Animation is one of the dominant media forms targeted at young children, and it is a highly multimodal medium, where music is used in interaction with other auditive and visual modes to create meaning potential. 

Even though we don’t always pay attention to music, there’s a general agreement in film music studies that music still serves in various ways to create textual coherence, geographical and historical setting, and by creating a background for interpreting character emotion. 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 and care about. 

Music serves these functions by adhering to certain conventions and by directing attention and co-creating meaning with elements in the visuals (see e.g. Cohen, 2010). However, since children belong to a different interpretative community (c.f. Fish, 1980) than the adult researcher, and since very little empirical work has been done regarding children’s reception of film music (a few empirical studies of children’s reception of animation have been done, however, the most relevant here being Drotner, 2003; Hodge & Tripp, 1986), we can’t assume to know how music in animated films is understood by these audiences. As pointed out by Kress et. al., what constitutes a semiotic mode is relative to different social communities (Kress, Jewitt, Ogborn, & Charalampos, 2014, pp. 52–53), and it follows from their social definition of mode, that so is the interpretation of a mode.

In my interdisciplinary PhD thesis, I have provided multimodal analyses of key sequences from Frozen, Shrek the Third and Up, focusing on the music’s role in constructing characters. Moreover, I have conducted empirical observations and interview studies with children aged 7-11, aiming to analyze their expressed interpretations of the music and characters. 

In my presentation at 9ICOM, I argued for a multimodal approach to film music analysis, which is able to capture the complexity of music, as well as processes of intersemiosis (understood as the semiotic potential stemming from interaction of semiotic resources c.f. Liu, Halloran, & O’Halloran, 2009). 

In this presentation, I will present the second part of my PhD study, which connects the theoretical perspectives with my empirical data, and I will provide an overview of the findings of my study, discussing children as highly active and critical viewers. The children in this study draw on general film-music conventions for creating emotion and narrative expectations. They also point to different strata of the music as essential to their interpretations and make references to other famous film music. The aesthetic elements of music and visuals are also a great motivational factor for their enjoyment of the films, and the children draw on personal experiences and cultural background for creating a frame within which to understand and evaluate both the music, the characters and the film as a whole. Finally, the children implicitly comment on processes of intersemiosis, by connecting elements of the music with elements in the visuals in their meaning-making activities.