Alternate Tooniverse

An alternate or parallel universe inhabited by cartoon characters (usually zany, Looney Tunes-style characters) and governed by Toon physics and the Rule of Funny. It exists alongside a more realistic universe, usually portrayed in live-action.

Though the trope is sometimes played straight, it's also a frequent target of deconstruction. The latter may highlight the impossibility of Toon physics, the violence in nominally kid-friendly cartoons, or the fantastic racism that might ensue if Toons really existed. Or any number of other things, really.

Subtrope of Alternate Universe and Roger Rabbit Effect. Expect many Alternate Species Counterparts when this trope occurs. Compare with Toontown, where toon and man are separated by simple geography instead of different dimensions.

Examples

Comic Books

• In the Animal Man comic The Coyote Gospel, a Wile E. Coyote expy is banished to "the hell above" — reality — for daring to question why cartoon characters must live such painful, violent lives. He appears on Earth as a grotesque "realistic" incarnation of himself, and becomes a messianic figure by taking on all other Toons' pain as his own — by being killed in various ways and springing back to life, forever, on the same lonely desert road.
• Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew! originally took place on an alternate Earth (Earth-C), which Superman crossed over into once. They have their own alternate too, Earth C-Minus, where the events that Rodney Rabbit writes in comic books take place for real. After Final Crisis, the Zoo Crew's world became Earth-26 of the DC multiverse.
• Ghostbusters (IDW) initially had two Ghostbusters universes: one in which Ghostbusters (1984), Ghostbusters II, the 2009 video game, and the IDW series take place, and one in which the animated series The Real Ghostbusters and Extreme Ghostbusters take place, and the films are fictional. While there are some callbacks and references between the two (mostly in the form of background gags, although Janine's appearance in the comics is a hybrid between her cartoon and film appearances, and an alternate version of Kylie from Extreme Ghostbusters is part of the New Ghostbusters team), they remained mostly separate... until 2015, when IDW did a limited-miniseries crossover between both 'verses. The Ghostbusters (2016) universe was added in 2017 with another miniseries crossover, and it became a full-on multiverse in a 2018 miniseries crossover, which among other things introduced the universe of the Tokyopop Ghostbusters manga and a universe that ran ahead of the Real Ghostbusters universe, where it's currently the Extreme Ghostbusters era.
• This is the explanation in some (but by no means all) DC Comics Meet Hanna Barbera and DC Comics Meet Looney Tunes oneshots.
• Howard the Duck comes from an anthropomorphic-animal universe, albeit without actual cartoon physics.
• Tom Strong had Funnyland, home to Righteous Rabbit Warren Strong, his wife Patience, their daughters Topsy, Turvey, and Fluffytail, and their Cunning Like a Fox enemy Basil Saveen. Funnyland reappears, along with some other alternate universes from Tom Strong, in The Terrifics, where it's also home to the Dr Dread counterpart Ducktor Dread.

Fanfiction

• The Doctor Who "outside continuity" pub This Time Round has an alternate tooniverse called This Toon Round, which contains toonified versions of Doctor Who characters (including Tardis Tails the cat and Lizzy the lizard from one very weird Doctor Who Magazine story) and TTR's own cast (including Author Avatars) as well as various British cartoon characters such as Danger Mouse and Wallace & Gromit.

Films — (Mostly) Animation

• Boonie Bears: Entangled Worlds, based on the hit Chinese animated show, suggests that the Boonie Bears universe is this trope, as the main antagonist is an intelligent businessman who lives in the live-action Science Fiction-fueled universe, and sends a Terrible Trio of humans to raid powerful objects from animated universes. Interestingly, unlike most examples here, the humans from the live-action universe are animated in the "tooniverse".
• Garfield Gets Real, where both the "real world" and Garfield's world are CG animated.
• Spider-Man: Spider-Verse:
  • While Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is CGI, some dimensions are given heavy stylisation, making them read as "tooniverses" in comparison to the more "realistic" worlds of Miles Morales, Peter B. Parker, and Gwen Stacy; Peni Parker is an anime character complete with Mouth Flaps that don't sync up with her actual speech, Spider-Ham is a Tex Avery cartoon character who can produce hammers and anvils from nowhere, and in The Stinger, Miguel O'Hara finds himself visiting the 1960s Spider-Man cartoon. With the exception of the last one, the traveler always maintains their artstyles in foreign universes. Scorpion even refers to Spider-Ham as a "cartoon" during the final battle. The Stinger of the live-action film Venom states that Into the Spider-Verse takes place "in an Alternate Universe".
  • Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse adds various other animated universes, including a Vulture from a "Renaissance" universe in the style of Da Vanci's drawings and another world Built with LEGO. More in line with this trope, the various live-action Spider-Man movies are shown to exist in the multiverse and a few scenes have animated character on live-action backgrounds or vice-versa. Spot makes a stopover in the Sony's Spider-Man Universe to talk to Mrs. Chen, the Spider-Society show footage from the Spider-Man Trilogy and The Amazing Spider-Man, and the Prowler of Earth-199999 is one of the prisoners being sent back to their native dimension.

