The dads who do appear in stories for young children can be pretty narrow characters.
So Johnson's Henry is independent, purposeful and nature-loving, but also -- even in his bear form -- more real as a person, with his complex relationships with his friends and the world around him, than Schnur's narrower character.
But the frame remains narrow, the characters and dialogue too generic to make the tragic story resonate as anything more than a dramatized tolerance lesson.
The film narrows its characters to walking Post-Its of issues, even while, for the most part — thanks to the exertions of the fine cast — they come off as individuals, yet ones whose depth of experience is systematically kept out of the movie.
Rather, "Annihilation" squeezes and narrows its characters and the world at large to fit the tight confines of a plot issuing from the big deal and turns a potentially cosmic vision of metaphysical distortion into an unintentional comedy of self-derision.
At the bottom, there is a narrow thing called character.
The narrow focus on character also obscures the full extent of the two men's failures as policy makers.
He lent his name to Baixa Pombalina, the city's commercial hub, which retains much of its original character: narrow streets, wrought-iron balconies and tiled facades.
Among them, there may be gifted children who simply don't respond to this kind of conditioning, children whose potential can't be expressed through such narrow notions of character and success.
"Daily Show" host Jon Stewart, who helped Colbert along his path by getting him "The Colbert Report" on Comedy Central after he served as a correspondent on Stewart's show, told New York Magazine, "He's done an amazing job with just that very narrow cast of character, but he's got a lot more he can show".
