Narrative

Looking at narrative this week, I became aware of how Aristotle defines a beginning, a middle and an end and how these categories are defined in film.

One name that struck me more than any other was that of Vladimir Propp, and it became interesting when looking at his character archetype in which he set out that there are '31 narrative functions' and '8 character types' was whether this was true amongst most animation.

Propp defined '8 character types' to be:

• villan
• donor
• helper
• princess/father
• dispatcher
• hero/victor
• false hero

This made me think to look at a  character sets to see how they match up.

I first thought about crash bandicoot, and while crash has alot of characters in the story I am still interested to see if it matches up on the whole. My breakdown would go like this:

• Villan - Dr.Cortex
• Donor - Polar/Pura
• Helper - Aku aku
• Princess -Coco
• Dispatcher - ?
• Hero - Crash
• False hero - ?

I managed to think of most of the characters which could fit these categories although not quite for 'dispatcher' and 'false hero'. While in a way it seems that obviously most narratives don;t include all of these they do seem to be apparent. Off the top of my head I can't think of any more categories to place a character. The many other characters in crash bandicoot seem to fall under 'villan' numerous times.