Morality tale

Or an improving tract, says Anne Stewart, stacking Series Three Communion booklets briskly on a shelf, next to worn but gaudily illustrated Ladybird Stories from the Holy Land and The Good Samaritan. Like all those awful Victorian moral tales. Do sit down, by the way. ... 

As the various Latin, French, and Flemish inscriptions printed with The Alchemist made clear, Brueghel (1525-69) offered early modern viewers a morality tale of the futility of alchemy, warning those who were tempted that it could only destroy families and households. "See how this foolish man distills in his vials / The blood of his children, his treasures and his senses," read one French inscription. "See how, after searching uselessly for mercury, / He goes with his children to seek his bread."1 The moral of the story seems clear. Yet as a representation of the alchemist, Brueghel s... 

No circulating library amasses Religious novels, moral tales, and strictures... 

One of the most famous stories of early Chinese alchemy related the work of Wei Po-Yang. The story was only partly about alchemy, being as much a morality tale about proper behavior. 

The morality tale is an allegorical story whose intention, like that of the fable, is to take a position on an issue. The goal of the morality tale is to offer a life lesson to those who would veer in another direction. The key difference between the morality tale and the fable is the use of human beings rather than animals in the story. 

If your idea lends itself to allegory and seems to serve as a life lesson for a particular group—adolescents, young women, elderly men—the morality tale could be a very useful device. 

As a form, the morality tale seems fresher, more creative, than a more realistic approach. The danger, however, is that your audience may not be receptive to the treatment if it is too simple and is interpreted as being aimed at young children rather than adults. This is the most common problem associated with using the morality tale as a framing device. 

The morality tale offers the widest possibilities for stories. Your story can be as simple as the tale of a property-tax collector and a property owner, or a script about the origins of war, such as Norman McLaren s great short film Neighbours. There are numerous collections of morality tales that can illustrate the form for you. Reading them will help you appreciate the shape of this particular form.2 Elizabethan drama, such as the plays Macbeth and Julius Caesar, is also a good source for morality tales. 

The journey has a broader shape than the morality tale or the fable, but because it is so often used, we include it as a shaping option. 

Whether the idea revolves around life as a journey, or a specific journey, the form offers a wide range of opportunities. Also, as a form it is more open-ended regarding interpretation than the morality tale, fable, or satire. If you... 

In order to articulate a tone, you need to make a number of choices. How close do you want us to get to the events of your story If you want to get us deeply involved, choose events that place the character in intense situations, close to the dramatic core of the story. If, on the other hand, you want us to have a more distant relationship with the events, position the character farther from the dramatic core. In fact, if you want to create a sense of detachment, you should employ irony, to distance us from the story. That distance will allow us to reflect upon the character and what is happening to him or her. This sense of detachment or irony is particularly useful in the morality tale, in the mockumentary, and in the satire. Is it useful to you to interpose yourself so definitely into the story ... 

A second prerequisite for the creation of an archetype is to frame the story in a genre that favors such a use of character. Satire, the fable, and the morality tale all use character in such a way that an archetype is very useful in supporting the core idea. 

The tragic character tends to be presented as a victim of the narrative. In fables, morality tales, and satire, as well as other types of stories, it is useful to have a tragic main character. 

There are many stories that can be framed in terms of a moral tale, but not every story can carry the excessive elements of hyperdrama. Stories that are factual, or too recent in terms of their relationship to a specific historical or cultural event, are difficult to render as hyperdrama. 

This, however, still leaves many options. Stories about children often lend themselves to the moral tale. They also lend themselves to excess and fantasy. A good example here is Peter Brook s Lord of the Flies. Novels such as Orwell s Animal Farm have their filmic equivalent in George Miller s Babe in the City. Stories about animals, such as the above mentioned, are naturals for hyperdrama. So too are stories set as fables. Even a film like Warren Beatty s Heaven Can Wait becomes hyperdrama when issues of birth, rebirth, angels, and Heaven become active elements of the narrative. Finally, stories about mythical figures or periods, such as Vincent Ward s The Navigator, work well as hyperdrama. In these stories, the characters are either archetypal or they are metaphors serving the moral tale that is at the heart of the narrative. 

Moral tales and fables function on a mythic level. In this respect, writers and teachers of scriptwriting who ascribe to Joseph Campbell s ideas about storytelling are right.1 A main character goes on a mythic journey. He or she faces many challenges and setbacks. The journey, once completed, makes... 

Think for a moment of children s fairy tales—the stories of the Brothers Grimm, of Hans Christian Andersen, of noses that grow long when lies are told, of children too innocent or naive not to follow a pied piper—and you have the driving force behind the hyperdrama. The fairy tale is a life lesson, a moral tale wherein the moral is the driving force for the telling of the story. A narrator or storyteller takes us through the cautionary tale. 

There is simplicity in a moral tale. All elements—character, plot, and tone— put the unfolding of a narrative in the service of the moral. Metaphor, exaggeration, unnatural events and characters can all be brought to bear on the moral purpose of the story. Even a filmmaker as grounded in realism as Bergman found in The Seventh Seal (1956), for example, that he had to move away from realism. The moral tale—no man can escape mortality—is his subject, and so death and a plot specifically about the spread of Bubonic Plague, the "Black Death," are his instruments. 

The purpose of the narrative, a moral tale, dictates an imaginative, non-naturalistic treatment of the subject. This is the first observation we can make about hyperdrama and the short film. 

As in the long film, the tone is far from realistic and in fact is quite free—it can be fantastic, or it can be very dark. In both cases, the tone has to make credible events and characters that do not exist in our everyday lives. The presentation of the material should sharpen the passion the author feels regarding the moral tale that underlies the narrative. 

I certainly saw it as [a] fairy tale, a morality tale. Interview, April 1981. 

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