How to Engage and Inspire Your Film Audience

The highest-level stories not only make us feel but also make us think. They achieve this by dramatizing important ideas and themes. I recently watched a film adaptation of the classic novel The Swiss Family Robinson that did this superbly.

The 1940 Swiss Family Robinson was produced by RKO and stars Thomas Mitchell, Freddie Bartholomew, Tim Holt, and Edna Best. For those who haven’t read the novel or seen the more known 1960 Disney film adaptation, the story dramatizes the adventures of an early 19th century family marooned on a deserted Pacific island.

What makes this 1940 adaptation of the novel so engaging and inspiring is that it explicitly dramatizes a universal and important theme: Moulding the characters of our children. (There is also a related minor but poignant theme about romantic love.)

Viewing Swiss Family Robinson, one is rivetted by its characters facing meaningful ethical challenges. What the creatives in this film did especially well was to have the lead character, the father (Thomas Mitchell), make an explicit and principled choice to put his family at risk by taking them across the globe to a new colony so that they could become better people. And then in an excellent complication, this choice terribly rebounds on him when they are marooned on a deserted island. Or does it?

The instructive lesson here for creatives is that if you want to emotionally move an audience on a deep level you must dramatize a universal and important theme. It is ideas and thinking that create emotion. And if you want to inspire your audience, it generally must be a positive theme and life lesson.

Now, dear creative, you don’t have to do that; you can write an interesting and even dramatic action story that means nothing, but it will not be overly involving or memorable. If you really want to create A grade and unforgettable stories, one vital way to achieve this is to conceive and dramatize a great theme. That is not easy, but the story and audience rewards are immense.

I wish a greater number of producers, executives, directors, writers and publishers would focus more on the ideas, values and themes of their stories. To stress the point more specifically: It is the ideas in Swiss Family Robinson that make it a thought-provoking and inspiring film for children and adults. A family can and should watch this film together.

Please remember that it is thinking that is at the base of what makes an audience feel. From theme comes emotion! Developing your stories so they inspire deep audience thinking and emotion can greatly help you to create classic stories.

How do you inspire your audience to think?

Swiss Family Robinson can be viewed on Disney+.

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