A Contrastive Multimodal Study Of Chinese Monkey King & US Kung Fu Panda

Making an animated movie is a process of meaning construction in which some specific images from the semiotic resources are shaped by choice of modalities.The selection of modalities may influence the impression of image(s)on the audience and the effect of meaning conveying.The impact of multimodality on the images of the animations and on the audience could be best reflected in the two animated movies,Chinese Monkey King & US Kung Fu Panda.This thesis is aimed to make a contrastive study of the two animated movies from the perspective of Multimodal Discourse Analysis.Kung Fu Panda was released in North American and has won the weekend championship and gained popularity all over the world.Its fantastic audio and visual effects impress the viewers and attract scholars from around the world to study it.It narrates a fat and funny panda who is determined to become a dragon warrior to protect valley people from attack.Monkey King: Hero is Back gains a billion Yuan in box office receipts and also wins the highest overseas sales record for domestic animated films.It tells the story of how the Monkey King saves a village from evil monsters.Both movies express “heroism” but represent it in two different images as Monkey and Panda respectively.The modalities for the images are selected and represented in different motions,sound and dialogues.A contrastive study may help demonstrate an effective process in meaning construction and reveal the cultural differences between Chinese and American.This research will focus on the action,color,size,and sound of two animations and employed the theory of Visual Grammar and Zhang Delu’s synergy as the analytical frameworks to explore into the process of meaning construction in different contexts and modalities.It captures a number of motion pictures and analyzes the representation,composition and interactions of the multimodalities and discusses their meanings.By doing the analysis,some findings can be made as followed: 1)Visual grammar is feasible and practical for the analysis of both the Chinese and American animation.2)In the representation,both animations tend to apply narrative meanings to convey information,including action process,which attracts the audience.The Chinese one seldom uses the classification of conceptual meaning,but more verbal processes.3)In the compositional meaning,they place the key information in the center part and have some common in a certain culture.In short,through the contrastive study of the two animations,this study provides some inspiration for the development of Chinese animations in designing and improving audiences’ visual cognition.This thesis consists of five chapters.The first section is the introduction of the history of multimodal discourse research,that of questions,methodology and significance.A literature review about the previous studies of multimodal discourse analysis and two animated movies in the recent years is introduced in the second chapter.The third section investigates the composition and integration of the research framework.The fourth chapter is the main body of the study of two animations by a method of multimodal discourse analysis.Final part is mainly about conclusion,which has made some important discoveries on this topic,limitations and suggestions for future research.