Children’s meaning making of animated film characters: a multimodal and musical audience study

Start:   Mar 20,   2019 05:00 PM
End:     Mar 20,   2019 06:30 PM

Location: Room 803, UCL Institute of Education,

20 Bedford Way London WC1H 0AL

This seminar explores the meaning making practices of children watching popular animated films. Based on interviews and empirical observations of children watching animation, Signe Kjaer Jensen from the Linnæus University Sweden, discusses how children understand characters from the films Frozen (2013), Up (2009) and Shrek the Third (2007). Operating within the tradition of qualitative audience reception studies, Signe draws from musicology and multimodality to discuss the significance of the mode of music in shaping children’s reception of animated characters. The research conducted in Danish Primary schools attend to children’s speech, body posture and gesture as signs of meaning making. The session will be the basis for a group discussion on the multimodal analysis of film and face-to face communication.

Signe Kjær Jensen is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies at Linnaeus University in Sweden. She holds a bachelor and a master in Musicology from Aarhus University in Denmark. Her research focuses on music and sound as parts of intermedial and multimodal media constellations.