Fat Shaming for Humour in Children’s Cartoons: A Multimodal Study of Motu Patlu

Abstract

Animated cartoon programs available to kids through mainstream media and internet influence the development of social perception among children. This study investigates the use of fat- shaming as a tool of comedy in a popular children’s cartoon program Motu Patlu through a multi- modal approach to explore the role of multiple modes such as image, text, language and situation to communicate and enhance meaning-making. The data for this study has been collected randomly from episodes on YouTube. Aspects of the framework by (Kress and Leeuwen, 2001) have been used to analyze the data. The analysis has shown that fat-shaming is implicitly being used as a tool of creating comedy in the under-study cartoon program and various modes such as image, text, character-depiction, and dialogues play a part in normalizing fat-shaming. Based on the findings, the study concludes that using fat-shaming for creating comedy may lead to fat stigma.