A Contrastive Analysis Of Visual Narratives Between A New Year's Reunion And Gorilla

The meaning of picture books is illustrated by images,or commonly conveyed by images and verbal text,which not only makes children enjoy reading,but also paves the way for their further study.However,compared with foreign classical picture books,the overall creation level of Chinese original picture books need to be further improved.Therefore,through contrastive analysis,the present study is designed to find out the differences and similarities between Chinese original picture books and English picture books,thereby providing guidance for the creation of Chinese producer.The research questions are as follows.1.How are interpersonal meaning,ideational meaning and textual meaning represented through images in A New Year's Reunion and Gorilla?2.What are differences and similarities between A New Year's Reunion and Gorilla from the perspective of visual narratives?In order to make the contrastive study more effective,all the research data are selected from two major awards: Feng Zikai Chinese Children's Picture book Award and the CILIP Kate Greenway Medal,which consist of four Chinese original picture books and four English picture books.However,due to too many images,it is not unfeasible to explore all of them.Therefore,two picture books,A New Year's Reunion and Gorilla are taken as examples,which have the same theme.The present study adopts Painter's the theory of visual narratives,which is the expansion and refinement of Kress & Van Leeuwen's visual grammar.On the basis of this analytical framework,the qualitative and quantitative methods are adopted to contrast them in visual narratives.Initially,drawing on the qualitative method explores how interpersonal meaning,ideational meaning and textual meaning are construed by images.Secondly,in terms of quantitative method,it is used to make a statistical analysis of the frequencies of these three meta-functions to find out the differences and similarities.Through contrastive analysis,the results of the present study can be listed as follows:Firstly,interpersonal meaning is mainly through these choices: focalisation,pathos and affect as well as ambience.The images in Chinese original picture book A New Year's Reunion,are mostly depicted from the perspective of the option of[observe],but the number of [contact] choice is still more than that in Gorilla.At the same time,in the Chinese original picture book,most images are in warm,vibrant colors,and characters are depicted in a generic style to establish relationship between readers and characters.By contrast,the naturalistic style is encoded in Gorilla to depict Characters' drawing,and a contrast of cold and warm colors are used to convey the change of characters' feeling.Secondly,the construction of ideational meaning depends on how the characters describe the relationship,between different events in the visual narrative and the change of circumstantial setting.From the angle of character manifestation,the similarity between these two picture books,is that characters are portrayed by way of the choice [complete].Furthermore,compared with the Chinese picture book A New Year's Reunion,in the picture book Gorilla,it uses most transformation of location and the clothes of the characters to explain the meaning.Thirdly,as to textual meaning,both of two picture books adopt complementary,bound images in meaning-making.Moreover,images are privileged in relation to the verbal text.In general,the creation of picture books depend on cultural differences,the style and personal experience.This study has demonstrated the feasibility of the theory of visual narratives.Meanwhile,through comparative analysis,it is found that the creation of picture books is closely related to the environment,styles and the author's experience.This paper hopes that researchers will pay more attention to picture books and strengthen the analysis of picture books,so as to provide reference for the creation of picture books.