Showing posts with label moral. Show all posts
Showing posts with label moral. Show all posts

Monday, July 23, 2012

The Crane Returns a Kindness (鶴の恩返し)


He peeped!
A one-minute story…
A man pulls an arrow out of an injured crane’s wing.
A woman appears at his house and begins living with him.
They are poor, the woman asks the man to make a loom.
She closes the door, saying, “Don’t look while I am working.”
She produces cloth, the man sells it, they become wealthy.
One day the man peeps in the room.
He sees a crane making cloth with feathers.
She sees him looking, and says, “You have seen my true form, I cannot stay here,” and flies away.
__________
Voice-over
Sometimes, there isn’t time to tell a story slowly. Fidgeting starts. Give yourself one minute and deliver in the present tense. Jump cuts. No transitions. No diversions. Pure plot.

Old stories were often used for instructing.
They were a vehicle for a precept: a rule, command, order.
Or, more subtly, a moral: a message, meaning, point.

Interpretations for The Crane may vary:
Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth?
In a modern context, Respect privacy?

“Privacy and security are those things you give up when you show the world what makes you extraordinary.” Margaret Cho
Or as Marshall McLuhan viewed it: “Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.”
...

Saturday, February 14, 2009

A rolling stone gathers moss

Sindbad tells the Roc to let him down near the men on the mountain.

 ...

Sindbad: Over there, near the men who've come to collect the diamonds.

Roc: But you have diamonds.

Sindbad: Sure. But I don’t know the way home. The men waiting, they know the way.

Roc: OK, so you give them some diamonds and they tell you the way.

Sindbad: Good thinking. But I go home, I have no diamonds, everyone laughs, and they say a rolling stone gathers no moss.

Roc: Give the men only half the diamonds.

____________________

Voice-over

Sindbad, eternal rolling stone, rewrites the proverb. A rolling stone gathers no moss? A rolling stone CAN gather moss. Squirrel a bit away on your travels. Fly Roc Air.  RocAir.com.

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Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Moral of the story

Emi and Mai have been given the task of thinking of a story with a moral in communication class.

...

Emi: The news always has good stories.


Mai: That one, that one about the baby dropped from the third floor.


Emi: I know, and it landed in the net and didn’t cry, like nothing had happened.


Mai: Weak moral though.


Emi. Ignorance is bliss?


Mai: Maybe. How about the one about the twenty elderly people caught in a bus in a flood.


Emi: They all drowned?


Mai: They cut up the curtains and made a rope and climbed out onto the roof.


Emi: Necessity is the mother of invention?


Mai: That’ll do.

_____________

Voiceover

For a ready-made moral, try attaching a proverb to a story. Quick and easy.

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