The Semiotics of Animation. From Traditional Forms to Contemporary Innovations (2025)

The Synergy of Animation and Tourism Industry: Myths and Ideologies in Mickey Mouse’s Traveling Adventure

Punctum. International Journal of Semiotics

The tourism industry circulates signs through its synergies with other cultural industries, such as film, music, museum, video gaming, and the sports industry, to name but a few. This paper aims at exploring the creation or preservation of tourist myths and ideologies through the cartoon industry following the travel experiences of one of the first and most widely known animation characters, Mickey Mouse, in animated films such as the Hawaiian Holiday (1937), Mickey’s Trailer (1938), Mr. Mouse Takes a Trip (1940), On Vacation with Mickey Mouse and Friends (1956), Croissant de Triomphe (2013), Tokyo Go (2013), Yodelberg (2013), O Sole Minnie (2013), Panda- monium (2013), Mumbai Madness (2014), O FutebalClάssico (2014), ¡FelizCumpleaños! (2015), Al Rojo Vivo (2015), Turkish Delights (2016), Entombed (2016), Dancevidaniya (2016), Locked in Love (2017), or Shipped Out (2017). In terms of methodology, this study of animated films and images will be conducted with the help of Greimas’ sem...

Semiotic Approaches to Big Data Visualization

punctum 8.1., 2022

Licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial-No-Derivatives (By-Nc-ND) more...

With strings attached: Barthes’ ‘On Bunraku’ from Thunderbirds to Japanese robot animated shows

Punctum International Journal of Semiotics, 2024

In his 1983 overview of the semiotic aspects of “performing objects,” which focuses primarily on puppet theatre, Frank Proschan criticizes Roland Barthes’ impressions of the Japanese bunraku puppet theatre performances, specifically the separation between the different parts of the puppet operation, which leads to the appeal of ‘the part’ rather than the ‘totality’ of the body accepted in western culture. Proschan argues that such separation is not unique to Japanese performances. However, Bolton (2002), while not arguing for uniqueness, claims that such separation is a part of Japanese culture and links it to the 1995 Japanese animated film Ghost in the Shell. This article examines Bolton’s, Barthes’, and Proschan’s argument in light of the Japanese animated robot shows, where such separation is common, through an examination of non-Japanese influence – the puppet shows, and in particular Thunderbirds (1965-1966) produced by Gerry Anderson in the United Kingdom. The article concludes that, while the Japanese animated robot shows and the Anderson productions that inspired them indeed emphasize the appeal of ‘the part,’ they do so in a manner that challenges both Barthes’ impressions of the bunraku and Proschan’s observations of the relationship between performing objects and animation.

Collecting movie posters: Changes in the digital age.

Punctum. International journal of semiotics.Punctum, 2023

While the film poster took over fifty years to become a collector’s item, the alternative poster was born as such. The article has five parts. The introduction explores the acknowledgment of the film poster as a collector’s item through the advent of Pop Art. The second and third parts propose a brief historical survey of the film poster and its difficult life. This survey and the presentation of some of its protagonists help us understand why the poster obtained its artistic autonomy, overcoming its function as a pure advertising medium. The fourth part analyses three posters diversified by production: (i) the Official poster distributed in cinemas and elsewhere; (ii) the Alternative movie poster created by young independent artists; (iii) and the poster created for distribution on the Netflix platform. This analysis highlights how the different contexts of use influence the structure and composition of the posters. In this sense, the development of the Alternative poster is a perfect example of what Jenkins intends as a participatory culture, made explicit by the rise of new movements born with the affirmation of technologies based on deep-learning systems.

Deleuze’s meta-cinematic framing: Multimodal meaning-making in Installation Art

https://punctum.gr/, 2022

'temporal object' (Ingarden). The paper aims to offer novel interpretive tools for investigating our current shifting sensorium engaged in meaning-making. It also maintains that installation art constitutes not only a compelling cultural strategy for "imagining and imaging the world" (Rodowick) but also the means to understand how modes of perception converge in producing subjectivity.

