Ed's Newsletter - August 2009

I MET A GUY IN BARCELONA
Pascal Luban sat in on my Acting for Animators workshop at Grin Games last year in Barcelona, and I knew immediately that he was something special. He designs games, and he understands the challenges of establishing empathy in games. We had some excellent discussions about game aesthetics, and I enjoy keeping in touch with him.

So when Pascal dropped me a note announcing his new Level Design master class, I gladly agreed to pass his information along to the game people who read this newsletter. Check him out, he's a good guy: www.gamedesignstudio.com or at his blog.

ACTING FOR ANIMATORS WORKSHOP SCHEDULE
Sept 15-17 - Changchun, China, International Animation, Comics & Games Forum
Oct 27- 31 - Beijing, China, Aniwow! Festival
Planning - Taiwan, Digital Content Institute, SOFA
Nov 23-25 - Swansea Animation Days (SAND), South Wales
Feb 5-8 - Animex Festival, Teesside England

CRAFT NOTES
"Willing Suspension of Disbelief"
This interesting and essential topic may be more relevant to screenwriters than animators but, since it comes up quite often in my workshops, I think it is time to lay it out a bit more clearly. It is sort of a tricky thing to understand.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge first coined the term in 1817 in an article he wrote about poetry, but it applies to plays and movies as well. In a nutshell, it means that members of an audience know that what they are watching on stage or on the screen is not real, but they pretend that they do not know this in order to empathize and be swept along with the story. In other words, they have good reason to disbelieve the reality of what is clearly a contrived presentation, but they suspend that disbelief in order to play along.

You do not hear a lot of public discussion about the willing suspension of disbelief, but it is an essential element in the enjoyment of all storytelling. I notice that it is violated in animation more than anywhere else, evidently because many storytellers figure that, if a presentation is animated, the audience will buy whatever behavior is depicted on screen.

Suppose that, in an animated short, a man passes a pretty girl on the street and, instead of tipping his hat, he lifts off his entire head in greeting. That's cool, right? However, if the man lifted his entire head midway through, say, 101 Dalmations, it certainly would not be cool because that kind of thing is not included in the implied contract established between storyteller and audience for that movie.

The willingness of an audience member to suspend his disbelief depends totally on how the stage is set in the first place. Pinocchio sets the stage by having a singing and talking cricket read to the audience from a storybook. Immediately, the audience knows that fantastic things are going to be possible in this movie, and that the cricket can break "the fourth wall" (he talks to the camera lens). Therefore, when the wooden puppet comes to life a short time later, or when he winds up in the whale's belly, the people in the audience are ready for it. They have already tacitly agreed to willingly suspend their disbelief.

Consider a live theatrical play, where the formula of willing suspension of disbelief is unavoidable. Actors and audience gather together in the same place at the same time for a common purpose, namely, to pretend. For the sake of example, let's say that Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is the production. Everybody in the audience knows that the actor portraying Caesar is not really going to die during the show. They know that, when he gets gang-stabbed in the forum, he is not going to bleed real blood. In fact, that is not even a real forum. It is canvas and paint. When the cast of actors take their bows during curtain call, the audience is acknowledging its appreciation of how wonderfully they pretended. The audience - whether in live theater or in movie theaters - is not passive. It has a job to do if the story being told is to succeed. Its members must willingly suspend their disbelief.

Note the different aesthetic involved in watching a documentary versus a fiction live action movie. You do not have to suspend your disbelief to watch a documentary. Indeed, that is the point! Suspension of disbelief only applies to fiction.

Meryl Streep is portraying the late chef Julia Child in a new movie entitled Julie and Julia. If you see the film, you will know up front that the person on screen is not really Julia Child, right? That person on screen that is dressed up like Julia Child and imitating her voice is really Meryl Streep. You saw her in Sophie's Choice and a bunch of other movies. You know all of that but, since you just paid $10 for a seat to this shindig, you willingly suspend your disbelief. That is your part in the theatrical transaction.

Remember DreamWorks' Bee Movie, starring Jerry Seinfeld? The studio reportedly spent $150 million on that, but whoever green-lighted it evidently never noticed that the script was violating the willing-suspension-of-disbelief contract with the audience. It is established early in that film that the bees are going to talk to one another, which is fine. The animals in Lion King talk to one another, too, and look at all the money that movie made. Same with Bug's Life. Okay, so bees talk to one another. Those are the ground rules established by the screenwriter up front. That is the tacit contract that we in the audience enter into with the storyteller. Then, fifteen or twenty minutes into the film, the Seinfeld bee starts carrying on a full tilt conversation with the Renee Zellweger human. Uh-oh, hold the phone. Somebody in the production pipeline must have been concerned that the Bee-Human relationship might cause a raised eyebrow or two, and so the script tried to explain it to the audience this way:

Zellweger: "You talk?!"
Seinfeld Bee: "Yeah, you know, you pick up a little here and a little there."

