Inter-authority dialogue between Divine Comedy and the movie Soul: reflections and didactic proposals

Abstract

The present article in inquired about the inter-authorial dialogue between the movie Soul, released by Walt Disney Pictures, in partnership with Pixar Animation Studios, and Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy. To do so, we aimed to a) verify the general challenges of working with The Divine Comedy in Basic Education; b) identify the scenes present in Soul that explicitly or analogously refer to Comedy; and c) to present a report of scenes that can be used in didactic proposals. Methodologically, we followed the inter-authorial dialogue, described by Barros, as an analytical methodological concept. Thus, we employed four methodological steps. In the first one, we used Severino's thematic bibliographic review method to survey the historiography produced in the present time on the theme in question. At the same time, we used the citation fiching technique, described by Andrade, to register reflective points of this historiography that contribute to our research. In the second and third stages, based on Grancho’s and Moises’s assumptions, we carried out the filmic analysis and the mapping of the formal elements of the book. In the fourth stage, we performed the image analysis, according to Penafria, to approximate with the Comedy narrative. In the light of this, our main considerations were: first, the verification that the challenges in working with the Divine Comedy are intrinsic to the text, due to the temporal, spatial, and cultural distance of the reader; second, we approached five scenes from the film Soul that indicate an inter-author dialogue with the Comedy; third, the dialogues described and analyzed point to possibilities of approaching the Comedy via presentation/dialogue with the film Soul, making methodological potentialities for the areas of History and Literature.