10 storytelling tips from 10 years at Disney
And how to apply them to your work in social media marketing.
Today’s newsletter is a guest essay from Jonathan Hurwitz, an Emmy and WGA Award-nominated writer and creative consultant based in New York. He brings a unique perspective to the world of social: he spent 10 years writing at Disney and has also spent time at agencies like Day One. Inspired by Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling, Hurwitz shares how to apply his learnings working at Disney to social media marketing. - Rachel
I fell in love with stories when I was four. My mom put me in Spider-Man pajamas, and just like that, my two great loves were born: superheroes and animation. As I got older, I dreamed of working at Pixar. After four internship rejections, I finally landed a Pixar internship during my senior year of college, which led to two blissful years of full-time employment with my dream company.
Pixar was the beginning of a 10-year journey working for Disney. After Pixar, I moved to Los Angeles to work in development for Disney Junior, followed by work as a writer on a handful of Disney shows for five years. I had the opportunity to help write the first openly gay character on Disney Channel (shout out to Cyrus Goodman from Andi Mack!), in addition to the infamously canceled reboot of Lizzie McGuire. (For full thoughts on that one, I defer you to my TikTok.)
A pandemic and a writer’s strike has made TV writing a difficult career to sustain, so I’ve spent the last five years supplementing freelance writing work with social media marketing roles. I spent a few years working as a Senior Creative Strategist at Day One Agency, and while there, I gave a presentation to the company with an objectively long title: “10 Things I Learned About Storytelling From 10 Years at Disney.” The goal was to share some of the storytelling nuggets I picked up from my decade at Disney that apply to the work we do in social media marketing.
What lies below is an edited version of that presentation. Down the rabbit hole we go!
If you don’t have stakes, you don’t have a story.
Pixar director Andrew Stanton offers a great example of how stakes work:
If the main character of a story gets stuck in an elevator, we might kind of care. That’s a little scary, right?
If the main character who’s claustrophobic gets stuck in an elevator, we might care even more.
If the main character who’s claustrophobic who we also care about gets stuck in an elevator, then we really care.
In other words: One good way to add stakes to a story is to make the audience care about the characters they’re watching.
Social Media Application: Make us care about the talent you’re casting in your content. Who are they? How did they get to where they are today? What do they want/need?
Social content from Chopova Lowena and other fashion brands at London Fashion Week like Balenciaga, Hugo Boss, and Miu Miu featured real “insiders”—editors, stylists, even the creative director’s mom—instead of traditional models. Similarly, nurse uniform supplier FIGS cast real nurses in a recent campaign to celebrate National Nurses Week.
This strategy adds real stakes: these aren’t anonymous faces we’re watching—they’re people we know, or feel like we know. It’s specific, credible, and compelling. Audiences inherently care about real individuals with real-world stories, which ultimately connects us to these brands on an emotional level.
Shapes can elicit feelings.
The iconic opening sequence of Pixar’s Up has no dialogue, so the storyboard artists only had visuals to make you feel something. They wanted Ellie to come across as sweet and open, so they gave her face a very circular shape. In contrast, they wanted Carl to be very stable and sturdy and stubborn, so they made his face very square. So, as I quickly learned, a circle can suggest openness, and a square can suggest stability/stubbornness.
Social Media Application: We often only have a still image or a few seconds of video to grab people, so it’s helpful to keep visual elements like shape and lighting in our strategy toolbox. For example, this campaign video from Glossier invites people in through creamy pastels, relaxing audio, and fluid movements. What visual and auditory tools are in your brand’s toolbox?
You can’t get surprise without expectation. That’s the core of drama.
Thinking of examples for this brings me back to theater. Why? Playwrights famously use a lot of techniques to increase the thirst for what’s to come. In The Cherry Orchard, someone fiddles with a gun early on in the play, so the audience expectation is that there’ll be a shooting before the play ends (hello, “Chekhov’s gun”). In Waiting For Godot, the two main characters literally spend the whole play waiting for Godot to arrive.
