| Lead: 48 | Excite: 58 | Amaze: 17 | Direct: 12 |
Powerful trailer uses a child narrator and animation to introduce a tough subject as seen through the child’s point-of-view. Elements of misdirection are used. At first it seems like a child’s book. Brilliant and frightening.
This trailer could be argued as a level 2 or 3. The animation with voice over makes it is 3 but the animation is so crude to indicate child-like it feels more like a pure voice-over level 2. The animation could be replaced with similar drawings and yield almost the same level of emotional response.
Extras
Trailers by Emma Donoghue
Lead Analysis
| Lead | What starts as a cute children’s cartoon becomes a terrifying story of confinement. |
| Excite [interest] | Expand on the setting, characters and crisis through the child’s eyes. |
| Amaze [hook] | “Outside isn’t real. Room is real.” |
| Direct [directive] | “Room is all there is.” Cover and author. |
Trailer Arc
Publisher Intro
To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world. . . . It’s where he was born, it’s where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.
Room is home to Jack, but to Ma it’s the prison where she has been held for seven years. Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in this eleven-by-eleven-foot space. But with Jack’s curiosity building alongside her own desperation, she knows that Room cannot contain either much longer.
Room is a tale at once shocking, riveting, exhilarating–a story of unconquerable love in harrowing circumstances, and of the diamond-hard bond between a mother and her child.
Author: Emma Donoghue emmadonoghue.com @EDonoghueWriter
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd