The white rabbit objective

Note: I’m taking the day off, so I’m republishing a piece from earlier in this blog’s run. This post originally appeared, in a slightly different form, on November 24, 2015.

On July 4, 1862, the Reverends Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Robinson Duckworth rowed a boat up the Thames with the three Liddell sisters, Lorina, Alice, and Edith. Here’s Dodgson’s own account of what took place that afternoon:

Many a day had we rowed together on that quiet stream—the three little maidens and I—and many a fairy tale had been extemporized for their benefit—whether it were at times when the narrator was “i’ the vein,” and fancies unsought came crowding thick upon him, or at times when the jaded Muse was goaded into action, and plodded meekly on, more because she had to say something than that she had something to say—yet none of these many tales got written down: they lived and died, like summer midges, each in its own golden afternoon until there came a day when, as it chanced, one of my little listeners petitioned that the tale might be written out for her.

The result was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, of which the computer scientist Alan Perlis once said: “The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland, but that’s because it’s the best book on anything for the layman.”

Today, however, I’d like to focus on the stories that weren’t written down. We have Dodgson’s word that he often extemporized tales to Alice and her sisters, but the vast majority were forgotten as soon as they were told. What set this one apart? You could point to any number of possible factors, but I’d like to nominate one element that doesn’t always get the credit it deserves: the White Rabbit. Dodgson himself hints that the rabbit played an important role in the story’s composition: “That was many a year ago, but I distinctly remember, now as I write, how, in a desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy-lore, I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole to begin with, without the least idea what was to happen afterwards.” When we look back at the original story, it’s striking how quickly it gets down to business: the rabbit appears in the second paragraph, and Alice sets after it in the fourth, and by then, we’re off and running. And what the rabbit provides is a narrative thread, in the form of Alice’s curiosity about it, that allows Dodgson—or his alter ego, Lewis Carroll—to introduce a series of disconnected episodes. He doesn’t emphasize the rabbit unduly: in practice, he gently reintroduces it once every other chapter or so, whenever the story needs a little nudge. And the result is as pure an example as I know of the principle that every story should be structured as a series of objectives, and that the best way to sustain the reader’s interest, as Kurt Vonnegut put it, is to have the protagonist want something right away.

This may seem like a rather clinical way to look at Alice, but it’s also a trick that every oral storyteller knows. The other great example here is Winnie-the-Pooh, which emerged from the stories that A.A. Milne told to his son. When you browse through the books, you can’t help but notice how the most memorable chapters are all structured around a single concrete objective: Pooh wants to get some honey, or to find Eeyore’s tail, or to figure out what Tigger likes best. Pooh himself is hardly a model of a driven protagonist, but for a bear of very little brain, he knows what he wants. And when I tell my improvised stories about John the Pig to my own daughter, I’ve learned how useful it can be to follow “Once upon a time there was…” immediately with “And he wanted…” It’s a courtesy both to the listener and the teller: the former gets something to pique her interest, while the latter has a narrative framework on which he can fall back whenever his invention starts to flag. If you know what the protagonist wants, you usually have a rough idea of what comes next. And it often makes the difference between a story worth remembering and one that evaporates before your eyes. (On a similar note, I went through a brief period of experimentation with Story Cubes, which consist of nine prepackaged dice printed with images—a clock, a magic wand, a man with a parachute—designed to encourage the same kind of storytelling: you toss the dice and try to come up with a plot that connects the nine random pictures. And your chances of succeeding are much better if you introduce the words “And he wanted…” as soon as possible.)