Social Media Application: Teasing what’s to come can stop people in their scrolls, e.g. the TikTok videos with text that reads, “Wait until the end.” Every time I see these videos, I immediately obey, and do, in fact, wait until the end. (And hopefully if you make them wait, you’re able to offer a satisfying ending!) Another way to immediately grab viewers’ attention is to start your video with a short clip from the end of your video. This “teaser” technique encourages viewers to watch the entire video to see how you reached the ending you’ve just teased.
The conflict is the story.
One of my Pixar bosses explained conflict to me in a way that I still think about today, which is in terms of WANTS vs. NEEDS. So the thing a character WANTS is almost always something external/physical.
In Toy Story, Woody WANTS to be Andy’s favorite toy.
But the thing a character NEEDS is the truth.
In Toy Story, Woody NEEDS to learn how to share Andy’s love.
And it’s that tension between WANTS and NEEDS that fuels a movie.
Social Media Application: No conflict/tension → No story → It’s going to be tough to stop people in their scrolls.
HomeGoods employed actress Jillian Bell to star in a scripted short-form series called “Home Sweet HomeGoods.” Jillian, playing herself, moves into a HomeGoods store and desperately WANTS to make it feel like a home, but she NEEDS to confront the reality that it’s actually a store in which people are actively shopping. There’s a tension between what she wants and what she needs, and it ultimately creates a very funny series that also serves as an engaging ad for HomeGoods.
TV has the ability to evolve over time, whereas movies just are.
TV has the ability to show a life being lived over an extended period of time, whereas movies can capture a life lived in 90 minutes. In other words, TV is open-ended, while movies are more finite products.
Social Media Application: Think of your brand’s social media presence as an ongoing TV series—each post is like an episode that builds character, tone, and relationship with your audience over time. People tune in regularly, come to expect certain themes, and form an emotional connection.
By contrast, your big campaign moments—product launches, seasonal pushes, tentpole events—are like blockbuster movies. They have a clear beginning and end, with heightened stakes, more polished visuals, and often a bigger marketing budget. Take Spotify Wrapped for example—it drops once a year like a major premiere, and everyone talks about it for a limited time. Or Nike’s campaigns around the Olympics—cinematic, emotional, and tightly timed.
Together, your “TV show” keeps your audience engaged day-to-day, while your “movies” give them something to look forward to and talk about in a bigger cultural moment.
Comedy = Truth + Specificity
I’d need a separate Substack to unpack all of the comedy in Pixar’s movies, but there’s a moment in Inside Out that serves as a good example of this working definition of good comedy as truth plus specificity.
We’re inside the dad’s head, and his emotions scramble to respond to a casual question from his wife at the dinner table. One of the dad’s inner voices panics, “Uh oh, she’s looking at us,” and another one screams: “Just play it cool, man. Play it cool!” This is funny because it’s both true and specific—most couples have surely experienced one partner talking while the other totally zones out.
Social Media Application: It’s hard to tell people how to be funny, but keep in mind when producing content that it helps to be as true and as specific as possible. Comedy that resonates often comes from small, oddly familiar details—those moments where your audience thinks, “Wait, that’s me!” The more precisely you can tap into a shared experience, the more likely it is to spark connection—and, in turn, interest in your brand.
This reminds me of Liquid Death’s comedic ad for the Pit Diaper, “an innovative new solution to help fans like you relieve themselves in the safety of the mosh pit.”
The ad speaks to a universal truth (concert venue bathrooms are gross) and uses specific details to rationalize and describe their “product”. And even if you haven’t experienced having to go to the bathroom while in a mosh pit, most of us can relate to the stressful experience of having to go to the bathroom while out in public.
There are no new stories. True or false?
I have an annoying answer: It’s kind of both. So many stories you know and love were inspired by other stories. Jaws, for example, has been tied to the Ancient Greek myth of the Mina-tore. And of course there are countless movies based on books.
