Re-configuring image-language relations and interpretive possibilities in picture books as animated movies: A site for developing multi-modal literacy pedagogy

The long tradition of the re-versioning of picture books as animated movies continues as a significant dimension of contemporary popular culture. While school students frequently experience both book and movie versions, classroom work does not appear to give emphasis to the ways in which the affordances of the different media are deployed to construct different interpretive possibilities, even when the story versions are ostensibly very similar, and there is a tendency for younger students to elide such interpretive differences. This paper extends recent work using systemic functional linguistics and inter-image analyses of children’s picture books (Painter, Martin, & Unsworth, 2013) to compare two short segments of The Lost Thing (ruhemann & tan, 2010; tan, 2000) in the book and movie versions of the story. The comparative analysis is intended to indicate the accessibility of a metalanguage of multimodality derived from systemic functional semiotics as a pedagogic tool for multimodal literacy pedagogy