| Animation, which integrates film, cartoon, painting, photography, digital media, music, literature and other kinds of arts, is a typical type of multimodal discourse that combines a variety of social symbolic resources. As a new form of news reporting, animation in political news has not caused enough attention of the academic. However, with the release of a series of animations such as How to be the President by Youku in 2013, Follow Xi Papa to Boao Forum in 2015 which attracted wide attention of domestic and foreign media, political news in the form of animation has become an important focus of Chinese political dissemination.This thesis explores the dissemination capacity of animation in political news from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis with a case study of the short animation How to be the President. Dissemination capacity refers to the capacity that the theme of communication makes full use of various means to achieve effective communication. The present research chooses the English version of this animation as the object, with the aim to analyze how meaning is realized through visual, verbal and audio modalities and to discover how the three basic modalities work together to achieve an integrative meaning.This research adopts a qualitative approach. Multimodal discourse analysis on this animation is conducted from the three meta-functional meanings based on Kress and Van Leeuwen’s visual grammar and O’Halloran’s filmic discourse analysis framework. Firstly, the framework for the multimodal discourse analysis of the animation in political news is proposed. Secondly, mise-en-scene(the shot) is taken as one unit in the analysis of this animation. The five shots are selected randomly from the animation as the materials, and four to fourteen frames in each selected shot are analyzed in terms of three basic modalities including images, music, text, color, etc so as to figure out how the three meta-functional meanings are realized. Finally, how each modality correlates to achieve the integrative meaning of the animation is also explored in the analysis.This research shows, firstly, the construction of the meaning of the animation in political news is realized through the interaction of the verbal, visual and audio modalities. Secondly, this thesis introduces the theoretical framework of the multimodal discourse analysis and verifies its applicability and feasibility in interpreting the meaning of animations in political news. Thirdly, due to the characteristics of conciseness and objectivity in political news discourse, the designers and the viewers are required to have a high awareness and ability of multiliteracies. Therefore, this research is not only useful to the designers for using various kinds of modalities scientifically in order to achieve the best designs and expression effects, but also can help the viewers read comprehensively the discourse expressed by the integrated modalities. |
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