Kansei Evaluation of Localized Film Posters

Abstract

In recent years, Japanese animation films have been attracting attention overseas. For example, "Blade of the Demon" was released in 2020 and became a massive hit in 45 countries and regions worldwide. Film posters are one of the influential advertising media for the release of a film. film posters are essential advertising media to influence the film box office, as they comprehensively express the contents and appeal of the film story in a single image. However, depending on where the film is released, the poster is changed into a different layout from the home country version. For example, the film poster of "Big Hero6" in Japan appealed to an emotional story, but in some other countries, the poster appealed to an action hero film. In this way, film posters were localized depending on the country where the film was released. According to previous studies on film posters, the Japanese and Americans had different perspectives in grasping the film stories even though the film was the same, reflected in the film posters. In addition, in a previous study conducted by our research team on film posters of Studio Ghibli of Japan, subjects' impressions differed significantly from the original Japanese poster version and re-produced others. However, even though the Japanese and Korean versions are very similar layouts and designs, the participants' impressions about these two posters differed due to the influence of the textual information. Therefore, this study evaluated the impressions of film posters with mosaic processing on the language part to eliminate the influence of the language information on the posters. As a result of the SD method's experiment, there was a negative correlation between the "Familiarity feeling" and the "Unique feeling" of the film posters. However, there was a positive correlation between the "Dynamism feeling" and the "Familiarity feeling" of the posters. Moreover, participants' impression about the mosaiced textual information of the Japanese and Korean versions was almost the same. That means textual information in a poster influences participants' impressions significantly. These results in this study will help future film posters production.