Social Media Application: I think it’s perfectly fine to look to social for inspiration and see what kind of content other brands are producing, but the best way to make your brand’s story feel new is to bring your brand’s unique POV to it. Think of your brand as one of one—what stories can you tell that no other brand can?
For a good example of riffing on a popular format, look no further than the Mohawk Chevrolet TikTok account. The dealership launched a weekly TikTok mini-series mirroring The Office, starring their own staff in loosely scripted workplace scenarios. (Think duck pranks and struggles to park a Silverado.) The format may be familiar, but the “set” and “characters” are ownable to their brand.
Theme drives plot and story.
Meg LeFauve, the writer of Inside Out and Inside Out 2, says that you should be able to summarize the theme of a TV show or movie in one word. And when you say that word, you should feel it in your gut, because themes should be emotional and personal.
For example, the theme of Finding Nemo is LOSS. Spider-Man is RESPONSIBILITY. Lord of the Rings is SACRIFICE. Psycho is ISOLATION.
Social Media Application: Social accounts can have themes, too—or “vibes,” if you will. Meg Stalter’s TikTok has a FUNNY vibe. Wisdom Kaye is giving you COOL. So if you follow an account you really love, see if you can identify what the vibe is that’s so appealing to you. Now do this for your brand’s social accounts. What vibe are they giving?
Story structure is key.
Story structure refers to the order of events in a story to achieve maximum drama and emotion.
A great example comes from one of my favorite days at Pixar when I got to see the original animation reels for Finding Nemo. In the opening of the movie (spoiler alert incoming!), Marlin’s (Nemo’s dad) wife is killed by a barracuda, who also injures his only son, Nemo.
In the original reels, this backstory was woven throughout the entire movie, but Pixar employees who gave feedback on this first cut said they didn’t really like Marlin as they were watching the movie. The creative team decided to cut all the flashbacks and move them to the beginning of the movie, as they are now with the barracuda killing the wife and hurting Nemo. So now, right from the beginning, you understand Marlin’s emotional journey very clearly. We know he has to protect Nemo because his wife was killed and Nemo was hurt in the barracuda attack.
Social Media Application: Most TV shows and movies follow the same traditional structure, but the ones that don’t follow the traditional structure are often the ones that stand out to me amid the sea of sameness (I’m looking at you, Fleabag and Skins). In other words, understand the story rules…and then break them!
Some of the best stories come “full circle.”
The beginning of a TV show or movie is the question mark, and the end of the show or movie is the period.
An interesting exercise I once did in a writing class was to pull a still image from the beginning of a movie and one from the end of the movie. If it’s a good movie, you should be able to understand the journey from beginning to end just by looking at those stills. Nemo starts with Marlin holding the damaged Nemo egg, incredibly terrified to let him go. Then at the end, Marlin learns how to let Nemo go. It’s a beautiful journey!
Social Media Application: “Full Circle” moments can be inherently emotional and satisfying for viewers.
Duolingo has spent the last four years welcoming their followers into the raucous world of Duo. We’ve been right by his side as he’s cheekily roped in pop culture and developed an obsession with Dua Lipa…only to witness his shocking death on February 11, 2025. This headline covering the campaign sums up my full circle point here: Duolingo died as he lived: unhinged. According to Zaria Parvez, Duolingo’s Global Social Media Manager, the death campaign garnered 1.7 billion owned social impressions and became Duolingo’s most successful campaign to date.
And finally, let’s bring it back to the beginning, with me as a four-year-old dressed in Spider-Man pajamas. Later, at age 32, I got to write two episodes of an animated Marvel Spider-Man show for four-year-olds that’s out now on Disney+. If that’s not a full circle moment, I don’t know what is.
That’s all, folks!
Thank you to Jonathan for today’s guest essay! See you all on Tuesday. In the meantime, check out the Link in Bio Job Board. There are lots of great new jobs from Chipotle, New York Philharmonic, L.A. Taco, and more.
I've been diving deep into more comedy narrative writing, for long form and short form. This is super helpful!
Loved the 'wait till the end' insights -- definitely gonna try it out