This becomes even more clear when we compare Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with its sequel. Readers may prefer one or the other, and I actually think that Through the Looking-Glass is by far the greater book. (Not surprisingly, it has played a significant role in my own life: my first professional publication ever, the novelette “Inversus,” was an extended homage, and my novel The Icon Thief ends with the image, which I lifted directly from Carroll, of a pawn making it to the other end of the board.) But it’s also emphatically a written novel. Instead of the clean, linear chase after the White Rabbit, we have the imaginary chess game, which is wonderful, but could hardly be invented on the spur of the moment. Unlike its predecessor, Looking-Glass takes its time to get going: it opens with a sleepy scene of Alice curled up by the fireplace in midwinter, and she doesn’t enter the looking-glass world for several pages. Even when she’s on the other side, she does little more than look around at first, and her objective, when it finally appears, is fairly abstract—she wants to become a queen. The result bears the same relation to the previous installment as the second half of Don Quixote does to the first: it’s a richer, more mature work, written after its characters had already become famous, but it lacks some of the charm of the original. Each story bears the mark of its origins: one in a boat in a lazy day on the Thames, the other in the study of an Oxford mathematician. And if Carroll had started with Looking-Glass rather than Wonderland, the story might have been forgotten at once. I wouldn’t want to live without either, but we have the White Rabbit to thank for both.

Moana and the two studios

If the history of animation had a portentous opening voiceover, it would probably say: “In the beginning was the storyboard.” The earliest animated cartoons were short and silent, so it made sense to plan them out as a series of rough thumbnail sketches. Even after they added sound and dialogue and became longer in length, the practice survived, which is why so many of the classic Disney movies are so episodic. They weren’t plotted on paper from beginning to end, but conceived as a sequence of set pieces, often with separate teams, and they were planned by artists who thought primarily with a pencil. This approach generated extraordinary visual achievements, but it could also result in movies, like Alice in Wonderland, that were brilliant in their individual components but failed to build to anything more. Later, in the eighties, Disney switched over to a production cycle that was closer to that of a live-action feature, with a traditional screenplay serving as the basis for future development. This led to more coherent stories, and it’s hard to imagine a film like Frozen being written in any other way. But another consequence was a retreat of visual imagination. When the eye no longer comes first, it’s harder for animators to create sequences that push against the boundaries of the medium. Over time, the movies start to look more or less the same, with similar character designs moving through beautifully rendered backgrounds that become ever more photorealistic for no particular reason.

The most heartening development in animation in recent years, which we’ve seen in Inside Out and Zootopia and now Moana, is the movement back toward a kind of animated feature that isn’t afraid to play with how it looks. Inside Out—which I think is the best movie Pixar has ever made—remains the gold standard, a film with a varied, anarchic style and amazing character design that still tells an emotionally effective story. Zootopia is more conventionally structured, but sequences like the chase through Little Rodentia are thrillingly aware of the possibilities of scale. Moana, in turn, may follow all the usual beats, but it’s also more episodic than usual, with self-contained sequences that seem to have been developed for their visual possibilities. I’m thinking, in particular, of the scenes with the pygmy Kakamora pirates and the encounter with Jermaine Clement’s giant coconut crab Tamatoa. You could lift these parts out and replace them with something else, and the rest of the story would be pretty much the same. For most movies, this would be a criticism, but there’s something about the episodic structure that allows animation to flourish, because each scene can be treated as a work of art in itself. Think, for instance, of Pinocchio, and how the plot wanders from Stromboli to Pleasure Island to Monstro almost at fancy. If it were made again today, the directors would probably get notes about how they should “establish” Monstro in the first act. But its dreamlike procession of wonders is what we remember the most fondly, and it’s exactly the quality that a conventional script would kill.     

The fact that Disney and Pixar are rediscovering this sort of loose, shaggy energy is immensely promising, and I’m not entirely sure how it happened. (It doesn’t seem to be uniformly the case, either: Finding Dory was a lovely movie, but it was plotted to within an inch of its life.) Pinning down the cause becomes even tricker when we remember that all of these movies are in production at the same time. If so many storytelling tricks seem to recur—like the opening scene that shows the protagonist as a child, or the reveal in the third act that an apparently friendly character is really a bad guy—it’s probably because the same people were giving notes or actively engaged in multiple stories for years. Similarly, the move toward episodic structure may be less a conscious decision than the result of an atmosphere of experimentation that has started to permeate the studio. I’d love to think that it might be due to the influence through John Lasseter of Hayao Miyazaki, who thinks naturally in the language of dreams. The involvement of strong songwriters like Robert and Kristen Lopez and Lin-Manuel Miranda may also play a part: when you’ve got a great song at the heart of a scene, you’re more likely to think of visuals that rise to the level of the music. Another factor may be the rise of animators, like Moana producer Osnat Shurer, who came up through the ranks in the Pixar shorts, which are more willing to take stylistic risks. Put them all together with veteran directors like Ron Clements and John Musker, and you’ve got a recipe for self-contained scenes that push the envelope within a reliable formula.

