Two Dimensional Characters and The Ensemble Cast — The Art of Total Drama Island

Total Drama Island is a Canadian cartoon series that hit Netflix recently — and it’s experiencing the Netflix Effect in full.

I was happy to join the pack and re-watch it for what might actually be the 100th time. Like a lot of people, I love it just as much now as the first time.

Which makes me wonder: why? Why the hell am I so in love with this cartoon?

Here’s the short answer: they developed a lot of great characters, and none of those characters have depth.

There’s a slight chance that you clicked on this article without having watched Total Drama Island. And even if you have seen it, I’m going to synopsize it quickly to support my argument.

Total Drama Island is a fictional, animated reality show hosted by a Hollywood has-been, Chris. Chris teams up with Chef, camp chef and narrative enforcer, to challenge the cast. The cast are a group of teenagers, presumably high school seniors, who have signed up to win a chance at 2 prizes: $100,000 and (more importantly) fame.

The contestants are broken up in 2 groups at various points in the show, first in 2 teams, later into boys and girls, then finally the show becomes a free-for-all. Each “week” there’s a challenge that the contestants have to face, which 1 team wins. The losing team must then vote off one of their team members. To add a twist, there’s usually an additional challenge to win immunity.

You know, typical reality show stuff.

Oh, yeah. The exact size of the group is 22 contestants.

That’s a little under 2.5 times as many POV characters as Game of Thrones, and around 3 times as many cast members as are on most seasons of The Real World.

More Characters, More Problems

Of course, Total Drama Island didn’t invent the concept of the ensemble cast. It’s common in fiction from any period, and even more common for elimination based reality TV. Survivor rivals the size of the TDI cast with 16 contestants for most seasons.

Survivor has an advantage here, though: it’s a “real” reality show.

In reality TV, you don’t have to invest in everyone. The person who gets eliminated in the first episode is going to take up a lot of that episode, that’s a way to demonstrate stakes. Then there will be a person who acts a fool, we’ll center on them. Next is a person who’s taking this Way Too Seriously™, we’ll follow them. The mean person. The hot one. And finally we have the less hot, still attractive person with a good backstory — they’ll be the main character before long.

Boom. There’s our reality show. It’s great. We’ll take that Daytime Emmy.

It’s a terrible cartoon, though. Garbage fiction. Imagine watching Spongebob, but they never give Sandy screen time and she gets cut from the show without a decent write-off. Imagine watching The Lord of the Rings but after Boromir dies he monologues for 3 minutes then never gets mentioned again.

You’d hate it.

Total Drama Island is meant to be like a reality show, arguably a satire of reality TV, but before that it’s meant to be a cartoon. And a necessary part of a cartoon is every character needs to get their lines in. They need to get their screen time, make their joke, and fill their role.

Further, a cartoon has to maintain a digestible narrative.

A classic issue, sometimes a feature, of the ensemble cast is how muddy it can make a story. Consider, again, Game of Thrones. A common criticism is that there’s too many characters: “I had trouble keeping the dozens of characters straight,” remarks a GoodReads reviewer. At various times in the story, an inattentive reader is lost in the multiple perspectives.

Even without the perspective switching, too many cooks in the kitchen creates these issues. If the writers are struggling to keep things straight, you can bet that the readers are going to. This was an issue with the other Netflix hit Squid Game, which oddly shares a similar premise. They did a great job handling their characters, but struggled to hit arc beats in rhythm.

So, for TDI and every other work of fiction with an ensemble cast, there’s a few problems ahead:

• Every character needs screen time, and that’s already limited.
• Every character has to be someone’s favorite, and almost all of them have to get cut.
• This narrative needs to be really clear, enough to be digestible by kids.

“I Wanna Be Famous”

So, we’ve got 24 characters who need their screen time. That is the 22 contestants and the 2 hosts. Over the course of 26 episodes (it would end up being 27, but I’m guessing that came when a second season was ordered), we have to develop 24 characters.

In just over an episode per character, we need people to fall in love with each of these characters. We need them to get screen time and create a satisfactory trajectory for an inevitable end — either when they leave the show or when they win.

