FORMS OF ANIMATORIAL EXPRESSION: THE MEANING OF MOTION IN DISNEY ANIMATION

Abstract

In this article, we propose to explore some cartoon's concepts used by the Walt Disney Animation Studios for a long time, which we find in Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston's The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation (1981). By the perspective of Discoursive Semiotics, we can comprehend how the motion pictures' composition, the form of motion, has its meaning, becoming a sign itself, with a signifier and a signified. Using traditional Greimasian Semiotics' generative course (GREIMAS; COURTES, 2013), focusing on the semio-narrative level, and Zilberberg's Tensive Semiotics and its valencies and missivity (ZILBERBERG, 2006a 2006b), we note that every motion sequence in a film organizes itself in a syntagm. Within this syntactic order with tensive base, narrative programs appear along with its values, actants and doings. Hence, we see how expression forms are not only support to content forms which disappear after effective communication, but that expression forms are, in this animatorial articulation, the originating center of meaning, with its own generative levels in the expression plane (rhythm and motor levels) and content plane (tensive, missive and narrative levels). It also opens a door to formulate a grammar for expression forms in Semiotics