The author proposes tools to justify such a transformation and analyzes some twenty works from the specific angle of the character arc.

Among these are: The Apartment, Casablanca, A Christmas Carol, Groundhog Day, The Lives of Others, Oedipus Rex, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, One Thousand and One Nights, Schindler’s List, The Taming of the Shrew, and Toy Story.

In his analysis of the beginning of Tootsie, for example, Yves Lavandier points out that contrary to many other analyses, the protagonist (Dustin Hoffman) is not actually characterized as a chauvinist who needs to learn to respect women.

In Lavandier’s view, narrative is the combination, at different scales, of thousands of objective-obstacle pairings and of their resulting mechanisms: the protagonist, the inciting incident, the three-act structure, the climax, etc.

"[2] Ray Morton of ScriptMag also praised the English translation of the book, saying "it does an excellent job of laying out the core and the advanced concepts of dramatic storytelling and how they apply to telling tales on the screen.