Stop Writing "RELATABLE" Characters

Added: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]Welcome to the Pixar Playbook, my new series about identifying patterns and formulas in Pixar movies. Today, I want to talk about how Pixar does relatability, which has some subtle but crucial differences compared to how amateurs like you and me often go about writing it. I think it's about a really important distinction. There's relatability on the one hand, and then there's what I'm going to call universality on the other. That's the main distinction I want to talk about in this video. When I think relatability, I often think about how SNL makes fun of Jennifer Lawrence.

[00:00:25]>> Name a bad habit that YOU JUST CAN'T QUIT. JENNIFER, >> I'M JUST like a snackholic. I mean, I love Pringles. If no one's looking, I'll eat like a whole can. Like, every day is my cheat day. You know what I mean?

[00:00:36]>> Oh. Oh, how annoyingly relatable.

[00:00:39]>> I think an undercurrent of the humor here is that this type of relatability kind of feels empty. It's annoying because Jennifer Lawrence liking snacks, I'm sorry if this shocks you, doesn't actually make her feel very much like one of us. She is a super famous celebrity. She is rich. She is beautiful. She has this glamorous lifestyle that is just too much of a gap to be bridged by snacks. But you compare that to Ellie and Carl falling in love and getting married and starting things together and then before they know it, they're old and they haven't fulfilled any of their dreams and then all of a sudden it's too late. That is life. That is not just relatable. That is like a core experience of everyone's lives.

[00:01:13]There isn't a gapping bridge here. That is getting down to the roots. What ties every human being together. Marlin losing his son and then setting out to search across oceans to find him. Again, that is core. That story of doing anything for family, of braving the impossible for them, that value and that effort, that's something that defines people's whole lives. Toy Story, that feeling that you've been replaced and you're no longer your loved ones favorite. I want to illustrate the difference here. That is not the kind of relatability of Snackaholic. Aside from Snackaholic not being very central to people's lives, is a circumstantial similarity. Lots of people like snacking for a lot of different reasons. The similarity is not necessarily a sign of anything deeper. Toy Story's dilemma of feeling replaced by the newer, shinier toy. That is every older sibling who's had to deal with their parents fawning over the new baby. That is every younger sibling watching their older sibling grow too old to play with them. That's people watching their ex get together with a partner who's more attractive than you or richer than you or cooler than you. That is every veteran employee watching new kids come into the company with their new ideas and their new technology that you can't keep up with.

[00:02:09]That's parents watching their children grow up and lose that special little kid love for you that they used to have.

[00:02:13]That's often children getting a step parent and new step siblings and dealing with that. That's a new kid in school destabilizing your whole social landscape. That's your small business failing to the new big corporate brand next door. It is everything. And not everything everything, but that's what I mean by universal. It doesn't just coincidentally match. It takes an enormous variety of experiences from an enormous variety of lives and it boils it down to a form that we can all see ourselves in. That is what I mean by universality. It's not just that the leaves happen to look similar. It is the root. It is the core. It is life. And to be that, to have that function, unlike snackaholic relatability, it has to be something important. It can't just be something silly. It has to be something that is central to people's lives.

[00:02:51]Hector not wanting to be forgotten when you die. Remy feeling judged based on how the world sees him. Going through puberty and feeling all the emotions of adolescence and turning red and Inside Out. Both Inside Out movies actually are practically built on this phenomenon of universality. It's taking a life that is specifically constructed to feel universal and exploring it through the major feelings that we have all felt and emotional experiences that we have all had. And not just any emotional experiences, but important ones, the ones that shape us and the ones that define a lot of our lives. And I'll say also that Pixar does do the coincidental match and leave of cyber relatability, too. I don't mean to imply that that's not important or that doesn't have a place. It absolutely does, and Pixar does that really well, too. I think I would use the term recognizability more as the focus than relatability the way Pixar does it. They go through a tremendous effort to make the world look and feel familiar with conspicuous things that are like super specific like gestures and mannerisms and tones of voice, specific objects also. These things don't even have to relate to my experience. Like that came with the four tennis balls that Carl uses that reminds me of my grandma's walker. It's just something that I recognized from my world, from my own story that makes this story feel more inviting for engagement.

[00:03:51]But that said, those types of details are not what makes you engage in the first place. All these phenomena help the story work, but what makes you engage is the universality, and Pixar is just so good at that. Hey everyone, subscribe. Sign up for the new newsletter, the newsletter. Thank you as always for supporting the content. We will have new Pixar videos every Wednesday and Sunday this month. So stay tuned for that. I will see you later.