How do you do that?

The writers of Total Drama Island approached it a few ways.

First, we have the teams. This has been employed on reality shows for years, and it was a great idea to steal it. Teaming up the characters means we can get a lot of them on screen all at once, and we can share an answer to the most important character question: “What do they want?” The teams become a character themselves, which expresses itself through the actual characters.

Second, the show demonstrates a clear protagonist/antagonist dynamic. The protagonist becomes Gwen, who we’ll discuss more in a bit. The antagonist role is split between Chris (and therefore Chef) and Heather, the show’s resident Mean Girl. This A/B antagonist is important for splitting the cast the same way the teams do. One group will worry about the problem set out by Chris, another group will run up against Heather, while a third kind of lingers in between.

Third, the show creates a huge web of relationships. Each character bounces off another in a way that feels natural to the character, and they grow with time. While the character rarely changes, the way they interact does. This creates satisfactory arcs without affecting characterization. Duncan remains the same, but his relationship with Courtney does not.

None of these are particularly unique, but they’re all effective tools that TDI puts on display with aplomb.

What really makes the show work is the simplicity of the characters. I would argue that only 1 character in the show is 3-dimensional. Anymore or any less, and I’m not sure the show works.

Working in 2 Dimensions

The idea of character dimensionality has been around since before anyone living. It’s a core concept to how we understand characterization. The common use that I’ve seen, though, treats it as a sort of binary. A character is either 3-dimensional or they aren’t.

Of course, this isn’t how the scale goes. There’s 4 different places one can land on the scale, and 3 ways to define the points on the scale.

Lajos Egri, who invented this idea, gave these 3 dimensions:

• Physiology: what the character looks like.
• Sociology: where the character fits societally.
• Psychology: what the character thinks.

This has evolved into 2 contemporary splits. The first defines the dimensions like this:

• Action: what the character does.
• Reaction: how the character responds.
• Depth: the internal conflict of the character.

And the third, which I prefer:

• Defining Trait: what’s one thing that’s true of this character.
• Confounding Trait: an additional trait, adding to or in conflict with the first trait.
• Sentient Trait: the character has gained the ability to think things they do not do.

The Points on the Scale

From those dimensions, we develop a scale:

1. A 0-Dimensional Character: displays no true trait.
2. A 1-Dimensional Character: displays physiology, action, or another defining trait.
3. A 2-Dimensional Character: displays all traits except psychology, depth, or a sentient trait.
4. A 3-Dimensional Character: displays all traits.

3-dimensional characters are the goal, they’re what people want to write. Writers love to create characters with lots of depth, who go through much internal conflict and show growth and change.

0-dimensional characters are the forgotten kids. I think they’re actually fairly common, if we discount race and gender as defining character traits in a lot of contexts. These are extras. They’re there.

1-dimensional characters are the realm of comedy and side-characters. The character hits 1 note and hits it over and over. They’re fun, they feel good. But they aren’t great feature roles. Of course they aren’t, they have no depth.

2-dimensional characters, though, are very rare. They hit 1 note and a flourish, they act, react, and leave. Gunther from Friends is a 2-dimensional character for much of the show. He’s meticulous in running the coffee shop and obsessive over Rachel. He enters the scene on 1 note, leaves it on another, and comes back on the first note.

The rarity of 2-dimensional characters is pretty easily explained: when do you need them?

If a character is unimportant to the narrative, don’t bother giving them any depth.

If they are important to the narrative, give them a lot of depth.

Most stories don’t in-between. They don’t need 2-dimensional characters. So, we rarely get to see them.

Except in Total Drama Island.

Reality Roll Call

I decided to take about 10 minutes to sort these characters into where I’d put them on the scale. Surprise, there’s no 0-dimensional characters in the main cast, there basically never is.

Here’s the count:

• 3-dimensional: 1 (Gwen)
• 2-dimensional: 16 (Chef, Chris, Owen, Lashawna, Courtney, DJ, Heather, Izzy, Noah, Trent, Duncan, Beth, Bridgette, Harold, Lindsay, Jeff)
• 1-dimensional: 7 (Cody, Eva, Ezekiel, Tyler, Justin, Sadie, Katie)

1-Dimensional Characters

Our 1-dimensional characters mostly have an early exit. They’re a single joke. Cody is on the line because his trait is mostly girl-obsessed geek, but he shows a little bit of a kind heart. Not enough that I think it’s a full trait.