Films — (Mostly) Live-Action

• Bedknobs and Broomsticks: The universe of the Isle of Naboombu is a World of Funny Animals and, much like the chalk painting world of Mary Poppins, it is animated, and the live-action protagonists are transported to it by the magical bedknob. Sadly they went there for nothing, as the Star of Astoroth containing the magic formula (which they were looking for) vanishes upon being brought in the "live-action" world... though they still get the formula, from the picture book Paul kept all this time, which happens to be about the Isle of Naboombu and features a clear drawing of the Star.
• Cool World: an alternate universe exists, populated by toons (or Doodles as they were called; the humans were called Noids).
• Dr Strange and America Chavez briefly fall through a cartoon universe when passing through several different worlds in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
• Enchanted examines how common Disney Princess tropes would work in the real world after Giselle travels from the animated world of Andalasia to modern New York City. Oddly enough, it wasn't supposed to be a Disney film at first but became one.
  • It's sequel Disenchanted (2022) examines how they would apply to suburbia and also how Disney villain tropes would affect things too after Giselle accidentally turns herself into a Wicked Stepmother by mistake. This time we get to see a little bit of what it's like for people from the real world to travel to the animated one.
• In the scene in Everything Everywhere All at Once where Evyn briefly visits dozens of worlds and universes, one of them is an anime and in a fight with Jobu Tupaki has them enter a world where they turn into crayon doodles.
• Mary Poppins and company jump into a chalk painting and end up in a world like this.
  • In the sequel Mary Poppins Returns, they go into a Royal Doulton bowl with the animal paintings coming to life. The sequence where Mary Poppins takes the children under the sea (inside their bathtub) for a bath is also animated.
• In Space Jam, the Looney Tunes characters live in an alternate world that can be reached from an underground portal in the center of the Earth.
• Space Jam: A New Legacy takes place in a Cyberspace full of planets dedicated to Warner Bros. properties. The Looney Tunes live on Tune World. We pass other planets devoted to the DC Animated Universe, Wonder Woman's' Themyscira, The Flintstones and The Jetsons.
• In Twilight Zone: The Movie, during "The Good Life" segment, Anthony uses his powers to send his "sister" Ethel into the cartoon world, where she's chased around for a moment before being eaten. In this case, though, the Toon universe seems to exist purely because of Anthony's dark powers.
• In The Phantom Tollbooth, the scenes on Earth are live-action while the Magical Land is animated.

Literature

• Steve Lyons' Eighth Doctor Adventures novel, The Crooked World is set on the titular planet inhabited by expies of famous cartoon characters.
• A planet called Toontown is mentioned in Ready Player One. Given the setting, it's probably a virtual recreation of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

(Mostly) Live-Action TV

• Invoked in Community, when Abed manages to convince Troy that he's found a doorway to a cartoon world outside Greendale Community College by painting an animated version of himself on a wall:
  Troy: That's impossible!
  Abed: Nothing's impossible in here! Animals can talk, your heart is shaped like a heart, and the smell of pie can make you float! You have to believe, Troy!
  [Troy is just about to run headlong into the wall when:]
  Abed: [leaping out from behind a bin] Wait! You don't have to believe.
  Troy: [clearly heartbroken] I didn't!... I didn't... [he storms off]
  Abed: I may have done some damage there.
• The Fringe episode "Brown Betty" might have featured such an alternate universe, as seen when story-world Nina Sharp communicates with story-world William Bell using the window device (though this may have been a choice to go for a retro-aesthetic).
• The Halloween Special of Out of Jimmy's Head briefly sends Jimmy and Golly into a cartoon world made of Milt Appleday's childhood drawings.
• The series regulars of the CW's Supernatural get sucked into a cursed TV and into the Scooby-Doo episode 'A Night of Fright Is No Delight." They try to go through the motions with the Scooby gang as per the episode's normal continuity but that gets deep-sixed as characters are killed off and painful real-life injuries are sustained. Once Sam, Dean, and Castiel figure out what's really going on, they now have to establish the status quo of the standard "Scooby-Doo" Hoax.
• The Fairly OddParents: Fairly Odder is a live-action reboot of Fairly OddParents with Fairy World is still animated. Humans who go there undergo a Toon Transformation but fairies stay toons when they come to Earth.

