How you tell a story is far more important than what the story is about. There is of course no need for talking if you've got nothing to say, but if you don't know how to tell your story, no one's gonna listen.

YOU CAN MAKE AN ANIMATED MOVIE FROM JUST AN IDEA.
Here is a very nice example, "Feet of Song" by Erica Russell

 

But if you want to make an engaging movie you must have a story.And that's not that big a difference between animation and regular movies. It is about identification, empathy forward movement. The biggest difference is that the deal with the audience contains a fantastic component - anything can happen, and it's no wonder it does. Feature films have begun approaching animation with new digital possibilities.

A bouncing ball may be the beginning of a story. If someone takes a step in a walkcycle, there may be a banana peel ahead and things will happen.

Everyone has a story to tell. Either one comes home and tell the family that the coffee machine at work was broken just as you stopped at its last pace, or you come home and tell them that you were abducted by aliens and moved to a parallel universe where you were worshipped as a god.

But what you're telling is subordinate to how to tell it.
Hollywood is the champion of this. You can sit and watch a whole feature and think that something is important, but when the movie is finished, it often appears that there was nothing to even remember. Sometimes it happens when you're watching a movie, you think is good and after a while you notice that you have seen it before but did not remember that.
It is of some importance that you have something to say, though.

WE NEED A CONFLICT!
Living in a happy marriage or relationship is wonderful. But watching a film about a right through happy situation would be extremely boring. We need a threat to this choking happiness. It could be a third person, it could be an illness, economic problems, an accident, a river, a mountain, a war... anything to make the happiness vulnerable. We want to see the cast act accordingly. This would make it interesting to watch. If the order is somehow restored in the end we'll love the film.

SNOW WHITE
When the Disney company was going to make snow white, it was calculated with efforts corresponding to 10 Silly Symphonies......

 

.....resource-oriented, animational, storytelling and not least economically. Show "Three Little Pigs" It turned out to be completely wrong. They could not tell the Snow White story as they did with the short films. Silly Symphonies consisted mostly of decorative, gags-filled and simple stories. Snow White needed to be told as a standard feature film in three acts, like a drama. The human characters Snow White, Queen and Prince could not be animated with regular squash and stretch, regular timing. They simply could not look like characters in a cartoon. It had to do with credibility and identification. They had to rotoscope them - that is, to film live actors and draw them frame by frame.

This page is under construction and I'll get back to it.