At the end of ‘Spirited Away’ Hayao Miyazaki has said that the heroine and her parents have no memory of the events of the film. In a way, they have had reverse arcs too. In this case they had instant reversions.

For example, the book ‘Neverending Story’ had a full reversing arc. The first part is about the hero discovering the importance of imagination instead of living in the ‘real world’, and the second half is the reverse – he ends rediscovering the value of living in the ‘real world’.

But in the film, they basically cut the full arc in half – the first part of the story became the complete arc for a great movie (“Neverending Story”) and they used the reverse arc for the sequel (“Neverending Story 2”).

I’m not sure it would have worked if they’d put the reverse arc in the first film.

You could argue they did the same ‘use the reverse arc for the sequel’ trick in T2. T2 was about discovering how nothing is fixed and can be changed, but the sequel was about how everything is fixed and can’t be changed!

If they’d been combined into a single film, we would have left the cinema thinking “So nothing the characters did at all actually mattered?” It would have actually ruined the film for me.

Despite all my reservations, though, I’m trying to put a reverse arc in my current WIP – hopefully without that problem.

Mac