What More Can Semiotics do for Comics? Looking at Their Social, Political, and Ideological Significations

Punctum. International Journal of Semiotics

s early as the 1960s and through to the first decades of the 21st century, comics studies have attracted a large and perhaps disproportionate amount of attention from analytical semiotic approaches that foreground description and theory building. Many of them, culminating in McCloud’s Understanding Comics (1993), have been accused of treating their subject with arbitrary abstraction and an overload of theory and of engaging in a semiotic metaphysics that posits the reality of the sign apart from the social reality of each reading. But such opposition of content-oriented criticism and formally abstract semiotics, the accusation of social myopia, does not hold under closer inspection. This introduction to the present Punctum special issue on The Social, Political and Ideological Semiotics of Comics and Cartoons traces some of the overlooked and often oversimplified concerns within semiotic traditions to comic book scholarship that can and often did investigate the historical setting o...

Governmental Propaganda in Mexican Comics. The Case of El Libro Vaquero

Punctum. International Journal of Semiotics, 2021

This article aims to analyze comic books' use as vehicles for political communication. Employing socio-semiotic methodology, we describe the discursive operations utilized to disseminate governmental propaganda (a particular type of political communication) in mexican popular culture. Our corpus comprises institutionally commissioned comic inserts in one of the most iconic magazines of contemporary mexico: El Libro Vaquero ['The Cowboy Book']. According to our findings, these comics tend to make citizens primarily responsible for implementing public policy, ignore the structural causes of the social problems they represent, reducing them to a sum of individual issues, and, finally, downplay state responsibilities while painting a positive image of the different State institutions. Consequently, we should take these comics as a type of institutional propaganda rather than as social marketing.

Acquisition of artistic literacy in multimodal learning via intersemiotic translation

Punctum. International Journal of Semiotics, 2020

The topic of teaching competence in artistic perception in school curricula has been investigated in the fields of education (Kindelan 2012), psychology (Vygotsky 1991), and semiotics (Ojamaa et al. 2019). Previous scholarship emphasizes the need to offer learners the opportunity to develop meaning-making abilities concerning different types of artistic texts. They also emphasized the educational value of establishing communication with and by means of such texts. This paper argues the educational value of acquiring artistic literacy in school education in the context of digital culture. We consider this acquisition process as the development of meaning-making abilities in relation to artistic texts and fostering learners’ ability to use artistic literacy as a symbolic psychological tool (Vygotsky 1978). We address this question by accentuating the role of semiotic mediation of artistic literacy. At the same time, we argue that artistic literacy acquisition can be established through intersemiotic translation among various multimodal artistic texts. In a practical sense, the paper attempts to develop a methodological framework for acquiring artistic literacy, conceptualized in terms of contemporary educational skills and competences. This paper also analyses the process of acquiring artistic literacy in relation to mediation in learning, the representation of texts, artistic work, and educational assessment. The analysis keeps account of the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic school framework and Lev Vygotsky’s theoretical framework, especially in addressing artistic work in education (Vygotsky 1971, 1978, 1991).

Introduction: Translation and Translatability in Intersemiotic Space

Punctum-International Journal of Semiotics 6 (1): 5-14 , 2020

Our firm belief is that the broad notion of the text has mainly come about thanks to semiotics. Τhis crucial move by semiotics resulted, among others, in bringing translation studies closer to semiotics. The implications of general sign studies for translation theory and practice have helped translation studies to move away from the verbocentric dogmatism of the sixties and seventies when only systems ruled by double articulation were acknowledged to have the dignity of language (Eco 1976). As Peeter torop (2004: 59) argues, “the text is what we understand in culture, and it is through the text that we understand something of the culture.” In Punctum’s special issue, we investigate this open relationship through articles that examine cultural transposition, intermediality, subtitling, adaptation, literary translation, multimodality, and all those interconnected cultural phenomena that comprise the actual intersemiotic network of cultural texts.

Intersensorial translation of coughing and sneezing

Punctum, 2021

The British Ministry of Health’s poster campaign Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases brought World War II to the British home front by making it personal and served as a visual call to arms for civilians. Although involving visual materials, the campaign provides a case for examining how posters engage people’s extra-visual senses in responding to this call. By using the concepts of intersensoriality and synaesthetic metaphor, we discuss the possibility of enhancing the audience experience of print posters by associating verbal and visual language with the rest of the senses. Premised on the assumption that it is possible to establish an interrelation between the senses related to sneezing, we argue that, once synchronized, all associated senses may increase the perception of propaganda experienced in the poster campaign.