Animated short films often strive to make audiences experience ups and downs and to empathize with the characters’ emotions in a short period; color scripts may be an effective method of achieving this goal. Through an experiment, this study investigated whether color scripts enhance viewers’ emotional experience. The participants, 289 elementary school students, were assigned to one of three conditions: (a) an inherent color treatment (V1) in which objects’ normal colors were used, (b) a color script treatment (V2) in which colors were enhanced by the characters’ emotions, and (c) the control condition (V3) in which the animated film was completely grayscale. The results indicated that V2 resulted in more emotional arousal than did the condition without a color script. V2 strongly affected the male participants, whereas the effects of the three conditions on the female participants did not differ significantly. In addition, V2 had the strongest effects on students from both lower and upper grades. The results indicate that color scripts can enhance viewers’ emotional experience. The differences in effects between genders and grades can be used as a reference for design practice.