Creating Emotional Connections with Non-Human Characters
Personification means giving human qualities to inanimate objects, animals, things, or abstract shapes. These can talk, dress, move, think, express themselves, or act like humans. In other words, they come to life: they can get angry, laugh, complain when something hits them, or even drown someone (think of a glass of water or the ocean). Personification is a common tool that enables quick audience understanding.
This technique doesn’t just humanize non-human figures, it transforms them into powerful characters capable of connecting with viewers.
Heider & Simmel Animation (1944).
This wonderful, simple video is an experiment conducted by psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel in the 1940s to study human behavior. When people were asked what they saw and what they thought about what was happening in the video, they attributed emotions, intentions, and human actions to the geometric shapes. “They’re attacking each other,” “that one’s angry,” “the circle is hiding,” and so on. In other words, viewers gave them recognizable actions and behaviors.
Humans Search for Meaning in Everything We See
They demonstrated that humans search for meaning in everything we see, primarily based on our own experience. We’re capable of seeing a hippopotamus in a cloud or a smile in a keyhole simply because we make connections with what we already know.
By attributing human personality to any shape and explaining our characters to the audience in a language they understand, we create empathy and ensure they grasp the message we want to convey. The audience will quickly recognize whether our character is tired, sad, in love, or furious.
How to Give Characters Personality
To bring a character to life and make it convincing and coherent, we need to know what human characteristics our character has and how it would act if it were a person at different points in the story. This includes:
- Define who they are and their role in the story
- Physical traits (does something make them different?)
- Personality and temperament
- How they move and act
- How they feel
- Way of speaking
- Quirks
- What they like and dislike
And anything else essential to building your character.
So, for example, if your character is a sneaker, you might ask yourself: Who are they in the story? How do they feel when thrown into a dumpster? Do they miss their matching sneaker? Do they cry at night? How does a person act when they cry and feel sad? How do you apply that to your sneaker? Does it cry water or do its laces turn into tears? What will it do to escape the trash?
Or imagine a character who can talk to the future like to a friend. What would that future look like? How would they talk to it? What would they talk about? Would only your character see it, or other characters too? If the audience could also see it, what would it look like?
And so on, ask yourself as many questions as you need to build believable characters capable of moving your audience. The audience must understand your characters’ behavior, even if they’re not living beings, and personification is a valuable tool that helps you establish that connection with them.
