How idiomatic are Disney films? The multimodal meaning-making of idioms

Since their dawn in the 1930s, Disney animated films have been appreciated by a large audience across the world. Previous studies on Disney film discourse (Lippi-Green 1997; Di Giovanni 2003 inter alia) have highlighted how this ‘universal recognition’ is not only the result of complex and winsome plots, but also of multilayered and well-structured dialogues, which are thoroughly planned and written to be captivating for children and grown-ups alike. This paper aims to investigate the role of idiomatic expressions in Disney film discourse as a tool to make animated films more attractive to the audience. More specifically, it will dwell upon how idiomatic expressions are represented in a specialized corpus of Disney animated films, covering a wide time span and different literary genres (i.e. fairy tales, novels, original stories, legends). Idioms have been recognized as a source of difficulty for children who may not have a fully mastered understanding of figurative language, and thus opt for a literal interpretation. Conversely, for adults idiomatic meanings are part of their repertoire, so they do not require a major decoding effort and their usage is often recognized as a stylistic choice to make discourse more colourful and natural (cf. Wray 2000; Wood 2010). Preliminary results of the analysis suggest that Disney scriptwriters very often commingle the pictorial, linguistic and embodied elements associated with an idiom in order to unveil, at least for a part of the audience, the opacity of such expressions. Consequently, it is evident that the visual channel, including performed actions, gestures, colours and proxemics, plays a vital role in facilitating the understanding of the intended meaning of idiomatic expressions. In contrast, the audio channel only provides the audience with marginal information and does not help to dispel ambiguity. In addition, in animated films, the complexity of meaning-making in idioms is often exploited to create humorous situations which are entertaining for the largest possible audience. This contribution – through a multimodal analysis relying on the framework developed by Wildfeuer (2003) – brings to the fore how all the semiotic components of a shot (Metz 1974) are crucial either to unveil the figurative meaning of idioms, or to create a clash of meanings, thus creating a potentially higher degree of amusement for the addressees.