Whether Cartoon Filmmakers is Making Violence to be More Acceptable to Children

Moey, Ian Min (2019) Whether Cartoon Filmmakers is Making Violence to be More Acceptable to Children. Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College.

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Abstract

For over decades, there are always debates about whether the media has been spreading either positive or negative impacts to the people and the society. Some says that the media has bring us together and contributes to what Marshall McLuhan suggested, global village (McLuhan, 2014). This helps us to understand what is happening at the other side of the world without being present at the place. On the other hand, some says that media has not been playing their initial role of merging the society, but are spreading too many soft news and yellow journalism which further developed to bring many social issues. Since the emerging of technology, the situation has been worsened and brings the society to be falling apart (Amirav & Hoggibottom 2014). Out of the many negative impacts that were brought by the media, spreading violence has always been a hot debate within the scholars and society. Violence elements can be seen is many of the media platforms, especially in films. As the action is enhanced by audio and visual, it has even worsened the situation. Within all genres of film, cartoons is one of the top concern of the scholars and society as it is targeted to children that are yet to be mature to understand the actions. Thus, this research aims to find out whether cartoon context is making violence to be more acceptable by children and in the society. This research will be done using qualitative methods, which are content analysis and direct observation. The content analysis is done by selecting five popular cartoons and the researcher will be randomly picking 10 episodes each out from the five cartoons to do an analysis of the 50 cartoons. As for the direct observation, the researcher will be observing children in the age range of 4 to 9 years old. The children will be given an episode of cartoon to watch and the researcher will be observing the reaction of children. Both the methods will be using a coding sheet prepared by the researcher to ensure all cartoons are code in the same criteria. The result get by the researcher in the content analysis is that cartoon filmmakers tend to make violence to be acceptable through the atmosphere of the happening, the background music and sound effects and also the other characters’ reaction; whereas the result of the direct observation shows that the children are happy when they are watching cartoon that consists violence but they do not imitate the words or action. This can be supported by the Social Learning Theory, which suggested that one can learn through observation, imitation and modeling. Despite that, learning does not necessarily leads to change in behavior, thus children might not change their behavior to think or act violently despite watching cartoons that contains violence.