ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors follow the premise that audiovisual metaphors and metonymies are among the most effective strategies to display and evoke emotions. They demonstrate the especially stylized and densely composed images in fictional and nonfiction animation films make use of cognitively anchored metaphoric and metonymic thinking and feeling. The production of animated images in any form or genre is characterized by a high level of control and allows for a precise attunement of colors, character, object, and camera movement as well as character and set design. The authors explore how animated moving images in different media and genres tackle issues of inner states, such as emotions, experience, and subjectivity. They present case study analyses of emotion metaphors and metonymies in two very different forms of animated 'films'. Metonymic expressions of emotions may involve basic processes of empathy originating from an activation of mirror neurons even devoid of narrative contextualization.
