Hollywood plots are boring

In the past two weeks I have watched one of the saddest movies I have ever seen:

And one of the happiest:

And I loved them both! They're both titles from my new favorite, Studio Ghibli, a Japanese animation film studio.

Now, the fact that I loved two very different films—one is about two war orphans trying to survive a food shortage in Japan, the other is about a magic goldfish—got me thinking. Normally it's a rare event that I truly like a film, let alone love one. So what's different about these two?

The answer is that they tell stories in ways that I'm not used to—they tell stories in a non-Western way. After 25 years of living in the United States and Great Britain, I'm officially burned out on Western storytelling in films. Or more accurately, I'm burned out on American and British films. The predictability. The cliches—the stripper with a heart of gold, the tired old athlete who gives it one more shot, the teacher who inspires inner-city kids, the mismatched couple who hate each other at first but inevitably fall in love—yawn. The same goes for most American sitcoms: gender stereotypes followed by ethnicity stereotypes followed by sexual orientation stereotypes followed by yawn, yawn, yawn. I've seen it all before. I'm bored.

What I like about foreign films is that they tend to tell stories if not in a less formulaic way, then at least with formulas that I'm not familiar with. When I watch these Japanese animated films, I watch them having no idea what is going to happen next. Even Ponyo, which is based on Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid," surprised me with its originality; its utterly unique take on a familiar story. The delight of being surprised, of truly not knowing what will happen next, is what enables me to sit through a film.

I guess that's why I've been finding more and more inspiration in foreign and independent films over the past couple of years. I figure that if I can learn to tell stories in an unexpected, unpredictable way, then they will be more fun to read, and more fun to write as well.

So, what do you think? What makes a story—whether it's a a book, a film, a play, or whatever—interesting for you? What keeps you reading/watching/listening?