Metaphor and symbol

The quickly growing discipline of multimodality has hitherto primarily found its inspirational models in semiotics and in Systemic Functional Linguistics. However, Cognitive Linguistics, and specifically its Conceptual Metaphor Theory branch, has over the past years proved a store of knowledge and methods of analysis that can benefit the further advance of the young discipline. In this paper the metaphor searching for one’s identity is looking for a home in animation films is examined. It is shown that (a) analysing this metaphor presupposes understanding “home” as a symbol; (b) animation has medium-specific affordances to implement the metaphor; (c) the metaphor combines embodied and cultural dimensions.