The Naked Gun series.
The Outsiders began and ended with a voice-over. Not really narration, but it bookended the film nicely.
Actually, Robert McKee’s policy was that you should never use voiceover, not narration.
Actually, McKee calls it “voice-over narration,” lumping the terms together.
He’s not dead-set against it, especially if it does things that can’t be done via visuals or dialogue. He singles out Woody Allen as someone who does it well, and says, “His narration offers wit, ironies, and insights that can’t be done any other way.”
However, he also whips out the old “show, don’t tell” rule, and says, “Do not put [the audience] on your knee as if they were children and ‘explain’ life, for the misuse and overuse of narration is not only slack, it’s patronizing.” (As an example of this patronizing tendency, I would offer The Thin Red Line, which has incessant voiceovers from the main characters ruminating over What It All Means in … slow … ponderous … tones.)
I think one key to successful narration is a liberal use of irony: i.e. the narration and the visuals need to be telling you subtly (or wildly) different things. Then the audience gets pleasure from the ironic contrasts between the two. For example, in A Christmas Story you’ll often have Jean Shepard’s mock-heroic narration about The Grand Quest for the BB Gun contrasting with visuals showing the mundane reality of being a kid.
If the narration and the visuals are telling you the same thing, well, one of them is probably redundant.
The Creeping Terror, of course. Narrated because they either lost or couldn’t afford the sound track.
Dark City and The Dark Crystal are notorious for narrations that were unnecessary and also gave the plot away.
American Splendor uses narration brilliantly.
War of the Worlds
High Fidelity is narrated off and on, marvelously.
My favorite recent example of a film that uses narration well is The Royal Tenenbaums. One of its themes is the slippery nature of nostalgic reminiscence; the voice-over (along with the chapter headings) provide a warm and fuzzy feeling of looking back at life, just as in many inferior and unapologetically sentimental films, but some very slight differences between what is being said and what is being shown provide (for me, at least) a major key to unlocking the film’s true depth.
Tom Jones (1963)
Whale Rider, an indie released last summer, has some narration bits, mostly at the start and end.
Okay. 'Splain please the difference between “narration” and “voice over”. I thought they were usually the same* for film fiction but also different from “talk to the camera” bits like Cusack in High Fidelity.
*Some voice overs are not narration because they really aren’t telling you about the story. E.g., “We had a lot of fun making this film, hope you enjoyed it too.”
The best narrated movie of all : Badlands read the script if you can.
And the very clever About A Boy with 2 narrators and done perfectly.