A system for indexing animated content receives detections extracted from a media file, where each one of the detections includes an image extracted from a corresponding frame of the media file that corresponds to a detected instance of an animated character. The system determines, for each of the received detections, an embedding defining a set of characteristics for the detected instance. The embedding associated with each detection is provided to a grouping engine that is configured to dynamically configure at least one grouping parameter based on a total number of the detections received. The grouping engine is also configured to sort the detections into groups using the grouping parameter and the embedding for each detection. A character ID is assigned to each one of the groups of detections, and the system indexes the groups of detections in a database in association with the character ID assigned to each group.