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Storytelling Lessons from Christmas Classic Home Alone

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I didn’t want to. I thought I would be wise enough to skip it and better spend the 103 minutes this year. But I watched Home Alone this Christmas and enjoyed all the quotes, predictable jokes and the happy ending. Again.

The fact that the movie is still a must see for millions around the world during Christmas, 24 years on from its debut in 1990, proves the power of the movie. And it’s not just my generation, who grew up with the movie, that are attracted by the story. Older and younger generations are equally captivated by the heart-warming story of the McCallister family. We can easily claim that Home Alone is one of the best Christmas movies of all time. But what is it that makes this story so evergreen? What can we learn from it as marketers?

Storytelling is about fairy tales

Real storytelling to me is totally different from the strategies around Facebook posts, Instagram photos and Tweets we see everyday. Storytelling is what I learnt from when my grandmother reading to me when I was a little kid. She had all the Grimm and Tolkien books, and the Dutch masterpieces from Annie M.G. Schmidt. And I can still enjoy the (folkloric) fantasy in these kinds of books and drawings when I read these books with my little nephews.

As with the above examples, Home Alone is a fairy tale. Writer John Hughes provides the main character, Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin), with ‘faeri’, as Tolkien would put it. Hughes makes Kevin a unique brave young kid with a lot of guts, creativity and luck. Which allows that the youngest of this family, by a miracle, get through three days ‘Home Alone’. If this isn’t enough of a challenge for an eight-year-old boy, two burglars – Harry and Marv – are thrown into the mix to try to rob his house on Christmas Eve.

A “fairy-story” is one which touches on or uses Faerie, whatever its own main purpose may be: satire, adventure, morality, fantasy. Faerie itself may perhaps most nearly be translated by Magic — but it is magic of a peculiar mood and power, at the furthest pole from the vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific, magician. There is one proviso: if there is any satire present in the tale, one thing must not be made fun of, the magic itself. That must in that story be taken seriously, neither laughed at nor explained away.
J.R.R. Tolkien on Fairy Tales

As we grow up, we retain the desire to believe in the visible or invisible extra strengths that a character has. It is this power that makes us want to be Kevin McCallister, or even Karate Kid, as young boys. But it’s the same power that makes us want to cook the most impossible recipes at Christmas after watching Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsey or Nigella Lawson doing the same thing with (almost unrealistic) great ease. Embracing faeri when creating characters in your brand storytelling campaign can be very powerful.

Mind the pitfall

At the same time this faeri can be a pitfall. Everyday we see brands greatly exaggerating their ‘powers’. Every once in a while this backfires when critical consumers share their opinions and experiences online. For example when the FedEx slogan ‘special delivery’ gets a whole new meaning with this deliveryman throwing and breaking a computer monitor.

Click here to view the embedded video.

 

What makes fairy tales so powerful is that they don’t get debunked. Writers such as Tolkien and C.S. Lewis created everlasting stories that we know can’t be true, but that we still want to believe in.

Find a balance between fairy tale and real life

The reason that Home Alone is still popular is because it bears so much resemblance with stories such as those of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Just like these older stories, the adventures of Kevin are presented as wholly credible.

Even when the story wouldn’t make any sense in 2014; a child couldn’t end up home alone without any possibilities of contacting parents, friends or any other relatives nowadays. The beauty of the story and the faeri make you want to believe it while at the same time tell yourself it can’t be true.

In the creative industry we are always looking for that balance between the beautiful story that is filled with fantasy and the true power of a brand or product. That is why the greatest challenge of storytelling is that of creating a faeri that at the same time is realistic and credible. A great example is Red Bull in that case. Creating a faeri with the energy drink ‘giving you wings’. But at the same time the faeri is being made credible with the support of extreme sports and even a jump from the atmosphere.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Home Alone is a modern fairy tale with a great balance between ‘make-believe’ and a realistic story. I’ll leave it up to the movie experts in this world to discuss what it is that maintains this balance is kept so well. It might be the original angle for a Christmas story, the excellent way that we see the movie through Kevin’s wide-eyed viewpoint or the talented teen star Macaulay Culkin. But In my opinion Home Alone is one of the best examples of a modern fairy tale that shows us the power of storytelling when done right.

 

Merry Christmas, ya filthy animal… and a Happy New Year

 

 

 

 


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