Light as a Fairy Tale: What Makes a Feel-Good Film Feel Good?

Summary: A study reveals the formal characteristics and content types that make those feel-good Film “feel good”.

Source: Max Planck Institute.

“Feel-good films” are sometimes disregarded by film critics as being sentimental and without intellectual merit. However, their popularity with audiences, who search and watch them exactly because of their “feel-good” qualities, tells a more commending story. Now, for the first time, this popular film genre has been examined scientifically.

A new study from the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics reveals that viewers of feel-good films consider them to be prototypical and that factors constitute their feel-good impact.

The study was carried out on around 450 participants from Austria, Germany and the German-speaking regions of Belgium and Switzerland. Their responses indicate romantic comedies as having a very high potential for emotional uplift.

The study’s findings give clues on the content-related and formal characteristics films must have so as for audiences to feel significantly sensible whereas watching them.

Yet in addition to romance and humour, feel-good movies sometimes have dramatic scenes that leave viewers with strong emotional reactions.

Typical of the genre and significantly adding  to its impression of lightness, these choices are frequently set in make-believe environment.

Not least, the mixture of all these components can be considered to be integral of the feel-good film.

The results of this study have simply been revealed within the journal Projections. The essay highlights the real truth that many people watch feel-good movies deliberately to unwind and cheer themselves up.

Several study participants concurred that, despite the possibility of sentimentality, feel-good movies weren’t cheesy, and that they were made technically.

In this respect, the positive use of the genre label by viewers differs considerably from the preponderantly negative perspective brought to it by skilled film critics.