This Week’s Top Storytellers: Chuck Jones, Cory Silverberg and “the best most dangerous” film sequel ever

Each week, Pilot brings you a roundup of the best—and occasionally the worst—examples of brand storytelling in the business. Here are our top five picks this week from around the world:

Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones on creating iconic characters   

Chuck Jones, animator of the Looney Tunes, shares his storytelling insights with us as part of a web series uncovering the work of great filmmakers. Though the show ended in 1969, the legacy of iconic characters like Bugs Bunny, Wile E. Coyote and Marvin the Martian remain impressed upon modern culture. In the video, Jones explores the all-important discipline of character development. Why, for example, is Bugs so laid back? And why, just once, couldn’t that Wile E. Coyote have his day? The answers just might help you build more memorable marketing campaigns.

A children’s book about transgender politics 

“Every body is different. Every body has beauty in it.” This is according to Sex is a Funny Word, Cory Silverberg’s latest children’s book about sexuality, transgender and gender-diverse youth. Silverberg could teach a master class in the power of simplicity, because he has translated a politically charged topic into a visually appealing narrative that an eight-year-old can understand. “One of my favourite things [about the book],” says an eight-year-old from Ottawa, “is that all of the people were different.”

Brainstorming with Groucho

Scriberia’s creative director, Dan Porter, believes your creative process should make you laugh – otherwise, well, you’re just not doing it right. Porter outlines his team’s process for arriving at captivating campaigns by way of outrageous shouldn’t-share-these-with-the-client ideas. To use humour effectively, he says, “you need to know your audience well enough to understand their assumptions, and your subject well enough to evade them.”

Decoding tech jargon

Speaking of humour, Avaya, a communications technology firm, has hired comedy team Tripp and Tyler to appear in a video highlighting the ridiculous heights technology jargon has reached in our society. Avaya uses parody to show both its fluency and ability to decode business and technology jargon – they’ve even designed a virtual “tech-tionary” – but, most of all, they’re pleading with everyone to just please stop the madness. We couldn’t agree more.

The “best and most dangerous” documentary sequel ever

The Act of Killing earned director Joshua Oppenheimer an Oscar nomination and a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” but it’s the documentary’s impact on Indonesian history – or, more specifically, how Indonesians confront and understand that history – that makes it a bona fide example of transformational storytelling. Vanity Fair recently met up with Oppenheimer to discuss his film about Indonesia’s 1965-1966 genocide—and how it helped a government atone for its sins.