In this paper we present a new approach to detect and recognize 3D models in 2D storyboards which have been drawn during the production process of animated cartoons. Our method is robust to occlusion, scale and rotation. The lack of texture and color makes it difficult to extract local features of the target object from the sketched storyboard. Therefore the existing approaches using local descriptors like interest points can fail in such images. We propose a new framework which combines patch-based Zernike descriptors with a method enforcing spatial constraints for exactly detecting 3D models represented as a set of 2D views in the storyboards. Experimental results show that the proposed method can deal with partial object occlusion and is suitable for poorly textured objects.