Quote:
Originally Posted by TinyRedLeaf
By plot, I take it that you mean exposition.
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I'm a bit at a loss, here. I'm familiar with the language for literary discription (secondary subject in a university degree), but I'm not familiar with the language of film description. It's possible that exposition has a specialised meaning I'm not aware of, but in literary terminology "exposition" has little to do with plot. "Exposition" is a mode of presentation (others being description, and narration [although here it gets confusing, since "narration" is often used as the blanket term for it all]).
"Plot" is the thin read line that connects all the actions in a story. It's an analytic abstraction. The same plot could be realised in different settings or with different characters. If you add characters and setting, you then have a "story". All of this is purely conceptional; it precedes the medium. You have this story to tell - what do you do? Write it in a novel? A graphic novel maybe? Put it in a film?
Of course, this is all highly abstract and it depends on how much you abstract. But story is
absolutely separatable from the mode of presentation. It's, for example, not hard to tell (even if nobody clued me in before hand) that the book and the film
Moby Dick tell "the same story". The very fact that you can compare the two so closely shows this. It's less obvious with
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and
Blade Runner. And at some point we're left wondering.
I get the complaints that are made here: people tend to overestimate the importance of story and underestimate the importance of presentation. I've frequented writer boards a lot, and that's one of the more frustrating aspects. People tell you that you can't use "too many" adverbs, and when you point out that writers use them all the time, you get one of two counters: (a) If the writer is considered a "good" writer, then that writer gets to use adverbs, because he knows how and you - a newbie - do not. (b) If the writer is considered a "hack", you're told that writer gets away with using adverbs because "the story is so strong".
There's an implicit implication that presentation is just ornamentation for the "story". That's why, when people talk about the "writing" for anime, very often they don't talk about the
actual writing (the scenario, or maybe the individual scripts). Chances are they've never read that. It's about the story as it shines through in the animation. Just as with texts, it's the story - an abstraction from what you've actually seen.
Paperman, linked above, has a rather boring plot: Boy meets girl, they separate, they find each other again. That's been done a lot. If you think plot is of prime importance then you absolutely miss what's great about the piece. There are various levels of abstraction: what I've outlined above is
very abstract. As you go down in abstraction levels, the plot becomes more exciting (say, if you include the paperplanes), but I'd still argue that plot is not the best tool to analyse this piece of film.
Similarly, plot isn't the best approach to plays like Beckett's
Waiting for Godot or short stories such as Viriginia Woolf's "Kew Gardens" (which is a montage of conversation fragments interspersed with the exciting story of a snail overcoming an obstacle in its path [a - gasp - leaf!]; it's also about flowers, but they do nothing remotely plot-like).
The thing is that - unless with some deliberately metalevel stuff - the presentation is supposed to be invisible (and when it's good, it often is). That's why it's hard to talk about that stuff; you don't notice it. It's there to ease you into the story, and the story is what you end up talking about (unless you're interested in criticism, or in the craft of creating stuff like texts or films). I
clearly miss many, many visual and auditory clues. I'm not trained to pay attention to that. But I still catch a lot more than, say, my Dad.
When people talk about animation in terms of story then that's because that's what they get out of the viewing experience. But that's selective attention. If you don't pay attention to the presentation, the story has been successfully presented. But the secret behind its success is also the reason why people generally put too much emphasis on story, and too little on the presentation. It's systematic, and it's not unique to animation. Written texts (whether they're novels or short stories) have the same problem.
[ETA:This thread reminds me of another recent one about concept and execution. Too lazy to look for it right now.]