I don’t know how this narrative principle is properly called in English but today I finished reading an academic paper on “backend vs. frontend motivation” in stories and I am nerding off big-time.
One of the most important elements of modern media to me, especially in film, is for it to be motivated from the ‘front’, that means from the beginning. You gotta have a starting conflict so well fleshed out that it justifies all which comes next in a domino chain of such bulletproof logical consequence that it cannot be questioned until it inevitably culminates in the grand, satisfying finish. Only then is an ending good and only then can it be truly enjoyable.
The best example of which that remains to this day is How To Train Your Dragon.
In my opinion this movie leaves no room for a different ending. Were it to be replayed thousands and thousands of times, it would always unfold the same way. It’s that solid. Solid in its core conflict, in its character designs, in its stakes. It would choose to happen the exact same way again every time. Everything is in-universe consistent and character-consistent to a T. I believe luck, or chance, played a role in the creation of this movie because humanity is just not able to think up something as perfect as this on purpose.
While the sequels are - generally speaking - good, the failure to recreate the artistic mastery of the first movie can be seen in them. Glimpses of the original magic do appear more often than I had feared, which pleasantly surprised me for both the second and the third movie. However, both sequels have obvious weak points. The first movie has none. None. It’s somehow flawless.
I attribute its success to strong frontend motivation. There is an age-old war yet it threatens the current generation’s survival as acutely as it did on the first day. The People are tired and it’s either the annihilation of the enemy or resigning themselves to poverty and death. Berk is backed into a strategic corner and while Stoick is far from giving up, he doesn’t know where to take fresh ideas from. The absurd third possibility of talking peace with the dragons comes from the innocence of a child human and a child dragon. The grown-ups couldn’t have done it, yet so unexpectedly balance is achieved. It’s brilliant.
Httyd1: Shitty war -> needs to end (peacefully if possible, because the vikings are not bad people…but Stoick doesn’t see hope). + DRAGONS.
Httyd2: Hiccup Will Be Chief, therefore let’s throw some growth at him and kill off Stoick so that the two won’t fight about how to run the village later (because that would be in their characters).
Httyd3: The Dragons Will Leave, therefore let’s create an artificial villain, and a convenient dragon girlfriend, and make Toothless ooc to achieve it.
See, Httyd gradually declines into using backend motivation and that’s why the third movie works even less than the second. At least Httyd2 had a strong middle, that is, from Flying With Mother til Hiccup starts talking to Drago. Don’t make the mistake of buying into the rest: Nowhere was the topic of Hiccup becoming Chief even a thing before Httyd2. Also, Hiccup behaved ooc with his sole focus on dragons (at the so-uncaring-that-it-must-be-intentional expense of humans) and the no-kill rule. And Stoick died not from a plasma blast, but for plot convenience.
The third movie, in turn, gave Hiccup his original character back and bestowed a glow-up onto him and Astrid and their relationship, but at the cost of Toothless’ personality and backstory… and the general in-universe logic, such as Grimmel’s hollow arc (stressing his intelligence when he’s clearly NOT). You see, both movies have their strengths, but it just doesn’t work when the creators think up the ending first and are willing to bend everything else, however painfully, to achieve exactly that desired ending.
The newest marvel of frontend motivation done right is of course Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. The reason why it’s just so good is because the arc of Puss eventually losing his lives was not a forced narrative, simply conjured up to Have Puss Do More Jiggling On Screen. It was an innate part of his self, already there in his character from the start, and was inevitably going to become a problem some day. The creators made the most of it by dealing with it not after 8 more daring adventures that were clearly fabricated to generate money in theaters (what a nightmare to think about), but by insinuating that Puss has already lived some of those lives, giving him depth. Because we have not seen all of them, yet our famed hero has been shaped by them.
One could argue that the quest for the Wishing Star was a little too cheap of a narrative. But Puss has been a serious character stuck in a world full of dumb magical creatures and artefacts before. That’s literally the universe he lives in. So it works. And ohh, how magnificently it works.
So anyway. Front-end motivation, people. Has usually better characters too because the plot is tied to their consistency. It makes the ending of their story depend on themselves, not on ex-universe tinkering or budgets. Use it more, please and thank you.
This is so true. I think that's why sequels sometimes don't do as well, there's no front end motivation. But that could be why Shrek sequels did well. Because the good sequels had front end motivation.
