Disney Musicals VS Your Story
A thought experiment: if your main character was a character in a Disney animated musical such as ENCANTO or MOANA, what would they sing about, how, and why?
At the beginning of Disney’s Encanto, Mirabel meets several children who are curious about the workings of the film’s setting and cast (mirroring our own viewer interest at this time). She responds with a song encapsulating the family’s powers and dynamics in a way that’s sanitised for the outside world:
A little while later, she follows up with a solo-song revealing her true feelings and inner hurt in contrast to the prior song:
This pattern of “1) Song about the outer world’s setting/cast → 2) Solo song about inner character dilemma” is repeated elsewhere in recent Disney animation, such as MOANA:
OUTER SONG:
INNER SONG:
In the recent WISH, although we see the same pattern repeated, I’d argue this iteration is far less effective (something that potentially contributes to the comparatively poor critical response).
OUTER:
INNER:
In WISH, we are in a town of wishes, which already mires the story in an abstract. This isn’t a place of war where a lover’s sacrifice and a family’s ongoing survivor’s guilt causes crushing expectations on new generations, as in MOANA; this isn’t an island that’s become increasingly isolationist due to horrific threats caused by a great past sin, trying to prevent the heir from sailing out to that same fate. This is a place where literal deus ex machinas without specificity are the topic of conversation: wanting things to magically come true. It could be argued that even as the main character refutes one method of dealing with wishes, the overall logic of generic hope isn’t really destabilised by the film.
Which draws a spotlight on the main character: what do we actually know about the main character by the end of the film, and how does she differ from any other main character in such a stock scenario? Her interview with the King shows her to be a bit of a disaster, which can be fun and relatable, sure, but it emphasises the extent to which the character really does have no clear goals or anything to set her apart from others who could have led this story. She’s generically Good and Tenacious and Impatient; that’s it.
Now imagine putting Mirabel in there. Immediately, you imagine a very different story taking place based on the way her character operates and the sense of her you get from her songs and other narrative interactions that occur early in the film. THIS is the kind of specificity and deft touch you should be aiming for in your own work.
STRUCTURE
The reason why the structure works very well in these Disney movies is partly a unique feature of musicals (the fact the audience dramatically accepts that characters will spontaneously share their innermost feelings in song!) and partly just a very clear execution of a concept central to most good drama: we need to know what characters want (or what they think they want), and we need to be let in on the emotion and passion surrounding this ‘want’. That’s what these songs achieve.
I‘m going to give you an exercise you can use in your own writing (one that is medium-agnostic, so not including it in my usual game writing prompt series).
Then… I’m going to apply it to Michael Bay’s Bruce Willis-starring Armageddon, because, I watched it again at an airport the other day and had a lot of fun with it and it’s provocative to compare such totally different works as Encanto / Armageddon, and, well, this is my Substack and I can do what I want…
EXERCISE:
WRITE YOUR MAIN CHARACTER’S FIRST TWO ‘ENCANTO’ SONGS
Look at the lyrics for the ‘outside world context songs’ linked above. Make notes about the way they’re written, what they focus on, what the singer is trying to communicate and represent about their subject matters.
Look at the lyrics for the ‘inside world protagonist songs’ linked above. Make the same notes about how these are written/what they focus on/what’s being communicated, but contrast with the outside world context notes you made before. What is the difference between the two songs?
Create equivalents for both songs for your own main character. These can either be full lyrics or mixtures of lyric / note-form content. Imagine your character is introducing their world/setting/cast in a public-facing way; then imagine your character is alone, and singing from the heart about their true feelings, needs, wants, hurts, passions (as far as the character has enough self-awareness for these).
Compare and contrast your answers with the original Disney examples to see if you want to add anything else. If you’ve completed an ‘Always, Sometimes, Never’ for your character (read more in the linked article below), then see if you can further refine nuance using these other traits. Likewise, if you want to now alter your ASN answers based on the results of this song exercise, please do! They’re supposed to be living documents rather than set-in-stone.
Now that you’ve got these songs, consider the first 5, 10, 15 minutes of your planned story. These timings are vague and will vary person to person and medium to medium (easiest in film, but far more changeable in novel reading and game playing).
Ask yourself whether the emotional resonances and details of your ‘outside world context’ and ‘inside world protagonist’ songs are at all communicated in these various 5, 10, 15 minute divisions of your story’s opening.
By this I do not mean that they need to be literally there in this form. I mean, rather, if for example I was writing a story about Mirabele from Encanto, do I get a sense that she feels separate from the rest of her family and the emotional depths to which she too wants a miracle?
