This paper explores the phenomenon of animacy in prose by the example of German folktales. We present a manually annotated corpus of 19 German folktales from the Brothers Grimm collection and train a classifier on these annotations. Building on previous work in animacy detection, we evaluate the classifier’s performance and its application to a larger corpus. The findings highlight the complexity of animacy in literary texts, distinguishing it from named entity recognition and emphasizing the classifier’s potential for enhancing character recognition in narratives.