character-appeal

character-appeal is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from dylantarre/animation-principles. It costs 40 tokens per session (906 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to designing and animating characters that attract attention and feel memorable. Character appeal means creating a figure audiences want to watch or understand, not simply making it attractive.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for heroes, villains, sidekicks, mascots, and other characters whose design, poses, expressions, and movement need to communicate personality.
Why use it?
It helps characters avoid feeling generic, unreadable, or lacking personality.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it for heroes, villains, sidekicks, mascots, and other characters whose design, poses, expressions, and movement need to communicate personality.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/dylantarre/animation-principles/character-appeal
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add dylantarre/animation-principles --skill character-appeal
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/dylantarre/animation-principles

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for character-appeal

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/dylantarre/animation-principles/character-appeal/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/dylantarre/animation-principles/character-appeal)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/dylantarre/animation-principles/character-appeal"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/dylantarre/animation-principles/character-appeal/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for character-appeal

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/dylantarre/animation-principles/character-appeal"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/dylantarre/animation-principles/character-appeal.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 40 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 906 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 18 Mar 2026
  • Snyk pass 15 Feb 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00040 $0.00906
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.00453
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00181
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00091

Measured 11d ago against content hash ee452bf5a45c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

character-appeal scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/02-by-thinking-style/character-appeal/SKILL.md · 87 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 87 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Character Appeal

Think like a casting director watching auditions. Appeal isn't just "cute"—it's magnetic. Characters must demand attention, invite empathy, and feel uniquely themselves.

Core Mental Model

Before animating any character, ask: Why would anyone want to watch this person?

Appeal is the quality that makes audiences invest. It's not prettiness—villains have appeal. It's the sense that this character is worth following. Their movement reveals their soul.

The 12 Principles Through Personality

Appeal — The principle itself. Design and motion that invites connection. Clear silhouette. Readable expression. Movement that expresses inner life. Characters you remember.

Solid Drawing — Characters must have dimensional presence. They need to feel like they could be picked up, like they have weight and mass. Solidity creates believability.

Exaggeration — Personality pushed to clarity. A cautious character is extremely cautious in movement. A bold character moves with unmistakable confidence. Amplify defining traits.

Staging — Present characters for maximum impact. Their best angles, their clearest poses. Give them their spotlight moment. Staging serves character.

Anticipation — Character-specific preparation. How does this particular character wind up for action? A nervous character anticipates differently than a confident one.

Timing — Personal tempo. Every character has their own natural rhythm. Quick and anxious. Slow and deliberate. Timing is personality in motion.

Secondary Action — Habits and quirks. The gestures a character does without thinking. A hair-twirl, a nose-scratch, a weight-shift. Secondary actions individualize.

Follow Through & Overlapping Action — Physical personality. Heavy characters settle differently than light ones. Hair and clothing respond to how the character moves.

Squash & Stretch — Elasticity of personality. Rigid characters barely squash. Flexible personalities stretch easily. The body type reflects the inner type.

Read the full file on GitHub · 87 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 87 lines · 40 tokens per session scan A ee452bf5a45c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

character-appeal is a skill published in the GitHub repository dylantarre/animation-principles (80 stars, last pushed 8mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 40 tokens to every session and 906 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

animation-reverse-engineering

Reverse-engineer any motion reference (a video from X/Twitter, Dribbble, a screen recording, a GIF) into production animation code through frame-level dissection. Use when the user shares a video/URL and says "implement this animation", "recreate this motion", "port this interaction", "how does this animate", "clone…

sendaifun/skills · 176 tokens

animated-portfolio-sites

Build a one-page animated personal or portfolio site (canvas starfield, rotating galaxies with mouse parallax, hidden accordion/card content, anchor nav) and publish it free on GitHub Pages. Covers the canvas technique and the Pages permission wall, not just one task.

pedroiff0/awesome-skills · 58 tokens

slideshow

Author a HyperFrames slideshow — a presentation, pitch deck, or interactive deck with discrete slides, fragment reveals, branching, hotspot navigation, and built-in presenter mode with speaker notes; also converts an existing page into a deck. Output is a navigable deck, not a rendered MP4. If the user didn't…

heygen-com/hyperframes · 83 tokens

hyperframes-core

The HyperFrames composition contract — build one renderable project. Use for composition structure, the data- timing attributes, class="clip", tracks, sub-compositions, variables, framework-owned media playback, deterministic-render rules, and validation. Also covers Tailwind projects and the STORYBOARD.md / SCRIPT.md…

heygen-com/hyperframes · 77 tokens

muapi-seedance-2

Expert Cinema Director skill for Seedance 2.0 (ByteDance) — high-fidelity video generation across Chinese, Global, and VIP tiers. Supports text-to-video, image-to-video, first-last-frame, omni reference, character training, omni-reference training, video editing, and watermark removal.

SamurAIGPT/Generative-Media-Skills · 67 tokens

muapi-workflow

Build, run, and visualize multi-step AI generation workflows. The AI architect translates natural language descriptions into connected node graphs — chain image generation, video creation, enhancement, and editing into automated pipelines.

SamurAIGPT/Generative-Media-Skills · 44 tokens