Character Animation Research Articles

From Digital Satire to Feminist Counterpublic Discourse: A Study of Participatory Mashups in China During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the effectiveness of China’s state apparatus and accumulated social discontent in the first half of 2020. Aided by a creative adaptation of a popular music video, a group of Chinese feminists initiated a short-term movement on the Chinese Internet in protest of the propaganda campaign of the Communist Youth League of China. The debut of two anime characters (Jiangshanjiao and Hongqiman) amid the pandemic stirred up strong grievances which led to an online feminist movement. Utilizing mashup videos, the movement, though ephemera, delivered a powerful counter-public discourse of women’s sufferings, which resonated widely in the digital sphere. Adopting a cultural perspective of Internet memes, this study closely examined the metamorphosis of a music video from an apolitical fanatic tool to sarcastic “guichu” mashups and eventually a powerful feminist counter-public discourse. Findings from this study suggest the strong potential of participatory mashups in the articulation of counter-public narratives from grassroots Internet users.

Narrating Disruptive Encounters in the Forest: Hunting, Animal Lives, and Ecology

Over the last century, three popular writers and media personalities have written bestsellers and created TV programs in order to alert the general public to the suffering of wild animals as well as the deleterious effects on young trees caused directly or indirectly by hunting and forestry practices. Austrian journalist and writer Felix Salten published Bambi: A Story of Life in the Woods (1923), using a baby deer’s perspective. German journalist and literary author Horst Stern shocked the nation with his TV program Remarks about the Stag (1971), which shows the brutality of hunting; his 1989 Jagdnovelle (The Last Hunt) weaves together a hunter’s perspective with his prey animal’s experience. In recent years, German forester Peter Wohlleben has shifted the focus from animals to plants by publishing a series of popular books about the forest, starting with The Hidden Life of Trees (2015). This essay examines how Salten, Stern, and Wohlleben all humanize their animal and plant characters, including through a form of “critical anthromorphism” (Mossner)—and are criticized for it. They also incorporate ethology, i.e. observations of animal behavior and the forest environment, as well as scientific knowledge, as they attempt to evoke their audience’s empathy for their nonhuman characters. Hunting pressure and the violent disruption of the lives of the animals leads to an “ecology of fear” instead of an “ecology of subjects” that would align better with changing perceptions of “nature” (Soentgen). Ethical questions concerning the mass killing of Europe’s largest mammals remain as it does not succeed in reducing deer overpopulation or damage to the forest ecosystem, perpetuing Germany’s forest/game conflict.

2D animation comic character action generation technology based on biomechanics simulation and artificial intelligence

AI can greatly improve the process of creating 2D character animations, especially for platformer games. The objective is to enhance visual effects quality and streamline production by incorporating biomechanics and AI-driven technology into the animation process. The current state of study shows that conventional 2D animation production has several problems, such as lengthy procedures, complicated technical requirements, and the requirement for human involvement. Both efficiency and innovation are limited by these limitations. To solve this problem, we suggest generating 2D character animations using AI-driven generative methods and biomechanics simulation. Consistently high-quality outcomes can be achieved by automating aspects of animation design. Improving animation industry innovation, streamlining production workflows, and decreasing manual labor are crucial. The viability of 2D animations generated by AI has been demonstrated in preliminary studies. Artificial intelligence’s effects on animation’s expressiveness, realism, and aesthetics are covered in detail. Furthermore, it has presented challenges with training data, choosing the right model, and fine-tuning. Beyond the field of gaming, our research has wider implications. Several industries may benefit from the benefits of 2D animations enhanced with AI and biomechanics technology. These industries include advertising, entertainment, and education.

Women, Horses and Dogs. A Reading of Sorana Gurian's Novel from the Animal Studies Perspective