But the strongest possibility of all, I think, is that we’re seeing what happens when the Pixar and Disney teams begin to work side by side. It’s been exactly ten years since Pixar was acquired by its parent company, which is just about the right amount of time for a cultural exchange to become consistently visible onscreen. The two divisions seem as if they’re trying to outdo each other, and the most obvious way is to come up with visually stunning sequences. This kind of competition will naturally manifest itself on the visual end: it’s hard for two teams of writers to keep an eye on each other, and any changes to the story won’t be visible until the whole thing is put together, while it’s likely that every animator has a good idea of what everybody else is doing. (Pixar headquarters itself was designed to encourage an organic exchange of ideas, and while it’s a long drive from Emeryville to Burbank, even that distance might be a good thing—it allows the divisions to compete on the basis of finished scenes, rather than works in progress.) It isn’t a foolproof method, and there will inevitably come a day when one studio or the other won’t overcome the crisis that seems to befall every animated feature halfway through production. But if you wanted to come up with a system that would give animators an incentive to innovate within the structure of a decent script, it’s hard to imagine a better one. You’ve got separate teams of animators trying to top each other, as they did on Alice, and a parent studio that has figured out how to make those episodes work as part of a story. That’s a great combination. And I can’t wait to see what they do next.

A wrinkle in life

Last week, it was announced that the director Ava DuVernay was looking for mixed-race and minority actors to play the children in her adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time. The news delighted me to no end, and not just because I come from a mixed racial background myself—although that’s certainly part of it. It’s the kind of decision that might seem surprising at first, but then comes to feel utterly right: I’ve spent most of the last hour leafing through my battered paperback copy of Madeleine L’Engle’s novel, which I’ve owned since I was eight years old, and one line after another seems charged with new life and meaning when I view it through that lens. A few years ago, I wrote of L’Engle: “Her work was my first glimpse of what I’ve since come to think of as the novel of ideas in its most rewarding form: richly imagined, emotional, and dramatic works of fiction whose central subject is the search for meaning in a universe dominated by science and information, which are really forms of protection against the unknown.” And it’s a journey that has been informed by my own multiracial heritage in ways that I haven’t always appreciated. When you’re of mixed race, you often end up searching for meaning on your own, either by arriving at one combination or another of the elements in your family story or by assembling a new value system from first principles. And I suspect that I was so strongly attracted to A Wrinkle in Time in part because it was one of the first books I’d read that was explicitly about that process. 

In my original post about the book, I noted that it’s essentially an episodic and didactic novel, but we don’t tend to notice this—in the way we do with, say, the Alice stories or The Phantom Tollbooth—because it’s so tightly constructed. It also approaches its characters in a vivid, intimate way that conceals how much of it is structured to function as an allegory. I wouldn’t say that Meg, Charles Wallace, or Calvin are more real to me than Alice or Milo, but they’re portrayed with more incidental detail and warmth, so that they come to seem more like real boys and girls whom we could actually meet one day. Unlike their earlier counterparts, who can seem oddly detached in the face of the strange characters they encounter, Meg, in particular, is vibrating with wounded feeling, which isn’t an accident. A Wrinkle in Time, like the other books I mentioned, is ultimately a story about a young person’s education, but it isn’t primarily an intellectual one, but one of emotion. You can even read each of its worlds as a place in which Meg is forced to fully confront a single emotion in its purest form, from joy on Uriel to freezing grief and forgiveness on Ixchel to mindless conformism on Camazotz. She emerges from each chapter with a lesson, but they’re gently conveyed, and they made less of a conscious impression on me at the time than the book’s vision of a life spent among ideas, which flew like sparks from the characters whenever they spoke.

