Wolves or Wookiees, take your pick

Two movies that have made quite a stir - Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and Wolf Totem - have surprisingly much in common. Aside from being hits that are beautiful to look at and take viewers into strange, undiscovered places, the two tales also intersect in a powerful world of myth.

Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) was the world's great scholar of mythology - his writings actually inspired George Lucas, the man behind the Star Wars franchise.

Campbell basically collected all of the world's myths from every culture and found similar plots and storylines they all shared. The common denominators, he argued in his seminal work The Hero With a Thousand Faces, were more than random coincidence.