Revoicing Otherness and Stereotypes via Dialects and Accents in Disney’s Zootopia and its Italian Dubbed Version

Since the founding of the Walt Disney Company in 1923, animated feature films have been a pillar of the cinema industry, telling fascinating, timeless stories, and appealing to children all over the world. Over the years, however, these tales have undergone significant changes, variously due to sociocultural development, different perceptions of childhood, and above all the economic need to broaden their target audience. Mono-dimensional drawings and fairy tales have evolved into the computer-generated imagery of films, completely modern in their cinematography and narrative approach. The growing importance and popularity of these movies has also attracted the interest of translation scholars who have turned their attention to the study of audiovisual texts for children and analysed at length the needs of this specific audience and the strategies adopted in dubbed and subtitled versions. As far as translation is concerned, one of the most interesting and challenging aspects of animated movies in general and Disney animated films in particular is the use of linguistic variation to construct the characters, highlight their geographical origins or generate humorous effects. Therefore, this study investigates how foreign accents and diatopic varieties of US English have been employed in the 2017 Academy Award-winning movie Zootopia (Byron Howard and Rich Moore, 2016) and dealt with by the Italian dubbing team during its translation. As the analysis demonstrates, some of the translation choices adopted for the Italian target text (i.e. using local dialects and accents) seem to foster stereotypes regarding the receiving culture and its social stratification, thus subverting in part the ST’s original moral message of inclusion and mutual tolerance.