Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Film Zootopia

Information has been increasingly presented in the comprehensive form of text,image,voice,action and other modalities.Simultaneously,the research object of discourse analysis is gradually shifting to multimodal discourse analysis,which has gone beyond the traditional discourse analysis modality focusing on text analysis,and comprehensively analyzed the discourse shaped and influenced by various modalities.It makes up for the deficiency of traditional discourse analysis.Film covers such multiple modes as language,image and sound,which is a comprehensive art of presenting image,sound and text.It has also become a new focus of multimodal discourse analysis.In recent years,multimodal discourse analysis has become an important approach to discourse analysis,within which scholars have made fruitful achievements.Based on Halliday’s functional grammar,the visual grammar of Kress and Van Leeuwen and the auditory grammar of Leeuwen,this thesis makes a multimodal discourse analysis of the film Zootopia,which focuses on qualitative research,supplemented by quantitative research.With the text mode,sound mode and image mode of the two characters selected from the film,the conceptual function and interpersonal function have been used to analyze the verbal modality,the representational meaning,interactive meaning and composition meaning to analyze the visual modality,and the perspective of sound and social distance,sound modality and melody to analyze the auditory modality.Based on the relationship between various modalities proposed by Zhang Delu,this thesis analyzes how to jointly construct the meaning of the film.The purpose of this study is to explore how the various modalities in the film jointly shape the characters of Judy and Nick,and what themes are revealed.It has been pointed out in the study that Judy is an optimistic,positive,brave and persistent character through analyzing the verbal modality,visual modality and auditory modality in the film,whereas Nick,influenced by his childhood experience,is a cunning,prejudiced,kind-hearted and loyal character.Through the analysis of the interaction between the protagonists and that between the protagonists and other characters in the film,the trust and friendship between Judy and Nick are unfolded.It is also in this process that discrimination and prejudice are shown with the development of the plot.Through the comprehensive analysis of the verbal modality,visual modality and auditory modality in the film,it is found that the audio-visual mode complements each other and jointly constructs the theme meaning of the film.This thesis makes a multimodal discourse analysis of the film Zootopia in order to broaden the research scope of multimodal discourse analysis.This not only provides the feasibility and operability of the study of the film from the linguistic perspective,further deepening the understanding of the theory,but also provides a new perspective for the audience to appreciate the film,enhance their understanding of the characters and themes of the film,and improve the audience’s awareness of multimodal discourse criticism and appreciation.