Sorana Gurian's proverbial passion for pets, almost unnoticed in Romanian literary history, deserves a careful analysis, especially because it was directly recognized as and even constituted the foundation of some substantial pages of memoir or fiction prose, written by this cosmopolite, intriguing, and spectacular author, who linked her biographical existence to several Moldavian, Romanian and French spaces. Animals have a completely exceptional importance especially in the novel "The days never come back" (1945) – where the number of animal references is huge (compared to any other Romanian fictional prose, regardless of the era in which they were written). The text contains over two hundred references to dogs and their equivalents from the general semantic field (puppy, whelp), or from the particular one (basset, greyhound, borzoi, fox, etc.), over a hundred references to horses and several hundred other references to cats, rodents (mice, voles, rats, ferrets), birds (from swallows or sparrows to eagles) and insects of various kinds (from crickets to dragonflies). Of all these species, dogs and horses – by far, the protagonists' (Vivian, Ann and her father, nicknamed the Chief) favorites – are frequently particularized even nominally, because from the perspective of the doctor's extended family, they are true friends and communication partners, with rights sometimes superior to servants, acquaintances, or human friends. Far from being perceived as fictional ”commodity objects” or simple tools, used only to build or furnish the narrative world, animals are integrated, to varying degrees, in the families of main characters, they accompany, silently but expressively, their steps – either as partners with equal rights, either as identity doubles or complements – and even reflect, metonymically, the human's narrative evolution. Starting from these premises, my study (which combines elements of gender, trauma, and animal studies) will analyze both the various functions of the numerous elements of bestiary and animal characters, and the provocative stakes of their narrative valorization.

Anthropomorphism as an art of storytelling: Exploring Aesthetics and Ethical Implications in Children’s Literature

Animals are extremely important to children’s books. Among other narrative functions, animals serve as essential metaphors for understanding the human animal. They provide emotional comfort, stimulate imagination, and offer a safe space for exploring complex themes, all of which contribute to children's emotional and cognitive development. Beyond their psychological appeal, animal characters in children's literature also offer significant educational value. This paper explores the aesthetics and ethical implications of anthropomorphism in Children’s Literature. Anthropomorphism is transmitted in kids through storytelling and then in the form of print media. It enhances the cognitive skills in children. The concept can be used in many ways to inculcate moral lessons in children. It teaches how to look at life. Kids learn to deal with their emotions. The paper analyses the stories of Panchatantra and Aesop’s Fables and the concept of Anthropomorphism and how it is used in children’s stories to understand and give a persona to the creatures who live alongside humans.

Integrating Sustainable Educational Innovations and Spatial Cognition: A Study of Factors Affecting College Students’ Sustainable Learning Behavior in Virtual Simulation Environments

Objective: This study investigated the factors influencing college students’ continuous utilization intention of virtual simulation software (Animation Character Virtual Simulation Software V1.0) in the context of current efforts to promote sustainable educational practices and explored design strategies to enhance this willingness in a sustainable manner. Method: Based on the Expectation Confirmation Model of Information System Continuance (ECM-ISC), this study developed a model to examine the impact of college students’ spatial ability (SA) on their virtual simulation learning behavior. Upon administering a questionnaire to the selected participants (N = 164), the survey data were analyzed for reliability and validity. Subsequently, the relationships among the model’s variables were explored. Result: For college students majoring in Digital Media Art, spatial ability significantly positively affects their sustainable utilization intention of virtual simulation software within 3D virtual scenarios. Meanwhile, it positively impacts perceived ease of use (PEU) and flow experience (FE), which are key factors in promoting the sustainable adoption of such technologies. The introduced spatial ability, perceived ease of use, and flow experience influence the endogeneity of the ECM-ISC. Moreover, gender differences in spatial ability are profound among these students. Conclusion: The primary influencing pathway is spatial ability → flow experience → expectation confirmation → perceived usefulness → continuous utilization intention. Enhancing spatial ability is one effective way to advance virtual simulation software, offering new insights for its design and long-term improvement in alignment with sustainable educational practices.

Research on Animation Character Expression Generation Based on Attention Conditioned Cyclegan

With advancements in computer vision and AI, deep learning is applied in animation and game design to enhance facial expression realism. This study proposes ACCGAN, an innovative method for automated animated character expression generation and transfer using deep learning. By integrating cycle consistency, conditional generation, and attention mechanisms, ACCGAN optimizes GANs in capturing complex expression features, maintaining naturalness, and accurately expressing details. ACCGAN utilizes multi-level attention mechanisms, dynamically adjusting focus on key facial features, enhancing capture and expression.

Plagiarism detection of anime character portraits

With the expansion of animation industry, there has been a recurring issue of animation plagiarism. Currently, the technology for copyright protection and plagiarism detection in animation is limited. This paper proposes a framework of plagiarism detection for animation character portraits. A Seq2Seq-based model is proposed for extracting the morphological features of animation portraits. By studying portrait morphological fitting simulation, a significant progress is made in learning facial characteristic of animation portraits. With the fitting mechanism, the proposed model can effectively learn the representative essential features of animation portraits. We also propose several loss functions to enhance recognizability and feature mapping ability between original and pirated animation portraits. By comparing the similarity between the pirated and original versions, plagiarism detection is carried out. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model has a good fitting effect and effectively detect the authenticity and piracy of the animation portraits.

