HEY.
I was gonna write a thing about something or whatever but I'm suffering from some major case of the Mondays so I'm just gonna c+p an old draft I wrote last week but never posted. Also my birthday was today, zippity doo dah.
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First of all, I want to re-iterate my joyousness for being one of the winners of Madness Day, and perhaps also won a place in Krinkels' heart. That said, I had what I thought was an interesting idea for a blog post.
Anybody who's seen most of my movies might have noticed that they hardly ever have dialogue. I have no particular dislike for dialogue or dialogue-heavy cartoons, but I have to be honest and say I suck at writing dialogue. Stories work better for me when they simply fall into place with drawings to tell the story.
Now, for me, I see it as a weakness, but for the films itself, it's probably a strength. Have you realized that Castle Crashers has no dialogue? The stuff NPCs say and hints don't count. Not to sound stupid, but I didn't even notice this until I'd finished the game. The story is simple and the characters are too. They don't even have names, they're all like, Red Knight, Blue Knight, Cyclops, Necromancer, Evil Wizard. Proof that a rose by any other name yadda yadda.
I really think the game's got a good story, even though it's nothing new and very simple. You'll see alot of EXTREMELY convoluted stories in TV shows and movies and pretty much any form of entertainment today, but you don't really need to have all this explanation and character backstories and shit to have a good story with great characters.
What could it be, then? Could it be that their personality is hardly defined and your mind is supposed to fill in the blanks? Actions speak louder than words, so whatever little information about a character you get goes a long way. People will always say "THE BOOK WAS BETTER" after seeing a movie adaptation, is it because the embellishment of the characters was more up to the imagination but the film version is just the filmmaker's interpretation of it? Could be.
My favorite character in particular from Castle Crashers is the Industrial Castle King, who is a total coward and a narcissist. He's got several enormous portraits of himself all over his castle, and he never personally fights you. Unarmed, he dies in one hit. He's dead weight to his allies, so they don't even save him. You tend to forget all of this is happening without one English word being uttered.
Another great example I've seen of this recently is Wall-E. A lot of critics have probably pointed it out that there's hardly any dialogue, and it really does seem like a long version of a Pixar short, which are almost always silent. The back-and-forths between Wall-E and M-O were some of the best scenes, M-O was a funny character and they didn't even have to explain why! It's like, if you have a dog that's really friendly, you equate the dog to "a good person", even if they don't talk. Their actions speak for themselves and you're not bogged down with having to interpret their feelings through words.
So why do I think it's the future? Silent films were the FIRST films ever, they've been around forever in some form, they never fully fazed out. What I mean is that silence is going to become more and more popular in the feature length area, in more magnum opuses than just the little league stuff. We've come a long way since the introduction of all the film tools we have today, cameras, color, sound, chroma key, CGI, etc.. it might just be when we handicap ourselves from some of these that we realize other ways to tell stories. Simplicity is key, and pictures really are worth 1000 words. Think of those Garfield comics where Garfield is either quiet or taken out altogether. Human minds are DESIGNED to fill in the blanks to solve problems, storytelling can make great use of that. In fact, this entry is too long. Let me re-iterate the entire article in one sentence.
Your cartoons and games have too much damn dialogue, rip out your characters' tongues and you'll see a WORLD of storytelling opportunities.
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Ok I'm done. Happy New Year everybody.
Gerkinman
I know i have a far bigger interest in telling stories without words then i do with dialogue. Animation is after all a "visual" medium. Its strange looking around a community like Newgrounds tho, theres alot of "storytellers" here that use a tonne of dialogue and yet their stories are utter shit, all the good storytellers on this website seem to just rely on music and visuals to tell a good narrative. Course this is just my opinion. The fact most dialogue driven cartoons on this site are bad sitcoms probably doesnt help.
Ukinojoe
A big offender here on Newgrounds is how alot of games have extremely boring long instructions. I like a hard complicated game now and then but I hate seeing it in Flash games, where my attention span is even lower than usual. I like how Tom's games are all consistently simple and take seconds to learn how to play. Additionally, movies that begin with a block of text explaining the backstory or something are no fun at all.