But the book’s message is also deeply Christian—more so, perhaps, than even the works of C.S. Lewis, which I admire in more complicated ways. Lewis, an epic fantasist who owed his religious conversion to none other than J.R.R. Tolkien, thought naturally in eschatological terms: Aslan dies on the stone table, but he returns at the head of an army to pounce triumphantly on the White Witch. (This doesn’t even get at The Last Battle, which I read with a kind of horrified fascination as a child, with its literal division of the characters at the end of the world into the sheep and the goats.) A Wrinkle in Time puts its scriptural sources right there in the text: Charles Wallace’s bedtime reading of choice is Genesis, and the song of the winged centaurs of Uriel comes straight from the Book of Isaiah. But I think L’Engle’s religion is more subtle and meaningful. When asked to name the great fighters against the Black Thing, Charles Wallace cries out: “Jesus! Why of course, Jesus!” But they also include Einstein and Buddha and Gandhi. And when Meg is asked to confront IT, the monstrous brain that rules Camazotz, her only weapon is love itself, which leads to the following extraordinary passage:

If she could give love to IT perhaps it would shrivel up and die, for she was sure that IT could not withstand love. But she, in all her weakness and foolishness and baseness and nothingness, was incapable of loving IT. Perhaps it was not too much to ask of her, but she could not do it.

This is just a few pages from the end of the book, and Meg resolves her dilemma by choosing to love her lost brother Charles Wallace instead. But the line to which I keep returning, and which I’m not sure I even noticed in my first dozen readings, is: “Perhaps it was not too much to ask of her, but she could not do it.” I think that this unheralded sentence is the secret heart of the book. A Wrinkle in Time comes as close as any work of literature I know to sincerely honoring the man of whom one of the few things we can say for sure is that he told us to love our enemies. (We also know that he was a member of an oppressed religious group ruled by an imperial power.) Yet it also understands how difficult this is, and even Meg, at the end of her journey, falls short of that ultimate example. It’s a line that reflects the personality of L’Engle herself, who was refreshingly empathetic and pragmatic in her faith, and whose books were always more about the search than about any answers that they provided. This search is a birthright that belongs to everyone, but to children of mixed or minority backgrounds even more urgently than most. Their construction of a self, of a personal history, and of their understanding of their own parents isn’t something that they confront in adolescence, as many others do, but as early as kindergarten—which turns them all into something like Charles Wallaces. You don’t need to be of mixed race to love this book. But it adds an interesting wrinkle.

Alice in Disneyland

A few weeks ago, I noted that watching the Disney movies available for streaming on Netflix is like seeing an alternate canon with high points like Snow White and Pinocchio stripped away, leaving marginal—but still appealing—films like Robin Hood and The Aristocats. Alice in Wonderland, which my daughter and I watched about ten times this week, lies somewhere in the middle. It lacks the rich texture of the earlier masterpieces, but it’s obviously the result of a lot of work and imagination, and much of it is wonderful. In many respects, it’s as close as the Disney studio ever got to the more anarchic style of the Warner Bros. cartoons, and when it really gets cooking, you can’t tear your eyes away. Still, it almost goes without saying that it fails to capture, or even to understand, the appeal of the original novels. Part of this is due to the indifference of the animators to anything but the gag of the moment, a tendency that Walt Disney once fought to keep in check, but which ran wild as soon as his attention was distracted by other projects. I love the work of the Nine Old Men as much as anyone, but it’s also necessary to acknowledge how incurious they could often appear about everything but animation itself, and how they seemed less interested in capturing the tone of authors like Lewis Carroll, A.A. Milne, or Kenneth Grahame than in shoehorning those characters into the tricks they knew. And it was rarely more evident than it is here.

What really fascinates me now about Alice in Wonderland is how it represents a translation from one mode of storytelling—and even of how to think about narrative itself—into another. The wit of Carroll’s novels isn’t visual, but verbal and logical: as I noted yesterday, the first book emerges from the oral fairy tale tradition, as enriched by the author’s gifts for paradox, parody, and wordplay. The Disney studio of this era, by contrast, wasn’t used to thinking in words, but in pictures. Movies were planned out as a series of thumbnail sketches on a storyboard, which naturally emphasized sight gags and physical comedy over dialogue. For the most part, Carroll’s words are preserved, and they often benefit from fantastic voice performances, but most of the scenes treat them as little more than background noise. My favorite example here is the Mad Tea Party. When I watch it again now, it strikes me as a dazzling anthology of visual puns, some of them brilliant, built around the props on the table: you can almost see the animators at the drawing board pitching out the gags, which follow one another so quickly that it makes your head spin. The result doesn’t have much to do with Lewis Carroll, and none of the surviving verbal jokes really land or register, but it works, at least up to a point, as a visual equivalent of the density of the book’s prose.