Animation Character Mouth Matching Model Considering Reinforcement Learning and Feature Extraction

Animation Character Mouth Matching Model Considering Reinforcement Learning and Feature Extraction

Retraction Note: Light image enhancement based on embedded image system application in animated character images

Retraction Note: Light image enhancement based on embedded image system application in animated character images

Research on animation design of woodblock print characters based on audience aesthetic differences

Traditional woodblock prints are a kind of Chinese folk traditional painting art, with a long history and unique artistic style. It has a long history and unique artistic style. The richness of its themes and wide range of applications cover many aspects such as New Year festivals, wedding banquets and birthday celebrations, religious rituals and lanterns and toys. The wide range of themes and wide range of applications of woodblock prints creates a rich and colourful connotation, especially traditional stories and character images, which constitute an important part of the woodblock prints, there are very rich story resources and character resources in the woodblock prints for animation creators to refer to, different creators of woodblock prints have different understandings and re-designs, and the audience has mixed feelings about the effect of character design. With the development of modern animation production technology and the increasing attention to traditional culture, more and more practitioners have begun to explore the animation of story characters in the non-heritage culture, and this paper aims to explore the feasible path of animation of the elements in woodblock prints under the aesthetic differences.

The “Door” to Doraemon’s Fantasy World: Understanding the Cartoon Café and Its Place Meanings

The popularity of animated characters has led foodservice operators to open restaurants that put cartoons at center stage. This type of establishment is referred to as a “cartoon café.” This qualitative inquiry employed two empirical studies to answer why customers patronize this type of eatery. Building on relational third-place theory (RTPT), it underscores how customer needs can ultimately shape loyalty outcomes through customer experience and place meaning. This research extends RTPT by highlighting the role of experience and co-developed (e.g., cartoon and restaurant) place meanings. It enriches the place meaning literature by acknowledging different interactive processes among personal experience, social interaction, and the physical environment in the hospitality setting. It also furthers the understanding of loyalty behaviors in hospitality services by offering a typology based on specific meanings of a third place. Implications for theory and practice are further discussed in the article.

Design and Implementation of Multi-mode Natural Interaction of Game Animation Characters in Mixed Reality: A Novel User Experience Method

To enhance users’ novel experiences in gaming, the design method of multi-mode natural interaction of game animation characters in mixed reality is studied. Through the process of skeleton modeling, interpolation of position and orientation, time alignment and time transformation of character posture, the game animation character in mixed reality is constructed. The multi-role interactive game animation is synthesized using a random graph and uniform network, and the edge of the depth of field image collected by the Kinect somatosensory sensor is extracted. According to the transfer model and observation model of the Kalman filter algorithm, the motion trajectory of the game animation characters is obtained and the game animation characters are tracked. The IRS recognition algorithm is used for optical multi-touch processing in mixed reality, and the natural interaction of multi-mode game animation characters in interaction–perception mode, natural interaction mode and interactive feedback mode is realized. The experimental results demonstrate that this method can achieve multi-mode natural interaction of game animation characters in mixed reality and provide users with a novel game experience.

Performance evaluation of generative adversarial networks for anime face synthesis using deep learning approaches

Anime characters have transcended their traditional animation role, permeating entertainment, video games, and social media. Online platforms, including prominent blogs and forums, are filled with references and adaptations of these characters. This digital ubiquity has spurred creators to develop innovative storytelling methods through the internet, fostering new avenues for anime character creation. Notably, advanced systems like Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have emerged as powerful tools for this purpose. This research investigates the capabilities of various GAN variants in generating anime faces. The Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) serves as a key metric for performance comparison. The analysis focuses on Deep Convolutional GAN (DCGAN), Progressively Growing GAN (ProGAN), and Style GAN2. Additionally, the performance metrics of the DCGAN model are examined. The findings show demonstrate significant differences in FID scores across these GANs. Notably, Style GAN2 exhibits superior performance in generating anime faces, achieving a significantly lower FID score (31) compared to DCGAN (625) and ProGAN (218.3). This research underscores Style GAN2's superior effectiveness in creating anime characters within the digital landscape.

