Multimodal Representation of the Day of the Dead in Mexican Animation Discourse

Abstract

The article aims to identify the multimodal means of representing the Day of the Dead in Mexican children’s animated films in Spanish. The research focuses on the verbal and non-verbal means of representing this major Mexican holiday in the animated films Coco and El libro de la vida, which are identified using multimodal analysis. The multimodal representation of the celebration of the Day of the Dead is a discursive whole, conveying culturally significant information through verbal, visual and auditory modes. The holiday is depicted in bright colours, whose symbolism is rooted in the culture of the ancient Mayan and Aztec tribes. Death is shown as a natural transition to the next stage of existence, i.e. the bright world of the eternal holiday. The key idea in the multimodal representation of the celebration of the Day of the Dead is that of preserving memory, which at the verbal level is actualized through lexical units with the meanings of memory and closeness and through the lexical-thematic group family and loved ones; at the non-verbal (visual) level the idea is manifested by images of family reunions at cemeteries on the Day of the Dead, while at the auditory level, through the song “Recuérdame”, whose style and manner of performance in Coco change depending on the singer and the meanings being conveyed. Representatives of Mexican linguoculture believe that a person continues to live as long as he/she is remembered. The life in the Land of the Remembered is portrayed by means of positive evaluative adjectives with the meaning of holiday/ fun, while the poor souls in the Land of the Forgotten will face a sad and lonely fate and final death. Multimodal representation of the Day of the Dead involves using certain lexical-semantic units and visual components of the animated text to demonstrate the key culture-specific realia (ofrenda, alebrije, cempasúchil, calavera).