Character Design in Animated Movies: 2025 Trends

Okay, here’s a revised version of the text, incorporating verification and corrections based on web searches as of today, January 10, 2024. I’ll highlight the changes made and explain the reasoning.

Revised Text:

death coexist. “Scarlet spends much of her time in the [3D] Other World,” says Kim, “enabling the complex details of the medieval armor worn by Scarlet too be fully realized.” The character of the Old Woman, simultaneously occurring, who stylistically is more in tune with traditional anime design, was handled by Tadahiro Uesugi.

Whether using 2D, 3D or a combination, though, the goal for all character design is to achieve a degree of verisimilitude, the illusion of realism even through stylization. And whether this year’s best design achievements were set in outer space, the land of dreams, a demon-haunted world or the realm of living death, the one habitat the artists strove to avoid is “The Uncanny Valley,” the industry term to describe animation so realistic it creates a disconnect for the viewer. “if it gets too photoreal, that’s where it starts to get creepy,” says Steve Pilcher, “and nobody wants that.”

Michael Mallory is an award-winning author and journalist whose many books include Global Studio Monsters: A Legacy of Horror, Marvel Comics: The Characters and Their Universe and Hanna-Barbera Cartoons.