Apart from a Beginning, a Middle and an End our primary school teachers always told us that a good story needed good characters!
Good characters are essential for narratives in all types of media; Film, TV, Video Games - even Music Videos that have interesting characters that the audience can identify with are important for engaging us and making us want to carry on watching or playing!
Good character development and interesting characters are often praised when texts are reviewed and analysed. Well written characters are often described as 'rounded' or 'developed' or even 'three dimensional' (nothing to do with watching with 3D glasses). Well written characters have subtle traits, nuances and idiosyncratic - things that make them unique!
However...
... whilst creating these amazingly deep characters is fairly standard process for a 500 page novel, it's a bit more tricky in film that lasts just over 100 minutes.
This is why many media texts will rely on the use of
Archetypes to tell a story - quickly recognised characters that have little depth but which perform a role within a narrative - usually to move the story on...
There are tonnes of archetypes used across a range of genres.
Think of your typical gangster films. They will probably include any number of the following archetypes:
- The Henchman
- The Corrupt Politician
- The Fall Guy
- The Snitch
- The King Pin
- The Gangster with a heart of gold!
- The Gangster's Moll (girlfriend)
- The Untouchable Cop
All very stereotypical and recognisable!
Studying characters is as old as studying narrative structure - and just as it's possible to group most stories together based on their characters.
Russian theorist Vladimir Propp spent his time collecting stories from around the world! Fairy Tales and Folk Stories, legends, myths and ancient tales passed from generation to generation. Stories as old as time and from continents thousands of miles apart - and do you know what he found?
...
Seriously, have a guess, what do you think he found out?
...
That's right, they are basically all the same!
More specifically he found that there were the same characters performing the same functions. He reduced these characters into the following types, or what he calls: Functions.
You can apply this theory of character functions to most conventional media texts, but just to make it easier we'll use a case study that most of us are familiar with...
... a Disney film!
This is a fairly easy activity - and you don't need to have seen the film to be able to do it.
Hero: Aladdin
Princess: Jasmine
Villain: Jafar
Princess' Father: Sultan fo Agrabah
Helper: Apu
Mentor: The Genie
The reason this is so easy is because of the role each character performs - each character has a function within the narrative - essentially they serve the story.
In this way it doesn't matter if the characters are predictable or cliched - in a text like this, the story is more important than the characters and that is true of many texts.
The characters need to be quickly recognisable so that audiences can engage with the story.
We also become familiar with the way in which these different character types are presented to an audience.
Again, an audience is spoon fed this by Disney - but it's a useful way to analyse the sorts of devices used by directors to signpost the role of a character and how the audience is supposed to feel about them...
Again there is no need to have seen the film to understand who the characters are!
Let's consider an example.
Jafar - the Villain
We're all looking at the same person in the picture - there's no doubt who the villain is - but how do we know that he is the villain?
Look at the clothes he is wearing - dark reds and blacks, signifying mystery and evil. Look at his sharp angular features, this man is sharp and pointy - presumably like his personality - difficult to approach or get close to! None of the roundness or soft edges of any of the other 'good' characters!
His pointy beard and snake headed staff have connotations of Satan! The devil, an evil figure who cannot be trusted, biblical connotations that refer to a character who will cheat and lie and mislead others to get what he wants!
Look at his eyes - half closed to hide his true emotions and intentions - contrast this with the other characters who have big wide, friendly eyes, allowing the audience to engage, feel safe - trust them and see their emotions clearly!
Not every character you encounter will be quite as easy to analyse as Disney characters - but you will find that most characters in films will fall into one of Propp's Character Types, and more often than not you will find that the director will do whatever they can in the story, in the mise-en-scene and through their use of camera and editing to make it clear to the audience that the characters fulfil a specific function!
Narrative conformity and conventional stories are such a key appeal of media texts that making recognisable and predictable characters is a simple and fundamental way of allowing audiences to feel as though their expectations have been met!
