Five characters in a row is harder than it sounds, because Midjourney will happily give you five variations on the same creature. My early runs came back with a tidy little family of blobs, all roughly spherical, all roughly the same height, differing mainly in colour. Technically five monsters. Functionally one monster printed five times. The fix was writing height and body shape differences into the prompt as explicit contrasts, rather than piling more detail onto each character.
Once the shapes separated, the image got much better fast. A tall thin one next to a squat round one next to a big hairy mass reads as a cast, and the eye moves along the row instead of sliding off it. Height variation alone did more work than any amount of texture or colour description. The tall red creature with the long curved neck is the piece that makes the whole line-up function, because it breaks the horizon that the other four sit under.
Animation studios worked this out long before anyone was typing prompts. The character lineup, or model sheet, exists so that a team of animators drawing the same cast can keep proportions consistent, and studios from Disney onward pinned them to walls as reference. Those sheets have a second job though. Lined up together at matching scale, a cast shows immediately whether the designs are distinct enough to survive being drawn small, drawn fast, or drawn in shadow.
I find this style fun to work with, and that’s rarer than it should be. The failure mode is charmlessness, where you get five technically distinct creatures that feel like assets rather than characters. Uneven eyes help. Asymmetry in general helps, because perfect bilateral symmetry is what makes a cartoon creature look manufactured.
Three lineups, same treatment, different casts.
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