Literary theory not being my strongest subject, which way round is it exactly? Are writers now deliberately using that structure to organise their stories, or is it just a vague catch-all into which you can crowbar any movie? Or is it now partially both?

I can’t stand it when people talk about ‘tropes’ in films and television, in particular the website tvtropes.org- it seems like a community-run thought reduction program, a sort of voluntary Newspeak. 

Yet there are certain things that do crop up again and again- Dreamworks characters, “sassy” black women, fat men dancing, three-act structures- and I have to wonder if writers are putting them there deliberately. 

So is this mis-applied literary theory, laziness, or simply necessary to get the suits to fund your project?

I disagree with both this contention and the sentiment put forward by @Captain_Internet:disqus in regards to tropes. 

The literary theory that Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces represents is called Structuralism (and breaks further down into Semiotic literary criticism), as @paraclete_pizza:disqus points out. What it argues is that there is a distinct pattern throughout literature, that art possesses a language and that immersing yourself in literature makes it easier to read and comprehend other literature, much like reading lots of Italian might allow an English-speaker to comprehend more Italian.

In its most “pop culture” form, this turns to tropes: recurring motifs. In literary criticism, tropes are simply considered short-hand, and aren’t defined. The Life/Death/Rebirth deity trope, for instance, is a recurring motif in many religious narratives. TV Tropes itself makes the contention that tropes aren’t bad–they’re simply a way of viewing a structure believed to be inherent in art. The trouble is when people cite TV Tropes’ defined tropes in a dismissive form, as though “well, it’s all been done before, so what?” sense. 

But the argument being pushed forward by structuralism is the idea that, since it’s most definitely been done before, that makes it easier for people to comprehend. Children’s movies follow the same general arc because the target audience is children and it’s far simpler for that group to be presented with the hero/villain dichotomy. Even if the movie hints towards complicated moral grey areas (the hyenas in The Lion King are oppressed!), it never addresses those. 

One thing in defense of Campbell’s ur-myth is that he doesn’t attach value to it. A terrible story has the same structure as a wonderful story. Bella in Twilight goes through the same character arc that Frodo in The Lord of the Rings goes through. But that doesn’t make them the same. Equal content does not translate as equal quality.

In all honesty, from an artist’s perspective, I don’t particularly care for Campbell’s work; it invites lack of innovation and is somewhat soul-crushing. I put it out of mind when I work. But from a critical perspective, any artist who attempts to deflect criticism by mentioning Hero is both unimaginative and an idiot. Structuralism argues that no artist can create without conforming to ur-myth. It’s inherent in all story. Might as well argue that people shouldn’t criticize your writing because you used words. 

When I took an evening playwrighting course, we had some very rudimentary exposure to narrative theory.

What I took away from it isn’t that your story should rigidly adhere to the template, but that you must understand the template so that you can break from it in the right way.

Writing purely by instinct sometimes works, but it can also blow up in your face. Without a solid plan, my writing tends to run out of steam. For others, they need an endgame or else they’d just write forever.

A theoretical story model can be a very helpful tool for self-criticism.

“Structuralism argues that no artist can create without conforming to ur-myth. It’s inherent in all story. Might as well argue that people shouldn’t criticize your writing because you used words.”

I find the uncritical acceptance of that assertion SUPER problematic, and extremely limiting though. It treats as a commonsense assertion something that really needs to be justified a lot more. Saying “Of course every narrative must conform to the ur-myth” seems about as naive and short-sighted as someone ten years ago saying “Of course you can’t play games on a phone!” If the assertion is in any way prophetic, it’s in a self-fulfilling way.

Which is not to say that I adhere to some myth of pure originality or creativity, or don’t acknowledge that, in some way or another, everything it a remix. But there’s a tremendous gulf between the postmodern deconstruction of the idea of the creative genius-artist and the very modern assertion of Campbell-style structuralism.

There are structuralists whose work I find really interesting (especially some of the Formalist proto-structuralists like Bakhtin and Shklovsky). But Campbell’s arguments, in particular, always feel a bit like thin gruel. His shallow connect-the-dots theorizing always struck me as being to cultural theory what shallow New Ageism is to religious systems. It’s largely a collection of easy connections, that is actually more interested in pasting over challenging differences than establishing meaningful similarities.

This framework is actually used at Dreamworks for a much much more obvious reason.
Given the time it takes to produce animation, storyboarding starts even before a script is completed.
So, you’ve got to work on a strong but simple structure fixed in advance, as you can keep all this preparation work. Writers can improve the script, but an extensive rewriting would make the budget explode at this stage of development.

A pre-Community Dan Harmon wasn’t very fond of this method when he worked on Kung Fu Panda:

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/feature-film/kung-fu-panda-writer-vents-5937.html

You can also see that the writer who reported his words and the people who react to the piece are for the most part people with a background or an interest in animation, so they’re torn between calling Harmon for his cluelessness and his lack of experience in animation and admitting that Katzenberg’s rules for productivity at Dreamworks contribute to the blandness of the finished product.

(Harmon also criticized the treatment given to his original script of Monster House in other occasions)