Little Red Riding Hood was a story created and told for children, but it wasn’t just a story meant to entertain. It was a story created at least partially as a warning for children. Hansel and Gretel’s actions weren’t that of convenient storytelling—they’re tied to dramatic, important historical context. Their actions give us insight into what life was truly like when the stories were first told. And because of that intrinsic tradition of human storytelling, we should immediately dispense with the idea that our stories are exclusively entertainment.

If we accept this (and the point of this entire blog is to convince you of that) our perceptions of virtually every detail of story, no matter how trivial, become utterly important. We’re no longer passively enjoying a story; we’re relating, we’re empathizing and at the end of the day we are learning something about ourselves. Something so deeply ingrained that we often can’t even see it.

I anticipate a cynical reaction to my analysis of Toy Story. You might think that I’m being disingenuous to suggest that something worth discussing happens in the film. But it couldn’t be more to the contrary. As we grow older, the films that we cherished as children resonate more powerfully than they did when we first watched them. Think back to the fireside stories and warnings of Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood.

From this standpoint, dissecting the most base and most unassuming of cinema’s cultural contributions (the contributions to our children) we can see the art form most clearly and can identify the truth that film is more than aesthetic.