Audience Perception of Exaggerated Motions on Realistic Animated Animal Characters

The recent push for more detailed graphics and realistic visuals in animated productions has sparked much debate around the new films’ photorealistic visual style. Some critics argue that the new “live-action” versions of movie classics such as the Lion King are not as visually stylish as the original ones, and the photorealistic characters are not as likeable, fun and intriguing as their stylized counterparts. This paper reports ongoing research whose goal is to examine whether it is possible to apply traditional animation principles to photorealistic animated animal characters in order to make them more expressive, convincing and ultimately entertaining. In particular, the study reported in the paper investigated the extent to which varying degrees of exaggeration affect the perceived believability and appeal of a photorealistic talking cat character performing a series of actions in a high detail environment. The study included 82 participants and compared three levels of exaggeration applied to the cat’s motions, e.g. no exaggeration, low exaggeration and high exaggeration. Findings show that subjects found the no-exaggeration clip more appealing and believable than the exaggerated versions, although the difference in appeal was not statistically significant. When comparing the two exaggerated clips, participants rated the high exaggeration clip higher for believability and appeal than the low exaggeration one.