How to Tell a Story

While this blog isn't about a book, I think it still fits.

After seeing the movie The Last Airbender, I felt the potential for an amazing story and powerful characters, but that potential hadn't been reached.  One of my friends told me that the animated series had a lot more, that she most missed the lighthearted humor and fun of the series, so I finally sat down and watched the thing.

I don't think I've ever seen such a contrast, and it made me think a lot about how we choose to tell stories.  Clearly, the first book of Avatar: the Last Airbender did not succeed as a movie, but why?  Sure, the movie utilized incredible special effects and a media accepted by a larger audience; definitely, there is less prejudice against a movie than an animated series, which are so often dismissed as childish or basic.  Could a different director have captured the essence of the series in a few hours?

This raises questions about the success (or lack of success) of other stories.  Think Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, Back to the Future, The Odyssey, and Star Wars.  Beowulf, Shakespeare plays, the comic strip Little Orphan Annie.  How do these succeed or fail in different forms, and why?  When someone takes the movie Shrek and makes it into a musical, are we even listening to the story anymore?  What is the value or purpose of each medium?

We've come a long way from sitting around a fire and listening to someone's version of an epic poem memorized and passed by word of mouth for centuries.  What have we gained, or lost?

I think this is critical to think about especially now that physical books are going out of style, replaced by e-books; as letters are replaced by e-mails, e-mails by instant messages, tweets, comments and status bars.  One of the things I enjoy most about research for English papers is reading the letters of authors, finding out their motivations and passions and progress--their own stories--from their own hands.  What will the people generations from now find of us?   What will we sacrifice of art for the sake of entertainment?  What stories will survive, in what ways?

Seeing both the movie and the animated series helped me realized what Avatar: The Last Airbender is really about.  The story just isn't the same without the small vignettes offered by an episode form; the repetition of seemingly minuscule elements, like the cabbage man; the episodes are, in a way, poetry.  By transposing the story from a series to a movie, the humor, the character, and the essence of Avatar are lost.  Like the message in one of the episodes, it's not so much about the destination as it is about the journey.