Narrative Strategy of Death Theme in Animated Films Under Children's Cognitive Perspective: A Case Study of Pixar Animated Film COCO

摘要

COCO is an animated film with the Mexican traditional festival Day of the Dead as story background, which shows the dead and the Land of the Dead in the form of a story. According to data from the IMDb website, the global box office of the film reached 800 million US dollars, which means that so many children have watched this film with death theme and full of skeletal dead characters. How COCO talks about the story with the theme of death from the perspective of children is the focus of this paper. This paper is based on the theory of children's psychology and hermeneutics as theoretical support. The research object is the narrative strategy of animated film with death theme and with children as audience targeting. The focus on children's perspectives is mainly due to the lack of children's discourse; children's cultural background and life experience will have an impact on related sub-conceptual cognitions; especially in the face of the death theme of animated films, children aged 5-9 are almost complete in a state of passive acceptance. If it is not handled properly when the animation company makes animated films with death theme, it will increase the children's fear of death, which will have a negative impact on the children's psychology and may bring lifelong injury. COCO introduces this new world of the Land of the Dead with the eyes of a child named Miguel, and also takes him as an opportunity to promote the development of the story, and treats life and death with a new perspective. Therefore, this paper will comply with the characteristics of the development of children cognition, in the perspective of children, to explore the narrative strategy of the Pixar animated film COCO with death theme.