But it doesn’t really build to anything, and like the movie itself, it just sort of ends. As Ward Kimball once said to Leonard Maltin: “It suffered from too many cooks—directors. Here was a case of five directors each trying to top the other guy and make his sequence the biggest and craziest in the show. This had a self-canceling effect on the final product.” Walt Disney himself seems to have grasped this, and I’d like to think that it contributed to his decision, a few years later, to subordinate all of Sleeping Beauty to the style of the artist Eyvind Earle. (That movie suffers from the same indifference to large chunks of the plot that we see elsewhere in Disney—neither Aurora nor Prince Philip even speak for the second half of the film, since the animators are clearly much more interested in Malificent and the three good fairies—but we’re so caught up in the look and music that we don’t really care.) Ultimately, the real solution lay in a more fundamental shift in the production process, in which the film was written up first as a screenplay rather than as a series of storyboards. This model, which is followed today by nearly all animated features, was a relatively late development. And to the extent that we’ve seen an expansion of the possibilities of plot, emotion, and tone in the ongoing animation renaissance, it’s thanks to an approach that places more emphasis on figuring out the overall story before drilling down to the level of the gag.

That said, there’s a vitality and ingenuity to Alice in Wonderland that I miss in more recent works. Movies like Frozen and the Pixar films are undeniably spectacular, but it’s hard to recall any moments of purely visual or graphic wit of the kind that fill the earlier Disney films so abundantly. (The exception, interestingly, is The Peanuts Movie, which seems to have benefited by regarding the classic Schulz strips as a sort of storyboard in themselves, as well as from the challenges of translating the flat style of the originals into three dimensions.) An animated film built around a screenplay and made with infinite technological resources starts to look more or less like every other movie, at least in terms of its staging and how all the pieces fit together, while a film that starts with a storyboard often has narrative limitations, but makes up for it with a kind of local energy that doesn’t have a parallel in any other medium. The very greatest animated films, like My Neighbor Totoro, somehow manage to have it both ways, and the example of Miyazaki suggests that real secret is to have the movie conceived by a single visionary who also knows how to draw. Given the enormous technical complexity of contemporary animation, that’s increasingly rare these days, and it’s true that some of the best recent Pixar movies, like Toy Story 3, represent the work of directors who don’t draw at all. But I’d love to see a return to the old style, at least occasionally—even if it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.

The White Rabbit objective

On July 4, 1862, the Reverends Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Robinson Duckworth rowed a boat up the Thames with the three Liddell sisters, Lorina, Alice, and Edith. Here’s Dodgson’s own account of what took place on that pleasant afternoon:

Many a day had we rowed together on that quiet stream—the three little maidens and I—and many a fairy tale had been extemporized for their benefit—whether it were at times when the narrator was “i’ the vein,” and fancies unsought came crowding thick upon him, or at times when the jaded Muse was goaded into action, and plodded meekly on, more because she had to say something than that she had something to say—yet none of these many tales got written down: they lived and died, like summer midges, each in its own golden afternoon until there came a day when, as it chanced, one of my little listeners petitioned that the tale might be written out for her.

And we all know what happened next—or at least we have no choice but to remember this week, with the deluge of recent coverage surrounding the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Today, however, I’d like to focus on the stories that weren’t written down. We have Dodgson’s word that he often extemporized tales to Alice and her sisters, but the vast majority were forgotten as soon as they were told. What set this one apart? You could point to any number of possible factors, but I’d like to nominate one element that doesn’t always get the credit it deserves: the White Rabbit. Dodgson himself hints that the rabbit played an important role in the story’s composition: “That was many a year ago, but I distinctly remember, now as I write, how, in a desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy-lore, I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole to begin with, without the least idea what was to happen afterwards.” When we look back at the original story, it’s striking how quickly it gets down to business: the rabbit appears in the second paragraph, and Alice sets after it in the fourth, and by then, we’re off and running. And what the rabbit provides is a narrative thread, in the form of Alice’s curiosity about it, that allows Dodgson—or his alter ego, Lewis Carroll—to introduce a series of disconnected episodes. He doesn’t emphasize the rabbit unduly: in practice, he gently reintroduces it once every other chapter or so, whenever the story needs a little nudge. And the result is as pure an example as I know of the principle that every story should be structured as a series of objectives, and that the best way to sustain the reader’s interest, as Kurt Vonnegut put it, is to have the protagonist want something right away.

