Script: Do These Pants Make My Arc Look Big?

I recently went on a bender in chick-flick town. I saw Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and Dear Frankie back to back. I’m still trying to re-hydrate myself.

There’s been a lot of buzz around Sisterhood in writerly circles, so I was curious to check it out. And I have to admit, it was fun. It’s not really a movie, per se, as much as it is four vignettes from other movies that are all connected by a magical pair of pants four 16 year-old girls share throughout a life-changing summer.

Bridget is a beautiful blonde, who hasn’t dealt with her mother’s suicide. She goes to soccer camp in Mexico and seduces a male coach. After, she’s depressed, because having sex for the first time didn’t solve her emptiness, it actually made it worse.

Tibby is an aspiring filmmaker, bitter about life and working at a Walmart-esque store. She makes a documentary about how pathetic minimum wage drones are. In the course of this, she meets a young girl dying of leukemia. Tibby’s there for the girl’s final days, and learns to see the wonder in life, even and especially the mundane.

Carmen goes to see her dad after a long absence since he divorced her mother. But dad’s got a new family – a fiancé and her kids. Carmen struggles with his rejection and feelings of abandonment. She confronts him in a cathartic moment, and later decides to go to his wedding anyway. He invites her to be part of it, confirming her place in his heart.

Lena is a repressed young woman who is afraid to love. On a trip to Greece to visit her grandparents, she develops a crush on the forbidden grandson of a rival family. Lena learns to open herself to love, and to stand up for her feelings.

And that’s pretty much it. There really isn’t any more to these stories than that. It looks pretty skeletal – just the big beats of four individual, more complex films. But for some reason, these broad strokes are all we need – the climactic moments, especially Carmen’s, are emotionally powerful. Why? Shouldn’t story this skimpy make it impossible for us to really connect to or care about the big moments?

Naturally, I have a theory. Each of these stories is familiar to audiences. What you’ve basically got is distilled, caplet forms of Bend It Like Beckham, Dying Young, My Best Friend’s (er, Dad’s) Wedding and My Big Fat Greek Wedding, connected by a pair of jeans, which were, quite frankly, the least interesting part of the film. Now, which film each of these segments is referencing most may be up for debate – but they are each most definitely stories we have seen before. This is a good thing, because it allows us to subconsciously fill in the missing beats with what we know, or think, should be there, to create more satisfying arcs for these characters. It's success lies in offering not just a one course dinner, but a smorgasboard of chick fare.

Bridget’s story is by far the skimpiest – most of her segments are just girls playing soccer. Snore. So her arc isn’t especially satisfying. The arc everyone seems to respond to most to is Carmen’s. I think this is for a couple of reasons – the first being America Ferrera’s fine performance, and the second being the fact that the film starts with her narration. So, if we have one main protagonist (which, based on screen time and story, I would argue we don’t) Carmen is the closest thing to it. Like baby birds, we’ve bonded to the first thing we saw.

While Sisterhood manages to pull off story by association fairly well, I still felt the film was incomplete. I wasn’t sure what the resolution for each character was. I realize this film is based on the first of three books, so of course things won’t be completely tied up. But it doesn’t look like there will be another movie, so why not treat us to a little closure? At the very least, I wanted an Animal House style freeze frame on each girl, with a caption telling me what the hell happened to her. Did Lena marry her Greek boy-toy? How did Tibby’s much-changed documentary turn out? Does Bridget deal with her mother’s death? Does Carmen really reconcile with her father’s new life, and what would that look like?

At any rate, Sisterhood is an interesting study of inferred arc, something I discussed in Shopgirl-ing For An Arc. It seems, in our ADD world, to be becoming more and more common, and while the old-school in me mourns good, old fashioned character development, the lazy writer in me is amazed at what a good pair of jeans can do for a girl’s arc.

Script: Make Sure Your Chicken Is In The Right Run

So, with the theatrical release of Wallace and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, I’ve been right into claymation, and Wallace and Gromit in particular. Naturally I decided to check out some of Nick Park’s other stuff, and sat down to enjoy Chicken Run. And I did enjoy it, but I had this niggling feeling… that I was watching a romantic comedy. A live-action romantic comedy.

I’ve been thinking a lot about animation, and it seems to me that it’s important to pick stories that absolutely demand the animated format, rather than taking a story that could, with today’s CGI and special effects wizardry, just as easily be told live action.

I know, you’re saying, “What about the chickens? And what about the chicken pie-o-matic-thingy? How could that possibly have been live action?” I agree, that demanded to be animated. But aside from that stuff, it didn’t feel like an animated film.

The similarities between the chicken coop and a WWII POW camp were obvious and, I’m certain, intended. I have no problem with that in an animated film. And the romance between Ginger and Rocky was great, and again, not a problem in an animated film. But what bothered me was the humor, or lack thereof.

Animation is a visual thing, so I expect to see visual gags, things that would be impossible in live action. Things like Wallace’s amazing inventions and Gromit’s death-defying escapes via bastardizations of those same amazing inventions. The evil penguin in The Wrong Trousers masquerades, to great humorous effect, as a chicken simply by putting a rubber glove on his head, and who could forget that amazing climactic chase with the train set? That final sequence is the stuff wet clay dreams are made of, and all chase scenes to come in animated films will be measured against it.

Wallace and Gromit rely on a lot of visual communication, too. Gromit doesn’t speak, he communicates entirely through his expressions and his fantastic ears – and we always know exactly what he’s thinking. The Bunnies in Were-Rabbit are almost completely a visual gag as well, to great effect.

The problem with Chicken Run, at least for me, is that all the jokes and communication were dialogue-based. It felt like an incredibly ‘talkie’ film, for animation. And for that reason, I wasn’t sure why I didn’t just watch a period Great Escape-esque romantic comedy with Mel Gibson and Julia Sawalha throwing barbed lines right on the screen, instead of hiding behind a curtain of clay.

When it comes to animation, format is a genre, and you want to make sure you’re in the right one. I still love Nick Park, and Wallace and Gromit will have a place in my heart forever, but sadly, I don’t think this Chicken is marathon material.