Music in animation serves, among other functions, to create a background for interpreting character emotion, just as it does in live-action. Music is therefore important for creating characters as thinking, feeling and social beings, elements which are essential for constructing believable characters with whom we can identify. This function of the music might be even more important in animation, where the visuals are not based on recordings of live actors. Since children, the primary target group of most animation, belong to a different interpretative community than adults, we can’t assume to know how music in animated films is understood by these audiences. Children simply have a different frame of reference for interpreting film music.

In my interdisciplinary PhD thesis, I provide multimodal analyses of sequences from Frozen, Shrek the Third and Up, which use different musical strategies for constructing characters. Moreover, I have conducted interview studies with children aged 7-11.

In this presentation, I provide an overview of my findings, discussing children as active and critical viewers, with a broad film-musical literacy. The children draw on knowledge of film- musical conventions for creating mood and narrative expectations, and they comment on leitmotif techniques and make references to famous film music. The aesthetic elements of music and visuals are moreover a motivational factor for their enjoyment of the films, and the children use their personal experiences and cultural background for creating a frame within which to evaluate both the music, the characters and the film as a whole.