Tabletop Games

• Ani-Earth in the Freedom City setting for Mutants & Masterminds is the Freedom equivalent of DC's Earth C-Minus, where the greatest heroes are the Furrydom League, and almost all damage is non-lethal (as explained in a sidebar titled "Boing!")

Video Games

• Stay Tooned! is about cartoon characters leaving the TV. The human protagonist becomes Trapped in TV Land at the end.

• The same year as Stay Tooned, we got Toonstruck: The protagonist, a cartoon animator, ends up in a toon world.

• The Bendy franchise is a rare example of this trope Played for Horror. It takes place primarily in a nightmarish alternate dimension styled after early 1930s animation called The Cycle.

Web Comics

• The webcomic Hexenringe involves at least two dimensions — one like ours and one which is populated by comics characters and other fictional creations.
• Zebra Girl has an alternate universe with cartoon characters whose lives and personalities run parallel with those of the people of the main universe.

Web (Hybrid) Original

• The Second Dimension in The Cartoon Man trilogy serves as this.
• Season 2 of World's Greatest Adventures sends Rufus to Cartoonland in a teleporter accident; it's a cartoon world with a simplistic chalkboard-like art style, and Toon Transformation applies.

Western (Mostly) Animation

• The Bionic Six also has an episode where the main characters travel to a Toonverse where their normally realistic style of animation became cartoony as does the physics.
• The Aniverse in Bucky O'Hare has anthropomorphs aplenty, but sci-fi physics rather than cartoon ones.
• Timmy of The Fairly OddParents! sometimes goes into the comic book world of the Crimson Chin.
• The central plot of Kidd Video: a band of rock musicians is taken into a Toon Universe made of what seem to be MTV's commercial breaks and abstract animated music videos.
• The Neverwhere short that the Den comics were based on starts on Earth in live action but the fantasy world is animated.
• An early concept for The New Adventures of He-Man would have been about He-Man and Skeletor sending their sons to the planet Primus in the future. The boys were going to be able to communicate with their fathers on Eternia over a video link but Eternia would have been in live-action. Occasionally the boys would summon their fathers to Primus who would Toon Transformation and help them win fights.
• In The Real Ghostbusters episode Who're You Calling Two-Dimensional? the Ghostbusters get trapped in a cartoon world created by the mind of fictional animator Walt Fleishman.
• Similarly, an episode of The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo had Scooby and the gang get transported into the comic book world of Platypus Duck.
• A lot of Walt Disney Alice Comedies start on live-action but have Alice going to sleep and dreaming she's in an animated world full of cartoon characters.
• Captain N: The Game Master starts on a live-action Earth, then Kevin gets transported to the animated Videoland and visits various animated video game worlds.
• The Captain Star episode, "Waiting For Sputnik" ends with the titular giant cat flying through a sort of Wormhole and emerging from a catflap in a giant live-action house.
• In Code Lyoko, Earth is Animesque while Lyoko is CGI. The Code Lyoko: Evolution Sequel Series had the Real World in Live-Action with Lyoko still being computer animated. For once this is justified in that Lyoko is a Virtual Reality, thus it would logically and by definition be made up of computer animation.
• Some of The Simpsons' Halloween specials:
  • "Treehouse Of Horror VI" gives us "Homer³" has Homer trapped in the Third Dimension, a bizarre CGI world. At the end, a CGI Homer is stranded on a live-action Earth.
  • The "Terror Of Tiny Toon" segment of "Treehouse Of Horror IX" has Bart and Lisa Trapped in TV Land in The Itchy & Scratchy Show where Toon Physics apply. When Homer changes channels, they briefly end up in a live-action episode of Live with Regis and Kathy Lee.
  • "Into the Homer-verse" from "Treehouse Of Horror XXXI" is a parody of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse where we see five Alternate Universe versions of Homer, including a black and white variant, a pixelated version, an anime Homer and a blue cat "Homer-Barbera".
• Turtles Forever has a slideshow of the TMNT multiverse, which includes footage from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), the Live-Action Adaptation of the franchise. The end of the movie also shows another universe: our universe, where the franchise co-creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird are putting the finishing touches to the original Mirage comics, hoping the book would sell well.

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