This may seem like a rather clinical way to look at Alice, but it’s also a trick that every oral storyteller knows. The other great example here is Winnie-the-Pooh, which emerged from the stories that A.A. Milne told to his son. When you browse through the books, you can’t help but notice how the most memorable chapters are all structured around a single concrete objective: Pooh wants to get some honey, or to find Eeyore’s tail, or to figure out what Tigger likes best. Pooh himself is hardly a model of a driven protagonist, but for a bear of very little brain, he knows what he wants. And when I tell my improvised stories about John the Pig to my own daughter, I’ve learned how useful it can be to follow “Once upon a time there was…” immediately with “And he wanted…” It’s a courtesy both to the listener and the teller: the former gets something to pique her interest, while the latter has a narrative framework on which he can fall back whenever his invention starts to flag. If you know what the protagonist wants, you usually have a rough idea of what comes next. And it often makes the difference between a story worth remembering and one that evaporates before your eyes. (On a similar note, I’ve recently begun experimenting with Story Cubes, which consist of nine prepackaged dice printed with images—a clock, a magic wand, a man with a parachute—designed to encourage the same kind of storytelling: you toss the dice and try to come up with a plot that connects the nine random pictures. And your chances of succeeding are much better if you introduce the words “And he wanted…” as soon as possible.)

This becomes even more clear when we compare Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with its sequel. Readers may prefer one or the other, and I actually think that Through the Looking-Glass is by far the greater book. (Not surprisingly, it has played a significant role in my own life: my first professional publication ever, the novelette “Inversus,” was an extended homage, and my novel The Icon Thief ends with the image, which I lifted directly from Carroll, of a pawn making it to the other end of the board.) But it’s also emphatically a written novel. Instead of the clean, linear chase after the White Rabbit, we have the imaginary chess game, which is wonderful, but could hardly be invented on the spur of the moment. Unlike its predecessor, Looking-Glass takes its time to get going: it opens with a sleepy scene of Alice curled up by the fireplace in midwinter, and she doesn’t enter the looking-glass world for several pages. Even when she’s on the other side, she does little more than look around at first, and her objective, when it finally appears, is fairly abstract—she wants to become a queen. The result bears the same relation to the previous installment as the second half of Don Quixote does to the first: it’s a richer, more mature work, written after its characters had already become famous, but it lacks some of the charm of the original. Each story bears the mark of its origins: one in a boat in a lazy day on the Thames, the other in the study of an Oxford mathematician. And if Carroll had started with Looking-Glass rather than Wonderland, the story might have been forgotten at once. I wouldn’t want to live without either, but we have the White Rabbit to thank for both.

Quote of the Day

The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland, but that’s because it’s the best book on anything for the layman.

—Alan Perlis

My Copley Square

The first work of fiction I ever sold for money was a novelette called “Inversus,” which first appeared almost a decade ago in Analog Science Fiction and Fact. It was a heavily revised version of a story that I wrote while I was still in college, based on the premise of a series of mysterious deaths whose victims all suffered from situs inversus, a condition in which  the organs of the body are a mirror image of their usual orientation. For reasons that are too complicated—and frankly implausible—to explain here, my protagonist concludes that these deaths are, in fact, the result of uncontrolled psychokinesis, caused by an undiagnosed second condition: that is, the victims are killed when their minds involuntarily destroy their surroundings. It isn’t a bad idea for a story, but initially, this premise was all I had. And it wasn’t until I figured out exactly how this psychic activity would physically manifest itself that I really had a plot.

