How Pixar Hooks Audiences Before They Even See a Movie

Storytelling secrets from the masters of the craft

1. The Audience

When beginners write or tell stories, they often assume the audience cares.

The audience doesn’t care. In fact, they couldn’t care less. It’s the storyteller’s job to make them care.

Too often—especially in our low-attention-span era—you start reading, listening, or watching a story, and it doesn’t grab you. It doesn’t hook you. It doesn’t compel you to keep reading, listening, or watching.

That’s what happens when a story doesn’t have hooks.

2. Hooks

You’ll stay with a story if it makes a promise to deliver something you want, which is to feel something, make you laugh, or answer a question.

That promise is called a hook.

If you’re a beginner struggling to hook people with your stories, learn from the best in the business.

3. Pixar

Pixar makes the promise in three key ways before the story even starts:

1. The title of the movie — Whether Finding Nemo, WALL-E, or The Incredibles, Pixar’s titles create intrigue, interest and curiosity.

2. The images on the poster or other marketing — with Monsters, Inc., for example, we see cute, fuzzy, happy monsters. With Up, we see the impossible image of a house carried away by balloons. These images, crafted with well-thought-out color schemes meant to manipulate the viewer emotionally, create even more intrigue, interest, and curiosity.

3. The Pixar brand — this is their most powerful pre-story hook. Their track record promises we’ll be entertained and moved, and it creates the maximum amount of intrigue, interest, and curiosity.

Once the movie starts, Pixar keeps hooking you. Every Pixar movie introduces one or more of four new hooks in the first eight seconds of a movie.

Check back tomorrow for a list of those and how they work.