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The Power of Death in Stories
There is no more emotionally compelling narrative dynamic than death.
Many years ago the night before I began writing a script which featured a young woman with terminal cancer, I wrote my friend Kurt Brown. Kurt was a poet and in fact had turned me onto poetry some years previously.
I emailed him: “Kurt, can you recommend a really good poem about death.”
He emailed me back: “Scott, all poems are about death.”
That got me thinking not only about poems, but stories of all kinds. Whether literal or metaphorical, aren’t all stories — at some level of interpretation and meaning — about death?
I was reminded of my email exchange with Kurt when I read an article by Josh Spiegel: ‘The Lion King’, ‘Bambi’, and Why Disney Movies Shouldn’t Be Afraid About Death”. In it, Spiegel compares these two classic Disney movies and writes this about The Lion King:
When Mufasa dies in The Lion King, pushed off a cliff by his jealous brother Scar into a stampede of wildebeest, it’s a shocking moment not only for his son Simba, but for everyone in the audience. The film is clearly building to this heartbreak in even lighter moments, such as a brief image of Simba and Mufasa playfully wrestling in the grass one evening, scored to the lush, almost operatic score from Hans Zimmer. But when Mufasa dies, it’s still a major surprise because these things just don’t happen in Disney films. What’s more, the aftermath, where Simba tries to nuzzle underneath the paw of his now-dead father, almost trying to will him back to life, is a gut-punch moment in Disney animation, as plaintive and affecting as anything the studio has ever done. I’m not going to lie: watching my son during this scene, as he became aware of what was happening, and seeing him come close to crying was incredibly rough. Like I said: the emotion is compounded when you watch this as an adult.
Another animation company Pixar does not shy away from death as a narrative element:
- Finding Nemo: Death of wife/mother and siblings
- Up: Death of Ellie (wife)
