This paper analyses the communicative aspects of the look of contemporary Brazilian animation short movie´s characters, using resources from Semiology. Animation cinema became an art at the beginning of the 20th century. With the cultural industry, it has cemented lots of characters in spectator´s memories around the world. However, the high expenses of animated movies´ production force many artists to produce their authorial animations as short movies. Due to the brevity of these movies, their creators repeatedly use types and caricatures as main characters, presented morphologically as signs that can easily be recognized by most of the audiences. This research considers the hypothesis that the look of characters from animated short movies is a system designed (intentionally or not) to communicate to the spectator messages of prompt comprehension concerned to the narrative shown and to the concepts personified by the characters in the short period of time in which they are acting. Based on the survey of sixty main characters from Brazilian awarded movies at the twelve first editions of Anima Mundi festival (1993- 2004), this dissertation investigated the existing stereotypes in recent Brazilian animation short movies. Then, it tried to outline ways in which the visual elements that constitute these stereotypes act in the signifying process of the animated characters, working together as a specific visual language. In order to carry out such investigation, the adopted methodological procedures were based on Roland Barthes´ Semiology and Vladimir Propp´s concept of characters´ attributes.