From Static to Carnival: The Emotionally Evolving Danmu Function of Bridget Jones’s Diary Film Sequels (2001-2024) among Contemporary Chinese Audiences

Abstract

This article explores how the British film sequels Briget Jones’s Diary (2001-2024) is reshaped in danmu subtitling among contemporary Chinese audiences, extending the conventionally passive viewing experience to an active, carnivalesque audience engagement through multimodal resources. The former passive viewing style chiefly conveys meanings rooted in one fixed audiovisual work while the latter offers a cumulative, “customisable and accompanying” (Liang & Lu, 2025) viewing experience that provides communicative translation (Chen & Feng, 2025) and builds potential community (Lee, 2021). Through the danmu subtitling, the original story-telling order and focus of the Bridget Jones film sequels are reconstructed based on their counterpart’s dynamic, associated playful work, adding complexity and depth to the original story. The textual emotional discourse will be first analysed, followed by the empirical danmu comments analysis. It is argued that through the four emotionally-driven categories of the participatory danmu (humour, compliments, negativity and discussions), which redirect and re-interpret British heritage to cater for the digitally-borne Chinese audiences by using either formal or idiosyncratic Chinese discourses. The British film sequel of Bridget Jones’s Diary is intriguingly reshaped to endure the legacy of digital work thanks to danmu subtitling in participatory culture.