Film aesthetics as a narrative strategy for conveying complex and sensitive themes in selected children's animated films

Résumé

Beyond their verbal content, children's animated films manage complex and sensitive themes through visual and auditory aesthetics, yet the aesthetic dimension of theme mediation is rarely analysed as a system and seldom examined with African audiences. This study explored the role of film aesthetics as a narrative strategy for conveying complex and sensitive themes in Kirikou and the Sorceress (1998), Shrek (2001) and The Secret Life of Pets (2016). A convergent mixed methods design, qualitative-dominant, combined semiotic content analysis of the three films with a descriptive survey of 50 purposively selected respondents and interviews with 10 key informants in Webuye, Bungoma County, Kenya. Five coordinated aesthetic strategies were identified: cinematography, mise-en-scène, costume and character design, sound, music and editing, with animation technology aligning technique to thematic register. The analysis indicated cultural variation in the form of these strategies alongside convergence in their mediating functions, and its central finding is coordination at the corpus's most thematically charged sites. The strategies converge on the same content, forming a mediation system parallel to language. Field evidence assigned aesthetics a real but secondary place in conscious audience attribution, with 16% of respondents identifying visual appeal and 8% sound design as the principal accessibility feature. The study recommends the deliberate coordination of aesthetic strategies by animation artists, including African animators drawing on indigenous visual and musical traditions.