Quote:
Originally Posted by Triple_R
How is that a tired premise? I honestly can't think of many anime shows or movies that are about a little girl ( just one little girl, nobody else) getting sucked into a magical world out of nowhere.
Sure, western fiction has Alice in Wonderland and Dorothy in Oz, but I can't think of many anime that have the same basic premise as Spirited Away does.
But just look at that, two of the most popular and timeless narratives of all-time (Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz) share the same basic premise with the critically acclaimed Spirited Away. Maybe that speaks to the strength of the "little girl gets sucked into a magical world out of nowhere" premise. 
In fact, that premise, like Star Trek's, is open to a literal world of possibilities. It may be a simple premise, but it's potential scope is massive. |
Well, there's something that balances out scope, and that's "attention to detail". Given the same amount of resources, a broader scope story will get a shallower treatment. (And the human attention span is limited.)
Also, we're moving up and down the abstraction ladder with little discipline, and as a result, I have no idea what we're really talking about. Your clarification attempt a couple of pages ago didn't help, either.
For example: "a little girl (
just one little girl, nobody else) getting sucked into a magical world" is a specification of a more general formula. I can run wild with it:
AI with a nanobot body who can assume any form at will (but whose two defaults are humanoid male/female) gets sucked into a world where sexual reproduction is unknown and the dominant sentient life form consists of amoeba-colonies with a group mind each.
It's something I haven't seen before, but it's
still the same formula, and the points of departure ideally define what the story's going to be about.
You can add strictures and remove strictures at will. Highschool romance comedy already has three: "romance plot", "highschool setting", "comedy mood".
But no matter how many strictures you impose, there's still a lot you can do with the variables.
I don't disagree that some genres have more variation possibilities, but in practice that's rarely going to matter much.
(And if you're going to argue success [as with Star Trek], I'd say that soap operas have beat them all.
Especially daily soaps.
)