my very favourite stories like boxes of toys. The Harry Potter series, House, M.D., The X Files — even Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Elephant Show, and Aladdin when I was younger — intrigued me less because of the actual plots they were acting out, and more because of the possibilities inherent in the set-up. I don’t want to hear these characters’ side of things — what would it be like if you made those ones the heroes instead? What would happen if you took the thing character X loves most and made him do Y for it? What if character A, who we think is B, is secretly C? What if D could travel through time? What if E died, and was a ghost, and came back to haunt F? What if?

It may seem that what I’m trying to get at, the difference I felt between those stories I loved and the Disney film that didn’t wow me, hinges on what fantasy and science-fiction writers call world-building: carefully constructing the rules and atmosphere of a fictional universe so that the reader feels like it’s an actual, unique place, maybe somewhere out there in a galaxy far, far away. That’s part of it, and certainly the sense that there’s a huge world out there that the protagonists never encounter because it’s not relevant to their story helps make a movie feel like a maze instead of a labyrinth. But that’s not all, and certainly some of the stories I listed above could never be accused of Frank-Lloyd-Wright quality world-architecture.

In the end, it ties back to that whisper-in-the-ear thing I mentioned so long ago. Tell me something I wasn’t expecting, something fresh that opens up a whole new interlinked set of paths before me. There’s no secret recipe for it (although there are plenty of recipes for avoiding it*), and what whispers to one audience member may fall flat for another. It depends on the experiences and thought processes of the person watching, the other stories to which they’ve been exposed, the kinds of ideas floating around in their head. But when it’s there, it’s the most magical thing any piece of art — story or not — can offer.

And when it’s not… well, nothing else quite makes up for it.

* It seems to me that one definite way to avoid whispering to anyone is to work using the kind of audience feedback where you go with what the majority want in order to widen your market base, to incorporate every single other person’s criticism instead of going with a core vision.