Story

As I have mentioned several times in this book, we are by nature storytelling animals, and it is through stories that we learn most of our survival skills. Storytelling is not only a pleasant pastime; it is critical to our ability to thrive on earth. That is why we have such comparatively large and complex brains. Dogs and cats rehearse their survival skills when they play – stalking the prey, catching the prey and dominating the prey. Those are all the skills that are necessary for dogs and cats. Humans must, first of all, live in social groups, tribes. And since we each have our own personal set of values, it is not easy for us to live in groups. That is why evolution has endowed us with the ability to empathize with one another’s emotions, which are our automatic value responses. We have to know if the fellow sitting next to us in the movie theater is going to follow us down the street afterward and whether he has a gun. We have to be concerned about whether a terrorist has the ability to poison New York’s water supply. We have to think about having enough rainy-day money in savings to pay for car repairs and about making certain our kids have the proper vaccinations. We must consider God and whatever it is that Putin is doing in the Ukraine. Humans are complicated and unfortunately prone to making

bad decisions in life. We require far more information than we can possibly accumulate in juvenile play and direct experience, and storytelling is our coping mechanism. We are the only animals that can objectively consider our own mortality and adjust our trajectory through life. We tell stories all day, every day, anyway – “I’m going to the supermarket, honey”; “I love you”; “I don’t like it when you speak to me like that”; “Have you ever seen such a beautiful sunset?” Every thought is a story. This sentence is a story. Some of us – some very precious few – tell stories for a living, and it is that group that needs encouragement. In particular, the tribe needs to hear more stories about the bad choices we humans make and the consequences of those choices. So far, animation has been used mainly to tell simplistic stories to children, and it is time for the art form to grow up.