Audience Design In Disney's Animated Films

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Audience design plays an important role in the world of motion pictures, especially in animated films, since the main audience is children. According to Allan Bell’s model, language speakers evaluate the social status of their audience and accommodate, converge with them accodrdingly. In that model, there are several different roles of the members of the audience: the addressee, the auditors, the overhearers and the eavesdroppers (Bell, 1984). This model becomes even more complex when we consider the linguistic choices in films because the audiences include the characters participating in the film, the producers and writers and, finally, the viewers who act as auditors, overhearers and eavesdroppers at the same time (Queen, 2006). This means that language is often carefully designed …show more content…
L. Green argues that most Disney characters (43.1 percent) speak “a variety of US English which is not stigmatized in social or regional terms”. After the analysis of the language used by 371 characters in Disney’s animated movies, the author found that only a small percentage of the protagonists used social or regional US English. Additionally, characters with positive motives use Standard American English, characters who are malignant and have negative motives use British and other variations of English (Green, 1997). This research becomes highly interesting and relevant when it comes to the film “The Princess and the Frog”, the first Disney movie to feature an African American protagonist, a “princess” named Tiana. The movie is set in the early 1920’s in New Orleans and most black characters speak a mixture of African American Vernacular English or African American Southern English with SAE. In this case, it is worth examining what the linguistic choices reflect about the characters in the film, find out how accurate the representations are and what they directly or inderictly