Virtual Teacher-Aided Learning System Based on Voice Operated Character Animation

Virtual Teacher-Aided Learning System Based on Voice Operated Character Animation

2D/3D Expression Generation Using Advanced Learning Techniques and the Emotion Wheel

Facial expression analysis is a critical component in numerous applications, ranging from human- computer interaction to digital character animation. Despite the availability of extensive datasets, most focus predominantly on basic emotions, limiting the expressiveness and applicability of models trained on them. This article introduces a novel approach to generating compound emotional expressions by leveraging the Emotion Wheel, a principle that captures the complex interrelations between basic emotions. Our method integrates the EMOCA (Emotion Driven Monocular Face Capture and Animation) [1] framework, which enhances 3D facial reconstruction by incorporating emotion recognition, stacking models [2, 54] with a sophisticated expression blending algorithm to synthesize nuanced 2D and 3D facial animations. Utilizing the VKIST dataset, which includes high-resolution facial images of Vietnamese individuals, we build a comprehensive database of emotion parameters. Through principal component analysis (PCA) and correlation-driven blending, our approach not only enhances the realism of generated facial expressions but also preserves the subtle nuances that are characteristic of human emotions. Experimental results demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms traditional linear interpolation techniques, producing more distinct and recognizable blended expressions. A user study further validates the naturalness and quality of the generated expressions, with average ratings indicating a strong preference for the proposed method over existing approaches. These findings suggest significant potential for improving emotional expressiveness in both static and dynamic digital character representations.

중국 신화 IP를 활용한 3D 애니메이션의 캐릭터 개발 전략 연구 - <나타지마동강세>(2019)를 중심으로

『Ne Zha: Birth of the Demon Child』 is the first 3D animation based on the popular Chinese mythological IP, Ne Zha, and has achieved great success, giving hope to China's 3D animation market. This study aims to compare and analyze the character development process of the animation character based on the existing Ne Zha IP with the characters in 『Ne Zha: Birth of the Demon Child』 to understand how to utilize Chinese mythological IP in modern animation production. The research results show that the character of Ne Zha in 『Ne Zha: Birth of the Demon Child』 retains traditional features while modernizing to breathe new life into the character. Secondly, by adopting Disney's character design strategies and actively utilizing 3D graphic technology, the character's details were enhanced, breaking away from traditional character images. Thirdly, the traditional character was adapted to fit modern social backgrounds, providing audiences with a strong sense of immersion. It is hoped that this study will serve as a basic reference for creators and researchers who aim to produce animations based on traditional mythological IPs.

Shokubutsu da!: A Fun Learning for Young Learners to Learn Japanese

Teaching Japanese to young learners is a challenge. Young learners need exciting media to learn Japanese vocabulary more easily. Hence, we created Shokubutsu da!, an animated video that is a smart learning media packed with exciting stories narrated in Indonesian, except the names of animal or plant characters are all Japanese. The video allows young learners to memorize Japanese vocabulary much more quickly. This research aims to determine the results of applying video learning Shokubutsu da! to young learners, namely kindergarten age. The method used in this study is qualitative-descriptive, which describes the implementation of animated video in class through observation. This study concluded that most children find remembering the Japanese vocabulary of plants and animals easy by watching the animated video Shokubutsu da!. The video can be more practical because young learners can self-learn, allowing them to play the video repeatedly at any time. Furthermore, the children were enthusiastic, as the video allowed them to have fun learning and memorizing Japanese vocabulary.

Bibliometric Analysis of a Comprehensive of Culture and Symbol in Character Animation during (2004–2024)

Bibliometric Analysis of a Comprehensive of Culture and Symbol in Character Animation during (2004–2024)

Aesthetics and Values in Animated Opera Characters: The Fusion and Innovation of Tradition and Modernity

In today's cultural exchange and heritage, animation, as a modern communication medium, is gradually becoming an important means of expressing traditional opera characters. This paper explores the fusion and innovation of tradition and modernity in the aesthetics and value expression of animated opera characters. By analyzing the aesthetic characteristics and value expressions of traditional opera characters, combined with the application of modern animation techniques, this study elucidates the unique advantages of animation in conveying the cultural connotations of opera and social values. Finally, the paper proposes strategies for combining traditional aesthetics with modern technology, and new pathways for innovative value expression in animated media, aiming to provide theoretical support and practical guidance for the modernization of traditional cultural dissemination.