From Pixels to Personas: Tracking the Evolution of Anime Characters
Rongze Liu, Jiaxin Pei, Jian Zhu

TL;DR
This study analyzes the evolution of anime characters over decades using multimodal data, revealing shifts in audience demographics, character design trends, and the influence of visual signals on popularity.
Contribution
It introduces a computational approach combining textual, visual, and popularity data to identify evolving archetypes and visual tropes in anime characters.
Findings
Audience shifted from children to young adults over time.
Moe-ification has increased since the 2000s, with softer female traits.
Visual signals like moe faces dominate in influencing popularity.
Abstract
Anime, originated from Japan, is one of the most influential cultural products in modern society and is especially popular among younger generations. The popularity of anime reflects important cultural evolutions in our society. Despite existing research on anime as a cultural phenomenon, we still have a limited understanding of how anime really evolves over the years. In this study, using a large-scale multimodal dataset of anime characters from an anime review site, we applied computational methods that integrate textual, visual, and production features of anime characters with online popularity traces. By combining LLM-extracted personality features with avatar features, we identify recurring personality archetypes and visual tropes with their temporal evolution over the past decades. We found that the target audience of anime has undergone a systematic shift from children to a…
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