Narrative Strategies of Animated Short Films from the Perspective of Reception Aesthetics: Taking "A Dog Under Bridge" as an Example

The "Reception Aesthetics" theory of the Konstanzer School in Germany holds that the meaning of a literary text depends not only on its own creative intention but also on the understanding of its content. On this basis, the audience is regarded as an important role in the narrative process of animated films, including "aesthetic distance", "expectation horizon", "calling structure", etc. The Birmingham Centre for Modern Literature was established in 1960 and holds a crucial position worldwide. The idea and method of "compilation and decoding" proposed by Stuart Hall made an important exploration for cultural research in China and had a considerable influence around the world. Raymond Williams' "cultural materialism" advocated the organic integration of Marx's historical viewpoints with specific cultural activities to form a new theoretical system. He Yun, a professor from the School of Fine Arts of Southeast University in China, encoded and decoded the hermit figures in Chinese landscape paintings based on the basic framework of "metaphor" and "recluseness", and decoded their emotional experiences. Through the analysis of the work "A Dog Under Bridge", this paper reveals how the author achieves a kind of encoding of narration through artistic techniques, thereby constructing a novel with realistic and transcendent significance. The "dog" in the film is not a simple character image, but a "symbol" with multiple cultural symbolic meanings. Its fate and choices are thought-provoking: life, freedom, and a sense of belonging. On this basis, by adopting an interdisciplinary cross-comparison method, this paper explores the blend of its narrative rhetoric between reality and escape, and how the audience enhances their emotional feelings through their own personal experiences and interpretations, thereby proposing new ideas and inspirations for the narration and emotional expression of Chinese animated films.