Doing Things with Emotions: A Multimodal Visual Narrative Affective Pragmatics Approach to the Anti Bullying Digital Animated Short Film

The purpose of this study is to look at bullying behavior as a wide spread social problem, which causes emotional and psychological sufferings. Bullying has been thoroughly studied in psychological studies, but there are not many linguistic studies concerning the emotional effect of bullying. The study aims to describe visual narrative story in the Antibullying Animated Short Film Project as a nonverbal educational communication medium. This video film was created by Fabian Gutierrez as a part of a class project; it lasts for about seven minutes to say “bullying can be stopped”. The video was launched in 2016 on YouTube with (1.2m viewers), and in 2020 on Facebook (1.9K viewers). The study adopts an interdisciplinary qualitative method of analysis; it is the outcome of combining digital animation, psychology, visual narrative, multimodal behavior modeling for socially interactive agents and affective pragmatics in one model of analysis. The model is based on Larson’s (2014) body language, Cohn's (2013) the grammar of visual narrative, Pelachaud, et al.’s (2021) socially interactive agents, and Scarantino’s (2017) affective pragmatics to analyze the data of the study. Music, as the only source of audio mode in the film, color, typography are also included in the analysis; Machin's (2010) framework of analyzing sound and typography, and Biggam's (2012) semantics of color taxonomy to highlight the theme of emotional impact of bullying; they are tackled as complementary tools of analysis. It can be concluded that the animator's deployment of different modes of communication are affective in portraying bullying and extracting the attached emotional meanings, resulted from this immoral social behavior. It is recommended to use digital animation short film genre to enhance individual's awareness of unethical social behaviors; they are suitable educational media tools, because viewers are emotionally involved in the film; thus, this genre can be affective to enhance moral, and social values that need more linguistic research.