ADOLESENSE: A Study on How Juvenile Audiences Negotiate Meaning with Non-Juvenile Broadcast Animation

ABSTRACT

Non-juvenile animation is a hybridization of two television genres that employs the elements of adult comedy but is translated through the representation of child-like elements in graphics, texture, and composition. It contains juvenile-friendly visuals while portraying adult contexts, language and characteristics in story themes such as sexual, political, satirical, economic, social and violent. This genre therefore displays the dichotomy of catering visually to juveniles and thematically to adults. With media accessibility made easy in this day and age, juveniles aged between 12 and 17 years old are able to patronize non-juvenile animation enough to appreciate its unusual nature and humor, raising the inquiry of how they are able to do so, with the different elements that build up the show. Their negotiation of meaning situated in their process of cognition, is the main focus of this study.

The data were gathered in this research via a focus group discussion among juveniles between 12 and 17 years old and in-depth interviews from expert cognitive adolescent psychologists. Results were analyzed using Jung’s Theory of Personality, first in identifying the respondents according to the ways they use cognition; Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory as a guide in providing specific concepts that examine how adolescents’ process information from non-juvenile animation; and Piaget’s Cognitive Theory as a lens to by which manner do nonjuveniles (adolescents) process non-juvenile information cognitively. The study discovered that certain types of juveniles (according to Jung) understand and process information in specific ways (Bandura’s theory), and decode and form meanings through different cognitive manners (Piaget).

For further research, this study recommends that the causes and effects of juvenile patronage towards non-juvenile animation be explored, and being that this is a cognitive inquiry, future studies may also explore the affective and behavioral dimensions of the same study.

Nolasco, A.B. (2010) 'Adolesense': A study on how juveniles negotiate meaning with nonjuvenile broadcast animation, Unpublished Undergraduate Thesis, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City.

Subject Index: Adolescence, Animation (Cinematography), Mass media and teenagers, Wit and humor, Juvenile