A very rough rule of thumb for the progression of our experience as an audience: 5 minutes = a hook where the audience should at least have a hint of the two major songs. 10 minutes = maybe we understand the applicability of both songs now, maybe we’re at that awkward dividing point between the two songs where we realise not all is well. 15 minutes = we’ve now definitely achieved the narrative equivalent of hearing the two songs.
Some stories start with external action (archetypally, imagine a fight scene or a heist, but ‘external action’ can really be anything that’s not focussed on a character’s interiority and where the weighting is about something happening in the environment near the character). For these openings, part of the appeal to audiences is the interesting and potentially exciting nature of the action we are witnessing. But, generally speaking, we want to get to know our main character/s at the same time, so that when the action ends, we don’t just turn off the movie / the game / stop reading the book. The action is a carrot, making us care about someone we don’t care about is a stick, so the job of the action? Turn that stick into a carrot by the time we get to the slower moments.
Point 9 above means that the “outer world → inner world” twin song principle can still work even if we imagine a very different pace and focus for a story’s opening. The action and our character’s participation in the action becomes a version of the outer world song, and the inner world song is the aftermath responding to the outcome of that action.
And for people wondering about interactive fiction where we might shape aspects of our character’s inner world? I’ll be creating a game-specific follow up to this article, but for now, imagine that your character is Mirabel. When she says “I’m fine, I’m totally fine / I’m not fine”, those can be choices! When she goes on to talk about how she feels about her family and powers, those can be choices too! People so frequently miss out on these self-expressive choices in games when they start out writing this kind of thing, that we can actually define what our characters are thinking and feeling in an explicit way. Of course, as writers, you have created and limited the options that can be selected and what each leads to: so it’s almost like instead of creating twin songs, you’re creating potential variations of twin songs that still adhere to a certain overall theme and shape, just with audience sing-a-long allowing them to reshape it in different ways.
So - Michael Bay’s Armageddon.
The film starts with a montage of scenes showing an asteroid heading towards the world and none of our protagonists are present. Immediately, we might wonder how this fits the above model: but then skip to point 9 in the exercise, and you’ll see we’re in ‘external action’ territory in part. The way to use structural models in fiction writing in general isn’t to adhere ghoulishly to what doesn’t apply, but, neither to discard them just because they don’t fit each exact story you want to tell. Consider the ethos behind them, their texture, their shape, and see what it tells you as a diagnostic tool. So here, in the above model, I said that for stories starting with external action, we ideally want to care about the protagonist by the time the action ends, and that the aftermath is the ‘inner world song’. At the end of the asteroid montage, we hear that the government need people that can drill to save the world: so what do we get afterwards? Cause and effect (in a narrative sense) leads us to seeing those drillers on their oil rig, oblivious to the ‘outer world context’ in a way that we know will inevitably lead to pathos once the two songs collide.
OUTER WORLD (up to 4:11, at which point they splice in later scenes; this video also leaves out a few other scenes, but is mostly there)
INNER WORLD (can’t get a single video, but combine the below two and you roughly get the picture):
The inner world song of this sequence is one of Harry (Bruce Willis), oil rig drilling team leader / friend to his men / father to his daughter / antagonist to one of his men trying to sleep with his daughter. In his interactions with protestors near his rig, we see that he has a potentially dangerous sense of humour (using a golf club off the edge of the rig), and therefore lacks a sense of decorum. When he realises one of his men (Ben Affleck) is sleeping with his daughter, he shoots after him with a gun and repeatedly misses (his golf club was pretty accurate though, right? Makes you wonder why he keeps missing…) His men, as a chorus, keep trying to advise him to leave the kid alone and that his daughter is capable of having relationships (setting up a tight interconnected family rather than a pure business, with the men literally saying that they felt like they all raised her). The man who sleeps with his daughter is practically her age and is the youngest of the people there. So if they’re all a family, then what is Harry really feeling towards this antagonist, who should by the emotional logic of the opening also be part of the same family?
Later in the film, Harry says that the man is a son to him, but he can’t say it in this inner world song, and neither does he necessarily know it. But there’s enough of a sense of subtext and ‘missing pieces’ by the logic of the rest of the material for us to start understanding that Harry is a fun, potentially dangerous man who ignores social convention and earns loyalty, with a crew that are more like family than workers or disposable pawns.
And so when Harry knows that, to save the world, he needs to potentially sacrifice not only his own life but all these men in his family?
We understand how tough it is for him, because we understand him. Because, the first 15 minutes of his storyline laid it out for us in the non-musical equivalent of that Encanto style inner world song: a sequence of drama, comedy, and action that shows us everything we need to know.
(And yes, it was very fun treating Armageddon as a serious topic of literary analysis. Until next time!)
