No Talking

Sometimes saying nothing at all is more powerful than dialogue. I often find dialogue-free moments in movies more effective than those with speech. I believe it’s also more creative, as the filmmaker has to trust the visuals and acting to convey the emotion in the scene. Take Frédéric Back’s animated short film, Tout rien, for instance. There’s not a word spoken throughout the whole film, and it leans entirely on the visuals to portray the story that’s being told. Tout rien is a great example of a dialogue-free movie that is made well. 

No-dialogue can greatly enhance the emotion depicted in a film, and Pixar’s WALL-E is another quality example. There’s almost no speech in the whole first half of the movie, and there’s no need for it. The sentiments are beautifully expressed through the actions of a trash-compacting robot. Pixar has been successful in conveying emotions without words in their short films as well, like Partly Cloudy, La Luna, and many of their other shorts. No-dialogue can also contribute to the movie in a humorous way, like Aardman's Shaun the Sheep. Throughout the entire movie, a character never utters dialogue, unless you count an occasional “baaa.” Aardman’s filmmakers made the correct choice in keeping the movie dialogue-free, and I think the lack of speech makes the movie much better than it would have been with verbal communication. Often times the best way to show humor or emotion in a movie is not saying anything at all.