Sidekick humour in animated Disney films: the case of Mulan and Frozen. A semantic, pragmatic, and multimodal analysis

Romero Dorchin, Mireia

Sidekick humour in animated Disney films: the case of Mulan and Frozen. A semantic, pragmatic, and multimodal analysis

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Romero Dorchin, M. Sidekick humour in animated Disney films: the case of Mulan and Frozen. A semantic, pragmatic, and multimodal analysis. 2021. handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10230/48765

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Abstract

Humour studies involve cognition, semantics, pragmatics, and, recently, multimodality. Also recent is their application on animation. This paper reports on the humour shown in Disney films Frozen (2013) and Mulan (1998) by their two sidekicks (the protagonists’ loyal companions). The research answers four questions on the main function of the sidekicks’ humour, its attainment through language, the role that multimodality (prosody, gestures, and image) plays in it, and last, the possible existence of a pattern between the sidekicks’ humour-building strategies. The corpus was analysed with multimodal annotation program ELAN while following three humour theories: release from dramatism in a scene, superiority or aggression over a target, and incongruity, where the clash between prototypical meaning and meaning in context is highlighted. The results show that, despite differences in the use of superiority humour, both sidekicks use humour as release to break up dramatism, and also as incongruity, that is, as clashing utterance meanings: the prototypical one and the one in context. Thus, extralinguistic information is often crucial in interpreting humour. As for multimodality, although interwoven with language, it can sometimes be the sole humorous element. In all, the paper concludes that both multimodality and language cooperate in the building of a humorous identity for each sidekick.