Cartoon Character in Animation Media for Preserving Folklore Traditional Art in Surakarta

This study aims to preserve spoken traditional art, especially folklore in Surakarta area and to use it as a character education media for young generation through cartoon character animation since folklore needs audiences’ visualization. This study is an application research containing five stages, namely observation, collecting information and idea, elaboration for determining main idea through analysis, integration, abstraction, generalization, transmutation, synthesis to make the concept of artwork, realizing the concept in various art media, and finalization to complete the process in the form of artwork. The data were animation characters and folklores obtained by field observation and interview with some informants, namely cultural observer, historian, cartoonist, and expert in animation. Data validity test employed data triangulation techniques in terms of data source and theory triangulations. The result of this study is that cartoon characters as media for delivering folklore through animation are disseminated into some educational institutions, governmental institutions and communities in Surakarta. These animation media of folklore in terms of cartoon character are supposed to be used as a media to introduce and to preserve folklore tradition to society, especially young generation in Surakarta.