Storytelling for Geeks. A Multimodal Analysis of Disney’s Stickers

In September 2016, the Walt Disney Company launched a series of packs of stickers featuring characters and art from Disney stories. Stickers are – along with emoji, GIFs, videos and images – graphical devices or “graphicons” (Herring and Dainas 2017, 2185) used to communicate on social media platforms. Since their first appearance in Asian countries in the early 2010s, stickers have become a new tool that can be used, like emoji, to make communication easier and faster on mobiles. Disney stickers were launched by a virtual campaign named As Told by Emoji, that retells Disney stories through custom designed emoji. The paper will analyze the features of Disney stickers as a resource to make meaning in digital language adopting a socio-semiotic multimodal approach integrated with mediated discourse analysis. In details, it will focus both on the examination of the “modal affordances” (Kress 1993) of Disney digital stickers – that is on “what it is possible to express and represent readily, easily with a mode, given its materiality and given the cultural and social history of that mode” (Jewitt and Kress 2003, 14) – and on the semantic components added to stickers by the ‘translation’ of Disney stories into digital language of the campaign.