Emotional Perception of Death in Animated Films : Sentiment Analysis of Coco and Soul’s Scripts and Reviews

Sammanfattning: This thesis aims to understand the emotions expressed by adults watching animated films with death topics through sentiment analysis. The research is a quantitative sentiment analysis from the perspective of distant reading. The previous studies on death scenes in animated films have only focused on child audiences. However, the age group of the audience of animated films is extensive; thus, it is necessary to analyse the sentiments of adult audiences. This thesis attempts to collect two movies produced by Pixar studio: Coco (2017) and Soul (2020), as well as their audience reviews on IMDb, a total of 600, for cross-comparison. Additionally, it analyses the content containing death in the reviews to understand better adult audiences’ emotional expressions on the subject of death. The analysing results show that the positive sentiment scores of the comments containing death are slightly lower than the scores of all the reviews, and the scores of the negative sentiments do not differ much. However, positive emotions still dominate these comments that contain death. The emotional performance between the script and the reviews is roughly similar. Still, the emotional intensity of the comments is higher than that of the script, indicating that the audience is willing to show their emotions on the public online film platform. Future research is recommended to conduct analysis together with other NLP analysis methods or close reading to explore more details of the content.