Social Signified in the Movie Posters of Hollywood Movies Made for Children

With the recognition of motion pictures as an art form of the twentieth century, one realizes that movie posters have also evolved in various aspects, namely aesthetically, technically, socially, ideologically, and so on. This research paper has a dual purpose: to present quantitative data relating to the production of movie posters advertising Hollywood children’s movies, and to provide a semiotic analysis of the posters’ content based on a number of semantic codes. The paper examines movie posters as socially generated products and as carriers of ideology. The sample was chosen based on the movies’ US Box Office ranking, and comprises the one hundred highest-grossing children’s movies produced from the 1930s — and more specifically 1937, with the movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs — to August 2012, when the research was conducted. As regards the designation “children’s†, movies aimed at audiences of up to fifteen years old were chosen, based on their age rating.