Narratives and visual language of the ‘recap cartoon’: Analysis and exploration

With growing attention to ‘snackable content’, animated cartoons that summarise existing stories in just a few minutes have appeared on various video sharing websites and have been investigated by animators from different cultural backgrounds. This paper uses qualitative visual content analysis to investigate the narratives and visual language of these ‘recap cartoons’ created by three different social media animators. By combining exaggeration, symbolic substitution and symbolic association with elements of digital culture and Internet pop culture, recap cartoons explore new ways of animation storytelling in the fast-paced era of social media.