On the whole, I find characterisations in movies more convincing than those in novels. Characters in a movie are played by real people, with real, expressive human faces; so no matter how badly written, directed or performed, at least some trace of humanity is present in the character. This is true even when the character is played by Kevin Coster. Characters in a novel, on the other hand, are purely the self-indulgent fantasies of the novelist, who is usually a charlatan who knows almost nothing about the way real people think or behave, and also an inveterate bullshitter. I can't remember the last character I read in a novel who was even remotely convincing. (And the tiresome postmodern trick of "this character is an obvious artifice" is less convincing still.)
The only advantages novels have in the realm of characterisation is that they can explore a character's internal world in a manner and depth impossible in film, and can afford to spend more time and space in developing the character. In a way, artifice is overcome by sheer quantity.
Animated films seem to me the worst of both worlds, doomed to deal with false characters in a shallow way. This is particularly true of a heavily stylised animated medium like Anime, where faces fit to a template from which the possible variation is quite limited. (I wonder if there is a strong correlation between a taste for Anime and austistic tendencies? It must be a lot easier to deal with facial expressions drawn from such a limited set of brush strokes.)