애니메이션 주토피아에 나타난 문화의 역할: Pop-Culture References와 Easter Eggs 1 를 중심으로

The aim is to examine what role culture can play in movies and to describe what culture stands for from an L2 learners’ point of view. Roell (2010) has made a list of movies, suggesting 33 movies which she considers to be suitable for intercultural training. Academic societies emphasize categorical culture types to enhance cultural awareness and knowledge. However, many EFL college students tend to focus on superficial culture. In this paper, the American animation Zootopia (Howard & Moore, 2016) was analyzed to see what role culture can play. Four scenes were selected. The first was a satire on an American government administration, the Department of Motor Vehicles, which is notorious for its terrible service. The second contained pop-culture references. Zootopia borrowed an authoritative image from the movie The Godfather (Coppola, 1972). The third was about Easter eggs. Zootopia borrowed one scene from the animation Frozen (Buck & Lee, 2013). In the fourth scene, Doug played the chemistry teacher’s role from the American drama, Breaking Bad. This was another Easter egg. We are sure that most Korean college level students enjoy learning about pop-culture references and finding Easter eggs, even though they are very superficial in terms of cultural knowledge. It is also apparent that they learn the L2 implicitly.