Listening to the kids: Children’s perceptions of culture and ethnicities in global animated films in Aotearoa New Zealand

This study aims to look at children’s opinions and ideas of representations of cultures in global animated films. The main idea behind this journal article is to give voice to the children that consume those media texts. This paper will highlight children’s answers to online surveys and one-on-one interviews from the second part of the data collection that took place in Aotearoa New Zealand over three years. As a theoretical framework, concepts and theories such as funds of knowledge (Gonzalez, 2005), cultural mediation (Martin-Barbero, 2006), and multiculturalism (Zalipour & Athique, 2016) are used to support the social and cultural landscape in which the research participants lived during the data collection. The interviews with the children aimed to discuss sixteen Disney and Pixar films and their respective twenty-four main characters. The purpose of the conversation was to understand where children think the films’ characters might have come from and, therefore, understand to what cultural background children believe those characters belong to. According to the research findings, some factors can add to children’s comprehensions of representations of culture in the media, such as the schools they attend, and the activities children develop in those educational environments.