I was mentioning this in one of my upcoming posts on Narutaru as it relates to Kitoh’s art style, but I realized this would be of more general interest. Take a quick look at this short video. It’s only one minute and nineteen seconds:
This is from a classic 1944 paper by Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel. It’s an amazing video. All this video is is a few geometric shapes, moving around. It doesn’t even have sounds or words. Yet our mind is able to fill in the blanks and make a story out of it. Needless to say, this simple short animation tells a better story than many modern anime, with their fancy glittery eyes, enormous animator sweatshops, and fancy rotoscoping and CG techniques. What’s truly important in telling a story? Is less sometimes more, coupled with the power and ingenuity of the viewer’s imagination?
I guess that the problem is that more means more chances to contradict the signals you’re sending to the viewer. For example making bad choices in term of long term coherence of the story, or sending contrasting signals with your stylistic choices. It also means more chances to fuck up in a technical sense. Plus, more will make the story more relevant to the real world and real life, and hence more likely to carry political implications or other problematic themes, which can make it not necessarily worse from a storytelling point of view, but despicable to our eyes as we see that storytelling finalized to a bad end.
By the way I saw a short story of domestic violence in the video. Big Triangle is kind of a despicable dad. Little Circle is probably adopted, or Circleness is a recessive gene. Or Little Triangle had an affair. Still not an excuse to act like that, though.
Yeah, that’s essentially the story I saw in the video too. So many gaps the mind is able to fill in.
I think that you may be on to part of the problem with more signals. The more signals you have, the more you allow yourself to screw up. Also, the more you allow yourself to be distracted form the essential themes of the story.
Yeah. On the other hand, one could argue we are able to fill in those gaps *because* we are used to tropes and common scenarios – some from reality, but lots of them from fiction – and we recognize their basic traits. So in a sense this kind of abstract storytelling only thanks to the tons of past storytelling we did absorb already and which shaped our mind and thought processes – giving our brain an ability to recognize “story patterns” not unlike the ability to tell a smiling human face from a few abstract traits like a colon, a hyphen, and a closed parenthesis.
Did the original experiment involve showing that video to very small children as well? How would they react, not having all the cultural load we do?