An apparatus and method for determining a characteristic of a motion picture. The method includes dividing the motion picture into video clips and video segments of each video clip, extracting video features from each segment, determining whether or not the respective video features have a targeted characteristic according to respective predetermined references using classifiers based on the respective features and generating determination result values, statistically combining the determination result values indicating whether or not the respective video features have the targeted characteristic according to the segments to generate first combination values, statistically combining the first combination values according to the video clips to generate second combination values, statistically combining all the second combination values to generate a final combination value, and finally determining whether or not the motion picture has the targeted characteristic using the final combination value according to a predefined final point of reference.