Animation — Volume 2: Winning back your own size
Want against need, and the rules that keep an invented world emotionally legible.
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The volume
One of them has his name taken away. Another loses his place on a child's bed, the morning a new box arrives. A third has a flaw stuck to him, named by his father before anything else. A girl has the body of an old woman sewn onto her by a curse. An entire species, after seven hundred years in reclining chairs, is left with one job. Five ways of being reduced to a function, and five routes back to your own size, not one of which passes through a duel. It is done by working, by taking care of somebody else, by remembering. Worth noticing, for a writer: the judgment that shrinks a character almost always comes from close by, from a parent, from an employer, from a lit screen, and almost never from a declared enemy. This is the volume on want and need, and on invented worlds coherent enough to move an audience.
The five films, and why they are here
Toy Story
Two opposite losses in the same bedroom: each protagonist makes the other's flaw visible.
Spirited Away
Growth made visible as finished work: every task completed gives back a piece of the self.
Finding Nemo
The flaw named by the father put to work in the third act, where it becomes the instrument of the escape plan.
WALL-E
Almost half an hour without dialogue: how to build a character out of gestures, a habit and one object set aside.
Howl's Moving Castle
An imposed image made visible on the body, rising and falling with how much you believe you deserve to be here.
Inside the volume
- Introduction to the genre: the essay that binds the volume's five titles together and says what to watch for.
- Five analytical chapters, one per film, from the dramatic premise to the legacy of the work.
- Comparative glossary: thirteen or fourteen craft concepts, tested against these five titles.
- Over two hundred pages, in PDF and EPUB, in your account library.