$150 million and they made a mistake like that! No, you do not "pick up a little here and a little there" and begin conversing with humans. Bees do not talk to humans, and we all know it. If the storyteller wanted the audience to buy into the premise, he should have established up front that this is the kind of movie in which insects might talk to people.

Rats do not talk to humans either, but we did not have any difficulty with rat-to-human communication in Pixar's Ratatouille. Why? It is because Remy the rat invented an entirely unique hair-pulling technique of communicating with Linguini. Significantly, Remy actually speaks out loud to only one human character, Gusteau the chef. And that character is dead, which means Remy is not really talking to a human. That film correctly set the stage and the parameters of the story very early. When it came time for Remy to start communicating with Linguini, the storyteller paused long enough to justify it for the audience. If Remy had spoken English aloud to Linguini, explaining his ability by saying "Oh, you pick up a little here and a little there," do you think the movie would have been the success it is?

Remember the great old science fiction movie, The Fly? Flies do not talk any more than bees do, but we bought it in that case because the script carefully justified it. "Pleeeaase help meeeee!" wailed the fly, and we all got chills down our spines.

One more time: The key to the willing suspension of disbelief is in setting the ground rules up front and clearly. The remarkable Waltz with Bashir - if you still have not seen that, you should. It is amazing - features a pack of realistic looking snarling dogs in the opening animated sequence. They are chasing something or someone, and they mean business. The audience knows right away that this movie will be animated in a realistic fashion. This movie is going to depict real world places and characters. There are not going to be any flying saucers or dancing raisins in this movie. They immediately suspend their disbelief to the extent of those specified parameters. But if director/screenwriter, Ari Folman, had included a sequence in which the Israeli army started levitating as it entered Lebanon, the audience would have balked. Once that initial contract is set, it is not to be broken.

The storyteller for Pixar's Up established his story's ground rules during the opening scene. On screen, we see animated people sitting in a movie theater, watching an old-time black and white newsreel. We know, therefore, that the base line for the story is going to be actual reality. There is nothing in the opening sequence to suggest anything supernatural. A tacit contract is formed between screenwriter and audience. And the movie keeps its promise for quite a long time, with that stunning montage of Carl and Ellie's real-world love story, the introduction of Russell the Pioneer Scout, the establishment of some construction workers and so on. When Carl's house gets lifted into the sky by those helium balloons, the nursing home guys out front simply cannot believe their eyes. Through their reactions, the storyteller correctly dealt with this improbability. The nursing home guys functioned in that moment as surrogates for the audience. They are acknowledging that this is an almost unbelievable event. The audience member thinks to himself, "Yeah, that's right. Houses don't fly like that. Well, at least those guys noticed it too." And so the contract between filmmaker and audience remained unbroken.

It is not until we meet the talking dogs that the contract gets into serious trouble. When the storyteller set up the ground rules, he didn't say anything about talking dogs. Now he is changing the parameters of the playing field in the middle of the game. That's not fair. Paradise valley is some place in South America, isn't it? It is not on another planet, where you might possibly encounter talking dogs. No, the story is clear: We are still on earth. The talking dogs are justified only by reference to those magic collars, which is insufficient. If you are going to ask the audience to suspend its disbelief in talking dogs, you had better help them do it.

Yes, incredible and amazing things can happen in an animation, but that does not give animators a get-out-of-jail-free card. It does not exempt animation creators from having to deal with willing suspension of disbelief. You simply cannot justify anything and everything on the grounds that the movie is animated. Even if it is animated, the story must be credible on its given terms.

Studio executives declare one after the other that "story is the most important thing." And they are correct. However, strong storytelling has structure, and part of that structure is the necessity for the screenwriter to define the parameters of reality. WALL-E is a robot that has emotions, falling in love. We in the audience have no problem at all with that because the parameters of reality are defined at the outset. In The Iron Giant, the robot lands on earth and becomes more human than humans, and we have no problem with that because the parameters are clearly defined up front. If the audience had not been willing to suspend its disbelief in sensitive robots, I would not be sitting here writing these words while experiencing the same emotional rush I felt the first time I heard the magnificent iron giant's final line in the movie: "Superman!"

Until next month...be safe!
"Actors are Shamans"