{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,10]],"date-time":"2025-10-10T01:39:56Z","timestamp":1760060396602,"version":"build-2065373602"},"reference-count":36,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"9","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2025,8,29]],"date-time":"2025-08-29T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1756425600000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["T2422010","62172170"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["T2422010","62172170"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"name":"Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities","award":["T2422010","62172170"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["T2422010","62172170"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Entropy"],"abstract":"<jats:p>The narrative structure of animated films plays a critical role in shaping audience perception, yet quantitative investigations into how character interaction networks influence film ratings remain limited. To address this gap, we apply complex network theory to analyze 82 animated films, extracting character networks from narrative interactions and examining key topological features\u2014including centrality heterogeneity, protagonist relative centrality, network density, clustering coefficient, average shortest path length, and semantic diversity of relationships. Our findings demonstrate that higher-rated films are characterized by greater disparities in character centrality, lower network density and efficiency, longer average shortest path lengths, and richer semantic diversity. These structural patterns suggest that loosely connected yet hierarchically organized character networks enhance narrative complexity and audience engagement. The proposed framework offers a quantitative, data-driven approach to narrative design and provides a theoretical foundation for analyzing storytelling structures across diverse media, including novels, television series, and comics.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/e27090914","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,8,29]],"date-time":"2025-08-29T16:42:21Z","timestamp":1756485741000},"page":"914","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Uncovering Structure\u2014Rating Associations in Animated Film Character Networks"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"27","author":[{"given":"Jue","family":"Zeng","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"The MOE Engineering Research Center of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems, State Key Laboratory of Digital Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430074, China"}]},{"given":"Yiwen","family":"Tang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"The MOE Engineering Research Center of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems, State Key Laboratory of Digital Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430074, China"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-0676-9745","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Xueming","family":"Liu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"The MOE Engineering Research Center of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems, State Key Laboratory of Digital Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430074, China"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,8,29]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"171","DOI":"10.1007\/s10824-019-09372-1","article-title":"Leveraging analytics to produce compelling and profitable film content","volume":"45","author":"Behrens","year":"2021","journal-title":"J. Cult. Econ."},{"key":"ref_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"42044","DOI":"10.1109\/ACCESS.2022.3168161","article-title":"Movie popularity and target audience prediction using the content-based recommender system","volume":"10","author":"Sahu","year":"2022","journal-title":"IEEE Access"},{"key":"ref_3","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"81581","DOI":"10.1109\/ACCESS.2022.3195228","article-title":"Prediction of movie quality via adaptive voting classifier","volume":"10","author":"Faisal","year":"2022","journal-title":"IEEE Access"},{"key":"ref_4","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"102278","DOI":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2020.102278","article-title":"Movie revenue prediction based on purchase intention mining using YouTube trailer reviews","volume":"57","author":"Ahmad","year":"2020","journal-title":"Inf. Process. Manag."},{"key":"ref_5","unstructured":"Egri, L. (1960). The Art of Dramatic Writing Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives, Simon and Schuster. [2nd ed.]."},{"key":"ref_6","unstructured":"(2025, May 28). Genre Keyword: Animation. Available online: https:\/\/www.boxofficemojo.com\/genre\/sg4242469121\/."},{"key":"ref_7","unstructured":"(2025, May 28). Douban Movie. Available online: https:\/\/movie.douban.com\/explore."},{"key":"ref_8","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1","DOI":"10.1145\/3344548","article-title":"Extraction and analysis of fictional character networks: A survey","volume":"52","author":"Labatut","year":"2019","journal-title":"ACM Comput. Surv."},{"key":"ref_9","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Zhang, L., Li, C., Fan, L., and Shi, M. (2018, January 6\u20138). Analysis of character relationship in tv series based on complex network. Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE\/ACIS 17th International Conference on Computer and Information Science, Singapore.","DOI":"10.1109\/ICIS.2018.8466543"},{"key":"ref_10","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"256","DOI":"10.1109\/TMM.2008.2009684","article-title":"Rolenet: Movie analysis from the perspective of social networks","volume":"11","author":"Weng","year":"2009","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Multimed."},{"key":"ref_11","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Gleiser, P.M. (2007). How to become a superhero. J. Stat. Mech. Theory Exp., P09020.","DOI":"10.1088\/1742-5468\/2007\/09\/P09020"},{"key":"ref_12","unstructured":"Alberich, R., Miro-Julia, J., and Rossell\u00f3, F. (2002). Marvel Universe looks almost like a real social network. arXiv."},{"key":"ref_13","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"601","DOI":"10.1007\/s11042-011-0725-1","article-title":"Social network analysis in a movie using character-net","volume":"59","author":"Park","year":"2011","journal-title":"Multimed. Tools Appl."