Ruzicka Kenfel, Veljka (ed.) New Trends in Children’s Literature Research. Twenty first Century Approaches (2000-2012) from the University of Vigo (Spain). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2014.
Artículo Celia Vázquez, University of Vigo, Alejandro Sierra, Colombian costume designer): Colour, Costume and Animated Films: Analysis of the Social and Emotional Placement of a character in Walt Disney’s Films.
This article aims at analyzing the importance of color and costume in children’s fiction and their by-products, the animated films. It is an interdisciplinary work that tries to combine literary criticism, based on literary anthropology, with costume design studies, following a methodology based on Goethe’s Theory of Colour. The authors will draw their attention to costume and color, a semiotic system through which the characters in fiction speak to their readers. They will explore identities expressed by color and dress that enrich literary characters and their sense of fiction’s historical and social context. Colour and costume have some symbolism through cultural meanings, political, historical and linguistic associations and even fashion trends. They will explore the hidden implications of color which are present and ready to be shown in Walt Disney’s work for children and they will try to demonstrate that, although the accuracy of Goethe’s theory eventually rendered scientifically irrelevant, he was the first to systematically studied the physiological and psychological effects of color and his idea has been and still is the traditional one when analyzing the psychological effects. It is the experience of dress and color what tells us about context, the emotional and psychological values of the characters. But color symbolism has not sprung up out of nowhere, or just because Goethe and other charismatic scholars from ancient times ascribed meaning to color. Their merit has been to systematize emotional/psychological and cultural associations that already existed and that help artists and writers to explore the deployment of color and dress to illuminate the structure of their work, the characters or social conventions for us to be able to approach and imagine more closely what the authors want to say.
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