‘Wall E”, etc talks about the importance of stories.

“Stories affirm who we are. We all want affirmations that our lives have meaning. And nothing does a greater affirmation than when we connect through stories. It can cross the barriers of time, past, present and future, and allow us to experience the similarities between ourselves and through others, real and imagined,” says Andrew Stanton, the filmmaker who made and wrote great movies like “Finding Nemo”, “Toy Story” and “Wall E”, among others. This filmmaker who has more than proven his worth says that a strong beginning to a story holds promise, “A well told promise is like a pebble being pulled back in a slingshot and propels you forward through the story to the end. Storytelling is like joke telling. It’s knowing your punchline, your ending, knowing that everything you’re saying, from the first sentence to the last, is leading to a singular goal, and ideally confirming some truth that deepens our understanding of who we are as human beings. We all love stories. We’re born for them.”
Stanton says the best stories are those through which the audience also works, “…the audience actually wants to work for their meal. They just don’t want to know that they're doing that. That’s your job as a storyteller, is to hide the fact that you’re making them work for their meal. We’re born problem solvers. We’re compelled to deduce and to deduct, because that’s what we do in real life. It’s this well-organized absence of information that draws us in. There’s a reason that we're all attracted to an infant or a puppy. It’s not just that they’re cute; it’s because they can't completely express what they're thinking and what their intentions are. And it’s like a magnet. We can’t stop ourselves from wanting to complete the sentence and fill it in… I first started really understanding this storytelling device when I was writing with Bob Peterson on ‘Finding Nemo’. And we would call this the unifying theory of two plus two. Make the audience put things together. Don’t give them four, give them two plus two. The elements you provide and the order you place them in are crucial to whether you succeed or fail at engaging the audience…It’s the invisible application that holds our attention to story…stories are not a widget, they aren’t exact. Stories are inevitable, if they’re good, but they're not predictable.”
Stanton mentions two important ingredients to constructing a story. The first, “When you're telling a story, have you constructed anticipation? In the short-term, have you made me want to know what will happen next? But more importantly, have you made me want to know how it will all conclude in the long-term? Have you constructed honest conflicts with truth that creates doubt in what the outcome might be? An example would be in ‘Finding Nemo’, in the short tension, you were always worried, would Dory’s short-term memory make her forget whatever she was being told by Marlin. But under that was this global tension of will we ever find Nemo in this huge, vast ocean?”
Take the example of Woody in Toy Story where Stanton says he realized the story teller has to like his or her character, but,“…how do you make a selfish character likable? We realized, you can make him kind, generous, funny, considerate, as long as one condition is met for him, is that he stays the top toy. And that’s what it really is, is that we all live life conditionally. We’re all willing to play by the rules and follow things along, as long as certain conditions are met.”
The essence of story telling, according to Stanton is, “As parents, you're always learning who your children are. They’re learning who they are. And you’re still learning who you are. So we're all learning all the time. And that's why change is fundamental in story. If things go static, stories die, because life is never static.”
A good story, he emphasizes should create wonder and have a strong theme running through it, best done when drawn from what the teller knows.