How to avoid character design tropes for animation?

A personal illustration of mine.

I’m writing this blog post as a group of students taking my Animation Fundamentals 1 course enters into Week 4, where they are tasked with writing a variety of character personalities, gathering character inspiration references, and sketching character designs made by the pros in the industry. It’s a nice introductory week where we begin calibrating our brains to designing interesting, dynamic characters after several weeks of technical, observational figure drawing and hand drawing.

I wanted to expand upon the process of creating a ‘unique’ character design that I discuss in the Week 4 video lecture. I find that many of my students have a difficult time with this, so I’ll discuss some ways to improve your character design in the short term and long term. It is very hard to avoid falling into a character trope or cliché, especially since most of my students are often pulling their inspiration from existing animation media.

An illustration of mine for a picture book.

Personality Tropes in Character Design

Every year, I receive around 50-100 character designs from all my students. There are always a significant swath of these designs that tend to feel a little hollow — not quite believable as living, breathing characters. I think there are a number of factors that contribute to this feeling, but rather than dwell on individual drawing approaches, I wanted to break down some of the common tropes I’ve found that pop up a lot:

• shy, lost teenagers who have some kind of secret gift, often magical or artistic.

• cute witches — I get so many cute witches!

• cutegurl™ (just kidding, no trademark) — a lot of my students just want to make that next cute girl character that it’s become its own archetype.

• dark, antihero, rebellious teen whose ready to burn down ‘the system’

• complex dragon / quadroped creature — probably the most difficult mechanically than any other on this list.

• robots of all kinds — often cute, sometimes dieselpunky, or solarpunky.

There are many more, and some subgenres of these ones, but this gives you a sense of what’s most common. Now, I believe there is still room to creative new versions of this tropes, but the competition is fierce! I find that often my teenage students basically want to recreate themselves in cartoon form, and I would highly encourage not to approach your character design in this highly individualistic way. Great characters occupy a very particular space within a story.

It’s just incredibly hard to stand out without a fantastic design sense and expert knowledge of anatomy, and especially how to express that anatomy in a stylized, interesting way. These tropes also feel recycled from existing characters already present in the animation industry, sometimes many times over. This isn’t especially surprising because this is where most of our students get their inspiration from! If you are stuck in one of these tropes, I have some tips for you to pull yourself up out of them; some are more immediately effective, and some will take a lot longer to subtly work their way into your designs and story ideas.

An illustration of mine commissioned for a picture book.

Immediate Character Trope Repair

Artists in many previous times throughout history would improve their work through making many ‘master studies’, copies of the masters of their era or earlier. This makes a lot of sense, because those revered master artists had already put forth a lot of the hard labour of tackling artistic challenges in their own ways, so by making copies of their work, it’s believed to help us understand how they approached their work. Not only this, but it gets us apprentice artists ‘caught up‘ more quickly than approaching the same challenges and starting from scratch.

This also helps with getting caught up with different designs from contemporary character design professionals. What often happens is younger, less experienced artists will find themselves, for example, drawing noses in the same way every time, or eyes, or any component of a character. By instead copying from existing character designer’s works, you can see what it feels like to approach the challenges differently; I call it “trying on someone else’s lines”. It helps break the mold of artistic stasis, or artist’s block. Without doing this, you are stuck with only the way that you can naturally think of drawing, which is an unnecessary, solo trek. Art is a collaborative discipline, and we all learn from each other, despite what any industry exec wants us to consider. So although your character personality might be a bit simple, you will learn to design that character in a way that is more than the sum of their parts; that expands beyond your initial write up for them.

When doing these studies, be careful not to draw from a single character designer’s work; source widely! The more the merrier. This will ensure that your work isn’t too heavily influenced by any single designer. Neil Gaiman, in his wonderfully inspiring commencement speech, says that “we need to sound like many people before we find our own voice”. How true this is! This is a great statement to celebrate the artists’ relationship with their craft guilds in the middle ages, where learning was primarily a collaborative affair.

Here are some great references to draw from:

• For older, classic character designers works, visit the Living Lines Library, specifically the Concepts & Model Sheets.

• For more contemporary designer’s works, visit the Pinterest board of the aptly named Character Design References.

Fairly obvious, but just understand that doing studies of other artist’s work is solely for the purpose of learning, not to claim as your own.

A personal illustration of mine.

Longer Term Character Trope Avoidance

The longer term way to avoid character personality tropes is a wide set of habits and skills to develop within yourself, with the added bonus that they will make you a more full human being in the process. All of my students probably know this about me, but I am a big advocate for young artists being well-rounded in their knowledge of arts and culture broadly; so that you are more than just a talented pair of hands that can make beautiful lines on a page, though that is a wonderful start. These habits involve cultivating a hungry curiosity for the world, and continually seeking knowledge of the many incredibly interesting things out there. This may seem vague, but to get down to specifics, here are some ways to break open your cultural infuences:

• Read a lot of books! Ideally ones that lend themselves to become a better storyteller; either directly or indirectly (history, anthropology, mythology, psychology, philosophy, and for all of the above, not just Western sources). I will provide a list of some very general places to start in a future post.

• Watch films that occupy an important corner of the world of filmmaking — whether by having incredible characters, or by expressing ineffable truths. Be curious of the form and function of filmmaking; animation or otherwise.

• Seek out other artforms and distinguish between the similarities and differences of your own visual medium.

• Write your own thoughts from what you learn along the way, and then continue learning.

What is described above is basically a self-seeking degree in humanities that will properly prime you with the cultural influences that are continually expressed through various art forms, and will help you to understand the character’s personalities that you make, and thus will inform the design that seeks to clothe that personality in three dimensional form.

If we want our characters to live and breathe, we must first understand what it is for characters to live and breathe, and to do this we must become forever curious, imaginative, storytellers. While this is obviously less of an immediate corrective to an existing character design issue, it is something to begin properly orienting yourself towards that will encourage the right kind of thinking towards the whole thing. It will help you answer the “why” of your stories and characters’ places within them. It will help you tell stories that will influence people, like all of the stories in our own lives that make up small corners of our being.

This will also help you to cross that threshold of being simply a fan of animation, and being an artist.