What I should talk about here is that Total Drama Island uses stereotypes to get their characters across. I’m a white man so I’m going to refrain from moral judgements, but the consensus seems to be that the show avoids any harmful stereotyping. They use these stereotypes to define a character easily and visibly, even beyond gender and race stereotypes.

This is particularly prevalent in the 1-dimensional characters. These characters are easy to sum up, and if you hadn’t watched the show you could probably do it from the bottom row. Geek, Angry Sports Girl, Dumb Athlete, etc.

3-Dimensional Character(s)

Gwen is the only character that, to me, shows real depth and self-awareness. The protagonist on a reality show is 2 things: the fan favorite, and the camera character. The audience views things through their lens and is pushed to root for them.

For example: Kim on Keeping up With the Kardashians. Love her or hate her, she’s the camera character. The one who really wins the most attention. When an episode of the show is edited, it’s edited around Kim and a B-plot.

Towards the second half of the season, Gwen becomes the Kim Kardashian of the show.

We meet her at 1 trait: Goth Girl.

Then we learn a second one: Boy Crazy.

And a third: Competitive.

Competitive and Boy Crazy clash a bit, and they start to erode Goth Girl. Gwen starts to demonstrate change, and then self-awareness. She’s able to step outside of her character traits and do things that don’t fit all 3. Simple, but it shows depth.

There’s only 1 other character who even teases this dimensionality: Duncan, who is Gwen’s mirror in many ways. He has 1 trait (Juvie Punk) which begins to clash with another (Good Friend). Those 2 traits start to create tension, but Duncan dismisses the opportunity to change, almost flagrantly.

2-Dimensional Characters

That lumps Duncan in with the overwhelming majority of Total Drama Island characters. The 2-dimensional characters.

In the interest of brevity, I’ll spare you an explanation for all of them. Here are a few of my favorite examples:

• DJ: Strong Man. Anxious.
• Owen: Everything Is Awesome. Clumsy.
• Chef: Hard as Nails. Loves Relaxing.
• Courtney: Counselor-in-Training. Devious.
• Bridgette: Smart. Easily Enamored.

In each of these characters, we see the same thing. We have a simple, usually comedic defining trait. Then, we have a second trait which is often in conflict with the first trait. But the character doesn’t care. They don’t have the capacity to doubt either trait, or the awareness to create change.

They just live like that.

The conflict is never resolved, it’s rarely even played up for comedic effect. It exists only to create action. Without the awareness, the character creates and builds tension without ever doing anything with it themselves. The character returns to their equilibrium without any change, even marginal.

The Art of Total Drama Island

In some ways, the 2-dimensionality of so many characters is a feature of the show. It’s almost a statement. Consider real people, people on “real” reality TV. We are constantly confronted with acts of cognitive dissonance.

The sexist man calls himself a feminist. The communist artist gets a corporate job. The cocky athlete thinks they’re humble.

And none of these people change. They continue believing what they believe about themselves.

Just like the characters on this Canadian cartoon.

Maybe the use of 2-dimensional characters is just a reflection of the genre that Total Drama Island is attempting to satirize. Maybe it was just a way to fill a long season while constantly losing characters.

Whatever it is, it’s great writing.

By using 2-dimensional characters, the show is able to effectively communicate characters in a way that even children could understand. While the characters lack depth themselves, they create depth in a variety of ways.

A 2-dimensional character clashes with another 2-dimensional character, creating depth of perspective if not actual depth. They’re spotlighted in dealing with 1 of 2 antagonists, the A-plot or the B-plot, and are able to show a new side of the situation. Or they reflect change in the camera character, or even the real perception of the audience.

Because the characters stay the same in spite of dissonance and a constantly changing scenario, because they lack awareness, you can change how the audience sees a character without changing the character themselves.

And you can save a ridiculous amount of screen time.