#42: Storytelling

I’m a huge anime fan, and I just started watching an anime called Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress (Kōtetsujō no Kabaneri). It’s a great show, and if you like anime, like science fiction, and like steampunk I would HIGHLY recommend it.

It took me until now to understand it, but one of the reasons why I’m a fan is the incredible storytelling in some of these shows. It’s movie grade story in an animated show, so you can’t help but watch. I think my American sensibilities limit me though, because we see animation as something for kids. Despite wonderful companies like Pixar, who demonstrate for us over and over that great storytelling can make great entertainment for adults and children, the overwhelming feeling (from my POV at least) is that animation is just for kids.

The best shows lock you in in the first 5 minutes of an episode. You know almost immediately what the conflict is, what the context is, who the story is about, and why you should care. The remainder of the episodes just slowly unfold the story and you fall into it. Some of the characters you root for and others you hate, but you become so involved that you are moved by the actions of two dimensional drawings on a screen. The best series make you feel sad at the end that your journey with the characters is over, because they’ve grown so much since you first met them.

I wrote a short story a few years ago, and I never understood why it didn’t seem right. I had a character that I was invested in, a cool action sequence, and some funny lines. I didn’t have a story — not really. The few paragraphs I wrote should have been so arresting that the reader couldn’t help but want to know more about the world and the characters that I created. They weren’t. Not from lack of trying, but simply because I just didn’t understand how to create a story.

What I did have was the beginning of something that is hopefully going to make its way onto a computer screen sometime in the near future. I have some learning to do, but I’m looking forward to it.