Journal of Computing Technologies and Creative Content 3(2), December2018 e-ISSN: 2550-1550 © 2018 JTeC All rights reserved Page 1 Appealing Characters in Malaysian Animated Film Mohd Rosli Bin Arshad Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Malaysian Institute of Information Technology, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. mrosli@unikl.edu.my Kim Hae Yoon Dongseo University, Graduate Design Department, Busan, Republic of Korea kimhaeyoon@gdsu.dongseo.ac.kr Muhammad Azmin Bin Mohamad Ghazali Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Malaysian Institute of Information Technology, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia azmin@unikl.edu.my Abstract— Malaysian animation viewers rapidly influenced by digital media entertainment. The rise of such entertainment tends to drive them away from understanding what lies behind it that affect their emotion and thoughts. This research explore the observation of Malaysian youth, to understand on how they feel about Malaysian animated film characters towards appealing design. A descriptive and One-Way Anova will be implement in this study to examine the design aesthetics and perception from the animation viewers that affects the psychological experiences in emotions that determines the appealing factors. Overall, the results indicate that the perceived appealing on Malaysian animated cartoon characters did not differ between age and gender. We believe this finding will benefits the creative content creators and help them to understand more about local animation viewers. Keywords—component; Appealing Characters, Emotions, Animated Film Characters, Design Aesthetics I. INTRODUCTION Animation have co evolved since the beginnings. Animation is a pop culture that aroused significantly from Disney and Anime. They are the key influences for many animation moviegoers around the world. It is not only inspired the style and animation art form but it also affects the humanity and life-style [1]. Designing a good game or movie character requires more than only having an idea nowadays. From the development of the storytelling in animation, designing good animated characters requires a coherent and consistent character design skill and the artist need to consider many restrictions to develop suitable characters in the story. Creating an appealing character designs in animation has been both a distinct challenge as well as a space for exploration for animators throughout animation’s history. The creation of character design in animation is closely related to many aspects in human society. The process of designing the animated character has become an important process not only for visual but also bound to many specifications that advent from myths and legends and inspired from society throughout centuries. It is through the Character Design that physical and psychological characteristics is presented, giving the character depth and making it connect with audience [2]. As described by Bryan Tillman [4], in order to achieve a satisfactory result, a character designer needs to combination different elements. These elements are the psychological and physical aspects of the character and the story that revolves around it. The importance of character design in animation and other media may have an indirect impact on the emotion of the viewers. The importance of design and color in animated films is very significant in order to portray a specific mood or emotion [3]. Animated feature films are extremely expensive to create, costing some studios hundreds of millions of dollars. On a large scale production, it is critical that every detail is perfect. In order to avoid failure, it is important to understand human visual attention when designing characters of animated films. Hence, this study concerns on the affective impact of animated characters in Malaysian animated film towards emotional responses among Malaysian animation viewers. Therefore, the focus of this paper is to look into the experiences of “enjoyable” in viewers’ emotion that stimulate the perception of pleasure and to understand whether Malaysian animated film characters gave and appealing appearance to them. The aim is merely to understand the difference between gender and age will influences the sense of pleasure on character design aesthetics and identify whether gender and age preferences gave a significant impact to the overall animation films. The significant of this research is imperative to recognize empathy among Malaysian youth on character animated film contents. Furthermore, this study could provide an evidence that design aesthetics in character design in Malaysian animations visual reinforcement has become one of a cinematic tools, and plays an important role to connect with the audiences. It represent a way that empirical experience accumulated by the audiences and will draw upon an evidence that reflect their human perception and cognition. In the end, digital creators must consider the impact on consumers’ evaluations and considerations, ultimately, their satisfactions. II. METHODOLOGY In order to investigate whether the character design aesthetics contribute to people’s perception and emotion, we