Dear all, On the 21, it is time for my ‘final PhD seminar’, where professor Kim Schrøder will act as discussant, and we will go through and discuss my thesis draft. If any of you are not familiar with the Swedish concept of ‘final seminars’ for PhD students, I can inform you that it is an extended text seminar, normally held about 4-6 months before a doctoral defense, where a close-to-finished thesis draft is discussed. There will normally be a short introduction to the thesis by the PhD student, and then a discussant will go through the whole text. In the end, there will be time for general discussion. The seminar will be between 2 and 3 hours long. I have tried and have been unable to send the thesis draft to you via this email list, my guess is the file is too large to go through, so if any of you are interested in reading the draft before the seminar, please send an email to ims at lnu.se<mailto:ims at lnu.se>, and I will send the draft to you personally. Abstract: This thesis is an audience reception study of film music and animation film, centered around the ways that animated characters are constructed as psychological beings which children can understand and identify with – as if they were real humans. The analysis considers the narrative context of a character but is particularly focused on the musical and multimodal construction of a character, meaning particular attention is put on how character traits are communicated by the use of music, voice, colours, camera perspective, etc. This analysis of the construction of characters is then compared to actual child audiences’ expressions of their experiences and interpretations, obtained through observations and interviews, in order to highlight how children understand and relate to the material they are presented to. Understanding and interpreting an animated film is conditioned by the structure of that film, but interpretation is also conditioned by the communicative situation and social position of the audience, as well as personal experiences, and as such no ‘absolute’ interpretation can be made, not even within a uniform group. This does not mean that we shouldn’t aim to understand how people process and relate to media, however, or to understand how children experience the animated films that are so immensely popular, overflowing our mainstream culture. By analysing the multimodal semiotic potential of three selected films, Frozen (2013), Up (2009) and Shrek the Third (2007), and comparing these analyses with children’s multimodal expressions (children often communicate through gestures or by humming or signing, necessitating multimodal interview transcriptions) of their understandings and opinions, it is the goal of this thesis to shed light on the ways that children relate to and use filmic form, particularly music, in negotiating the content, particularly characters, of the film, in a process where meaning is created in the active reception process of a child in a communicative situation The seminar is, as mentioned, on the 21. Note that it starts 1 hour early at 9.00 CEST. As always, the seminar will be on zoom: https://lnu-se.zoom.us/j/940933326 I hope to see many of you there! Best wishes, Signe – on behalf of myself and of IMS Signe Kjaer Jensen PhD student in Comparative Literature Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS) Linnæus University Department of Film and Literature 351 95 Växjö Sweden https://lnu.se/personal/signe.kjaerjensen/ signe.kjaerjensen at lnu.se<mailto:signe.kjaerjensen at lnu.se> IMS on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LNU.IMS IMS public email list: https://lists.sunet.se/listinfo/publik.ims