The turning point was the idea that one of the characters would think he was being stalked by the creatures from Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, when in fact the manifestations were being created by his own mind, as the objects around him seemed to come to life in terrifying ways. This tied in neatly with the phenomenon of situs inversus itself, and also gave me an excuse to dive back into Carroll, as well as such modern commentators as Martin Gardner, which is always a pleasure. I also decided to set the story in Boston, where I was attending college at the time. The challenge, then, was to find locations in the city that would lend themselves to interesting set pieces, particularly ones that I could connect back to Alice. And at some point, it occurred to me that my character would want to confront these creatures at the largest looking glass he could find. To my mind, this meant only one place: the John Hancock Tower, the largest mirrored skyscraper in the city.

One day, then, I took the train out to Copley Square, where I spent the better part of an afternoon trying to figure out what would happen next. I paid the admission fee to go up to the viewing platform on the top floor of the Hancock Tower, which gave me a good view of the entire city, and wandered for hours in the surrounding streets, looking at everything through the eyes of my central character. I wasn’t sure what I was trying to find, but it had occurred to me earlier that a statue or other piece of public art might come to life, forcing my character to pursue it, or be pursued by it, giving me a convenient way of proceeding to the next location. The challenge was to find a suitable object that would tie back into the themes of the story. And as I looked around the square, I noticed a pair of bronze statues. I didn’t pay much attention to the first, but when I got close enough to see the other, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was the statue of a rabbit.

I’ve never forgotten that moment. It was one of my first experiences researching a story on location, and the most vivid instance I can recall of feeling that the universe itself is conspiring in the creation of a story. Those moments are rare, but they’re the reason I go through the rest of the process: for the sense, as fleeting as it might be, that the world is telling you that a story is meant to be. The result is one of my favorite memories of my life as a writer, and it’s the first thing I remember when I think of Copley Square. In the ensuing story, the rabbit pulls itself out of the ground and leads my character on a wild chase, much as Carroll’s White Rabbit did, but of course, the statue itself isn’t really a rabbit at all. It’s a hare racing with a tortoise. As the plaque at the site says:

Tortoise and Hare at Copley Square was created by Nancy Schön, as a permanent tribute to the runners from all over the world who have participated in the Boston Marathon.

Quote of the Day

“And what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”

—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Is storytelling obsolete?

The tricky thing about defending plot is that you occasionally get it from both sides. On the literary end, you have critics like John Lucas of the Guardian, who is clearly suspicious of most plotted fiction, or James Wood of the New Yorker, who is famously fed up with the conventions of literary realism. Meanwhile, on the other end, you have those who want to get rid of story altogether, but for radically different reasons. And I suspect that the likes of Lucas and Wood might ease up on their invective if they realized that plot was, in fact, literature’s last stand against an even more insidious opponent, embodied, at least this week, by Andy Hendrickson, Chief Technology Officer of Disney Studios, who was quoted in Variety as saying: “People say ‘It’s all about the story.’ When you’re making tentpole films, bullshit.”

To state the obvious, I’d rather be defending story against the likes of Lucas and Wood, who at least claim to be aspiring to something more, than Hendrickson, who is pushing toward something much less. On a superficial level, though, he seems to have a point—at least when it comes to the movies that consistently generate large audiences. Citing a chart of the top 12 movies of all time, including Disney’s own Alice in Wonderland, Hendrickson notes that visual effects are what tend to drive box office—”and Johnny Depp didn’t hurt,” he concludes. Which is true enough. Most of these movies are triumphs of visuals over narrative, based on existing brands or properties, to the point where story seems almost incidental. Even a movie like The Dark Knight, which cares deeply about plot and narrative complexity, feels like little more than an aberration.

But this only tells half the story. For one thing, the list that Hendrickson provides isn’t adjusted for inflation, and the list of the real highest-grossing movies of all time yields a much different picture. There are some clunkers here, too (nobody, I trust, went to see The Ten Commandments because of the script), but for the most part, these are movies driven by story and spectacle: Gone With the Wind. E.T. Star Wars. The Sound of Music. Even Avatar, which had a few problems in the screenplay department, was an ambitious attempt to create a fully realized original story that would fuel the dreamlife of millions. And these are the most lucrative movies ever made. To be content with a disposable tentpole picture that barely makes back its production and marketing costs strikes me as a lack of ambition. And it should strike Disney shareholders the same way.

