Accents and dialect as a source of humour: the case of Rio

The present work stems from a research project carried out with G. De Rosa on the dubbing and subtitling of the film Rio (Saldanha, 2011), produced by Blue Sky Studios, in which the original English dialogues are compared and contrasted to translations into several languages, i.e. Brazilian Portuguese and Italian, making occasional reference to other dubbed versions, e.g. the Mexican, Spanish and Portuguese versions. In particular, this paper is devoted to an analy-sis of the Italian dubbing of Rio into Italian, focusing especially on humorous aspects and sociolinguistic variation and drawing a comparison with another animated film, i.e. The Aristocats (Reitherman, 1970).