The purpose of this study was to investigate how children understood the plot of animated cartoons. Elementary school children from 1st grade through 6th grade and college students were to watch a T.V. cartoon. And then, they were asked about the story. The content of the interview consisted of two points: One was about the recall of the story, i.e., how much they would remember the content of the story, and the other was about the understanding of the characters, i.e., what attitudes they have toward them. The main results were as follows: 1) All groups of Ss remembered the story in structurally organized manner, but 2) the lower graders' recall was more episodic ; 3) Elementary school children were seen to have more extreme attitudes toward the characters than college students. It was concluded that story understanding was at first based on fragmentary information gradually becoming based on more integrated information.