Moreover, even the movies that Hendrickson cites are more driven by story than he acknowledges. Alice in Wonderland was a book before it became a terrible movie, after all, and it’s safe to say that box office was driven as much by goodwill toward Lewis Carroll’s creations as toward Johnny Depp. The same is true for Spider-Man, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and most other major franchises, all of which were built on the work of solitary geniuses. In short, someone still needs to do the work of story. Aside from exceptions like Pixar or Inception, the primary creative work may not be done in Hollywood itself, but in novels, comics, and other media where true artists continue to gravitate, and where the movies will eventually turn. Hendrickson may hate to admit it, but he still depends on storytellers, even if they’ve fled his own department. Life, as a certain famous franchise reminds us, always finds a way. And story does as well.

Quote of the Day

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Hayao Miyazaki and the future of animation

Yesterday was the seventieth birthday of Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, the director of Spirited Away, which makes this as appropriate a time as any to ask whether Miyazaki might be, in fact, the greatest living director in any medium. He certainly presents a strong case. My own short list, based solely on ongoing quality of output rather than the strength of past successes, includes Martin Scorsese, Wong Kar-Wai, and Errol Morris, but after some disappointing recent work by these last three, Miyazaki remains the only one who no longer seems capable of delivering anything less than a masterpiece. And he’s also going to be the hardest to replace.

Why is that? Trying to pin down what makes Miyazaki so special is hard for the same reason that it’s challenging to analyze any great work of children’s fiction: it takes the fun out of it. I’m superstitiously opposed to trying to figure out how the Alice books work, for example, in a way that I’m not for Joyce or Nabokov. Similarly, the prospect of taking apart a Miyazaki movie makes me worry that I’ll come off as a spoilsport—or, worse, that the magic will somehow disappear. That’s one reason why I ration out my viewings of Ponyo, one of the most magical movies ever made, so carefully. And it’s why I’m going to tread cautiously here. But it’s still possible to hint at some of the qualities that set Miyazaki apart from even the greatest animators.

The difference, and I apologize in advance for my evasiveness, comes down to a quality of spirit. Miyazaki is as technically skilled as any animator in history, of course, but his craft would mean little without his compassion, and what I might also call his eccentricity. Miyazaki has a highly personal attachment to the Japanese countryside—its depiction of the satoyama is much of what makes My Neighbor Totoro so charming—as well as the inner lives of small children, especially girls. He knows how children think, look, and behave, which shapes both his characters and their surrounding movies. His films can seem as capricious and odd as the stories that very young children tell to themselves, so that Spirited Away feels both beguilingly strange and like a story that you’ve always known and only recently rediscovered.

Which is why Miyazaki is greater than Pixar. Don’t get me wrong: Pixar has had an amazing run, but it’s a singularly corporate excellence. The craft, humor, and love of storytelling that we see in the best Pixar movies feels learned, rather than intuitive; it’s the work of a Silicon Valley company teaching itself to be compassionate. Even the interest in children, which is very real, seems like it has been deliberately cultivated. Pixar, I suspect, is run by men who love animation for its own sake, and who care about children only incidentally, which was also true of Walt Disney himself. (If they could make animated movies solely for adults, I think they would, as the career trajectory of Brad Bird seems to indicate. If nothing else, it would make it easier for them to win an Oscar for Best Picture.)

By contrast, the best Miyazaki movies, like the Alice books, are made for children without a hint of condescension, or any sense that children are anything but the best audience in the world. And as traditional animation is replaced by monsters of CGI that can cost $200 million or more, I’m afraid that this quality will grow increasingly rare. We’ve already seen a loss of personality that can’t be recovered: it’s impossible to be entirely original, not to mention eccentric, with so much money on the line. The result, at best, is a technically marvelous movie that seems to have been crafted by committee, even if it’s a committee of geniuses. Toy Story 3 is a masterpiece, and not good enough.

Miyazaki is seventy now, and judging from Ponyo, he’s still at the top of his game. I hope he keeps making movies for a long time to come. Because it’s unclear if the world of animation, as it currently exists, will ever produce anyone quite like him again.