},{"key":"ref_14","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1894","DOI":"10.1016\/j.ipm.2019.02.005","article-title":"Integrating character networks for extracting narratives from multimodal data","volume":"56","author":"Lee","year":"2019","journal-title":"Inf. Process. Manag."},{"key":"ref_15","unstructured":"Douban (2025, May 28). Baidu Baike. Available online: https:\/\/baike.baidu.com\/item\/%E8%B1%86%E7%93%A3%E7%BD%91."},{"key":"ref_16","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"215","DOI":"10.1016\/0378-8733(78)90021-7","article-title":"Centrality in social networks conceptual clarification","volume":"1","author":"Freeman","year":"1978","journal-title":"Soc. Netw."},{"key":"ref_17","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"169","DOI":"10.1016\/0378-8733(91)90019-P","article-title":"Effects of communication network structure: Components of positional centrality","volume":"13","author":"Mullen","year":"1991","journal-title":"Soc. Netw."},{"key":"ref_18","unstructured":"Scott, J. (2000). Social Network Analysis: A Handbook, SAGE Publications Ltd.. [2nd ed.]."},{"key":"ref_19","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"161","DOI":"10.1002\/bs.3830100205","article-title":"An improved index of centrality","volume":"10","author":"Beauchamp","year":"1965","journal-title":"Behav. Sci."},{"key":"ref_20","unstructured":"Rochat, Y. (2009, January 26\u201328). Closeness Centrality Extended to Unconnected Graphs: The Harmonic Centrality Index. Proceedings of the ASNA 2009, Z\u00fcrich, Switzerland."},{"key":"ref_21","first-page":"1191","article-title":"Decoding the nexus of digital transformation and dynamic capabilities through harmonic centrality in the aviation sector","volume":"11","author":"Tuzlukaya","year":"2023","journal-title":"Bus. Manag. Stud. Int. J."},{"key":"ref_22","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"e1256","DOI":"10.1002\/widm.1256","article-title":"Social network analysis: An overview","volume":"8","author":"Tabassum","year":"2018","journal-title":"Wiley Interdiscip. Rev. Data Min. Knowl. Discov."},{"key":"ref_23","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"198701","DOI":"10.1103\/PhysRevLett.87.198701","article-title":"Efficient behavior of small-world networks","volume":"87","author":"Latora","year":"2001","journal-title":"Phys. Rev. Lett."},{"key":"ref_24","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Cui, Y., Che, W., Liu, T., Qin, B., Wang, S., and Hu, G. (2020, January 16\u201320). Revisiting Pre-Trained Models for Chinese Natural Language Processing. Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Findings, Online.","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/2020.findings-emnlp.58"},{"key":"ref_25","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"3504","DOI":"10.1109\/TASLP.2021.3124365","article-title":"Pre-training with whole word masking for chinese bert","volume":"29","author":"Cui","year":"2021","journal-title":"IEEE\/ACM Trans. Audio Speech Lang. Process."},{"key":"ref_26","unstructured":"Sun, Y., Wang, S., Li, Y., Feng, S., Chen, X., Zhang, H., Tian, X., Zhu, D., Tian, H., and Wu, H. (2019). Ernie: Enhanced representation through knowledge integration. arXiv."},{"key":"ref_27","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Zhang, X., Zhang, Y., Long, D., Xie, W., Dai, Z., Tang, J., Lin, H., Yang, B., Xie, P., and Huang, F. (2024). mgte: Generalized long-context text representation and reranking models for multilingual text retrieval. arXiv.","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/2024.emnlp-industry.103"},{"key":"ref_28","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"79","DOI":"10.1007\/s41109-023-00604-0","article-title":"Social network analysis of manga: Similarities to real-world social networks and trends over decades","volume":"8","author":"Sugishita","year":"2023","journal-title":"Appl. Netw. Sci."},{"key":"ref_29","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"208701","DOI":"10.1103\/PhysRevLett.89.208701","article-title":"Assortative mixing in networks","volume":"89","author":"Newman","year":"2002","journal-title":"Phys. Rev. Lett."},{"key":"ref_30","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"173","DOI":"10.1016\/S0378-8733(00)00023-X","article-title":"Some analyses of Erdos collaboration graph","volume":"22","author":"Batagelj","year":"2000","journal-title":"Soc. Netw."},{"key":"ref_31","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"3250301","DOI":"10.1155\/2017\/3250301","article-title":"On measuring the complexity of networks: Kolmogorov complexity versus entropy","volume":"2017","author":"Morzy","year":"2017","journal-title":"Complexity"},{"key":"ref_32","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"452","DOI":"10.1086\/jar.33.4.3629752","article-title":"An information flow model for conflict and fission in small groups","volume":"33","author":"Zachary","year":"1977","journal-title":"J. Anthropol. Res."},{"key":"ref_33","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Rossi, R., and Ahmed, N. (2015, January 25\u201330). The network data repository with interactive graph analytics and visualization. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Austin, TX, USA.","DOI":"10.1609\/aaai.v29i1.9277"},{"key":"ref_34","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1","DOI":"10.1016\/j.socnet.2013.11.001","article-title":"Relationship patterns in the 19th century: The friendship network in a German boys\u2019 school class from 1880 to 1881 revisited","volume":"37","author":"Heidler","year":"2014","journal-title":"Soc. Netw."},{"key":"ref_35","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Stehl\u00e9, J., Voirin, N., Barrat, A., Cattuto, C., Isella, L., Pinton, J., Quaggiotto, M., Van den Broeck, W., R\u00e9gis, C., and Lina, B. (2011). High-resolution measurements of face-to-face contact patterns in a primary school. PLoS ONE, 6.","DOI":"10.1371\/journal.pone.0023176"},{"key":"ref_36","unstructured":"(2025, May 28). Sociopatterns. Available online: http:\/\/www.sociopatterns.org."}],"container-title":["Entropy"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1099-4300\/27\/9\/914\/pdf","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,9]],"date-time":"2025-10-09T18:35:03Z","timestamp":1760034903000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1099-4300\/27\/9\/914"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2025,8,29]]},"references-count":36,"journal-issue":{"issue":"9","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,9]]}},"alternative-id":["e27090914"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/e27090914","relation":{},"ISSN":["1099-4300"],"issn-type":[{"type":"electronic","value":"1099-4300"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2025,8,29]]}}}