The technology described herein is directed to a media indexer framework including a character recognition engine that automatically detects and groups instances (or occurrences) of characters in a multi-frame animated media file. More specifically, the character recognition engine automatically detects and groups the instances (or occurrences) of the characters in the multi-frame animated media file such that each group contains images associated with a single character. The character groups are then labeled and used to train an image classification model. Once trained, the image classification model can be applied to subsequent multi-frame animated media files to automatically classifying the animated characters included therein.