RESONANCE IN EXPRESSIONS OF FACIAL AFFECT AND VOICE AFFECT IN “FROZEN” ANIMATION

In contemporary discourse analysis, understanding communication extends beyond written and spoken words to encompass a broader range of modes, including images, gestures, and sounds. Multimodal Discourse Analysis emerges to explore how meaning is constructed and communicated through these diverse modes within various contexts. This study addresses this fruitful field by examining the relationship between voice qualities and facial expressions in conveying emotions through a popular children’s animation called “Frozen”. The analysis is based on Ngo et al.’s (2022) framework to explore the interplay of the two systems of Facial Affect and Voice Affect from an interpersonal perspective. In analyzing Elsa, one of the two main characters in the animation, we found that she is largely portrayed as having low spirits, evident in the type of facial and vocal features she expresses. Although there are occasional disjunctions between these two systems of affect, likely stemming from contextual variables or production flaws, the majority of instances reveal resonance between Elsa’s expressed features of Facial Affect and Voice Affect. Theoretically, the findings involving a complete animation contribute to the literature on multimodal texts targeted at children. It also yields practical benefits in encouraging the utilization of multimodal resources to enhance children’s language and social development.