A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Animated Short Film

With the development of digital technology and the extensive use of the media,multimodality has gradually become an important and popular means of daily communication,and people have more and more frequent contact with a variety of semiotic modes.In this diversified society,people are tending to face not just textual information but a synthetic one with a combination of images,sounds,and so on.The way of information transmission has turned from a single text to a multimodal discourse with multiple semiotic modes.Thus the related theory is proposed and developed.For this reason,scholars and researchers have extended textual analysis on the basis of Halliday's systemic functional linguistics to other kinds of discourses except for the textual discourse,thus in this way,multimodal discourse analysis theory has emergedsince 1990s.The previous researches at home and abroad mainly focus on theoretical research and static discourse studies,while there are few studies on the interaction of semiotic resources in dynamic multimodal discourse.Besides,the main types of studied dynamic discourse are advertising discourse andfilmic discourse,and there are few researches on animated short films.As one of discourse genres,the animated short film hasits obvious and typical characteristics of dynamic multimodal discourse.The animated film of China has a long history,while in recent years,the development of the animation industry has not been optimistic,and some issues are exposed,which should not be underestimated.For example,the creation of mainstream animation in China is often quite the same,which lacks creativity;the main characters' image are apt to be naive,which lacks flesh and blood;the content of story tends to preach others and lack of interest.Thus,how does an outstanding master create an animated short film with the knowledge of multimodality?It is worth thinking and exploring.Many scholars begin to study the newly raised framework of visual narration,while most of the domestic scholars still merely base their studies on the framework of visual grammar proposed by Kress&van Leeuwen in 1996 to explore different semiotic modes in the construction of representational,interactive and compositional meaning.Above all,with the aid of the video analysis software ELAN 5.0,this study selects the animated short film The Dam Keeper to carry out descriptive dynamic multimodal discourse analysis on the basis of systemic functional grammar and visual grammar and according to the proposed framework adapted from the framework of visual narration(2012)and Zhang Delu's synthetic theoretical framework of multimodal discourse analysis(2009).This paper uses qualitative and quantitative research methods to study the animated short film The Dam Keeper.First,from the contextual level,the author analyzes the cultural context and situational context that affect its multimodal semiotic selective system.Secondly,from the perspective of meaning,the author analyzes how semiotic resources such as visual images and background sound construct the ideational meaning,interpersonal meaning,and textual meanings in this dynamic multimodal discourse.Then,at the level of expression,the use of different types of multimodal semiotic modes in the animated short film The Dam Keeper is explored.Finally,a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between the various semiotic modes in the animated short film and its impact on the entire discourse is illustrated.The research draws the following conclusions:the cultural level is the key level of multimodal communication,and communication is subject to the level of context.The context actually offers an environment for this brief story and affects the semantic meaning;the content level involves ideational,interpersonal and textual meaning constrained by cultural and contextual level.Ideational meaning involves the relations of the represented participants in the short film from the network of Character Attribution,Inter-event Relations and Inter-circumstance Relations.When analyzing these frameworks,several results can be obtained.For example,the metonymic manifestation is used more frequently than the complete manifestation,which can attract viewers with great interest and leave them a large space of imagination,and changes in perspectives attribute to the changes of viewers'attention.Interpersonal meaning involves the relations between not only the viewer and the film-maker but also the viewer and the characters in the film.The framework of focalisation,pathos and ambience can convey the meaning of interaction to promote the viewer's attitude towards the film.It mainly takes the option of[contact],[mediated]and[engaging]to invite the viewer into the story,and apply the rules of ambience to render the theme and express characters' feelings.Textual meaning combines the ideational meaning and interpersonal meaning into a whole by the way of layout,framing and focus.When studying the film with these sub-frameworks,it can be concluded that the visual images of this dynamic discourse mainly takes a choice of[integrated]to create a strong fusion between the images and subtitles,the images are unbound images which can make the viewers imagine without any confinement,and that the film applies the rules of focus with diverse options to construct the image and draw the viewers' attention;and on the expression level,the animated short film The Dam Keeper takes visual modality,auditory modality and so on,and each modality does not exist independently but interacts with each other.To some extent,this study can broaden the research field of multimodal discourse analysis.Besides,from the perspective of the audience,this research,which provides us with a new angle when enjoying a film not just from the aspect of aesthetics,but helps us understand the animated film thoroughly and skillfully.Thus our multiliteracy will improve a lot simultaneously.As for film making,film makers and animated film-lovers can learn from the study so that they can consider how to apply all kinds of modalities and make them collaborate well.Only in this way will more and more attractive films be created.