Art Shift

"I'm in despair! The fact that they spent the entire episode shifting my artstyle around has left me in despair!"

"I swear they just had an honest-to-goodness romantic moment!!
The art turned straight n' all!"

— Christine, Girls Next Door, "Datus Interruptus"^note She means the art style switched from cartoon-y to more traditionally beautiful, signifying a mood shift from joking to earnest.

This is a scene within a single work in animation or print where the visual art suddenly and intentionally shifts into a different style, usually for homage or parody purposes. Frequently occurs during Imagine Spots and flashbacks, particularly "Rashomon"-Style sequences (see Retraux Flashback), and is often paired with a brief Out-of-Genre Experience. Particularly abrupt shifts can be rather scary.

Not to be confused with instances where the visual art unintentionally changes as a result of, for instance, the animation being subcontracted to several different studios, or a comic being illustrated by multiple artists to meet publication deadlines. For this, see Off-Model. Neither should it be confused with cases where the style changes because two or more unrelated anime have been stitched together by an American distributor — for this, see Frankenslation.

Also should not be confused with Art Evolution, which is a gradual and more permanent art change over time as the artist gets the hang of drawing the series.

A Sister Trope to Art-Shifted Sequel, where a work changes its visual art style in its next incarnation.

Can overlap with Show Within a Show, Deep-Immersion Gaming, Disneyesque and Super-Deformed.

Compare Non-Standard Character Design. Contrast with Medium Blending, where it isn't just the visual art style but the whole medium (animation to live-action, 2D to 3D, etc.) which changes.

See also Stylistic Suck, a phenomenon used to visually distinguish a show-within-a-show from the work that uses it.

---

Examples

Advertising

• Unicef's PSAs on child rights often employ this:
  • Cinar's PSA on landmines is drawn in a cute, cartoony style, but the image of the children who were injured by landmines is rendered realistically.
  • Fil-Cartoons' PSA on protection in times of war has an art style similar to Captain Planet and the Planeteers, but when we see one of the boys in close-up and his fearful expression, it's drawn more realistically.

Animation

• 3000 Whys of Blue Cat: The art style changes to appear more simplistic in Dinosaur Times Series episode 118 when Blue Cat and Feifei have a rock-paper-scissors fight. Blue Cat and Feifei have rougher outlines, are shorter, and have Black Bead Eyes.
• BoBoiBoy: Season 2 episode 10 features a backstory for Adu Du and Probe that is given in 2D still art, unlike the series itself which is animated in CGI.
• Mechamato: The episode "Block World" features King Boxel, who can change anything he touches into blocks, turning them into a pixelised 3D form that moves in a staggered manner alike that of figures in arcade games. This coexists with the standard animation style of more fluid mobility.
• Sponge Bob In Tehran largely uses CGI, but there are 2 scenes after the intro that utilize 2D animation (namely one showing SpongeBob, Squidward, and Patrick inside an airplane against a moving sky backdrop, and another in which Plankton walks out the Chum Bucket and announces his goal of obtaining the secret formula. The latter reuses animation from a SpongeBob SquarePants episode.)
• In Marcell Jankovics's adaptation of Toldi, the visuals alter between mostly realistic animation with the occasional surreal Literal Metaphor and a style mimicking medieval manuscripts, as the story is set in that time. The same is true for the movie version, which is just the series' episodes edited together.

Anime & Manga

• Arabian Nights: Adventures of Sinbad: Being a 52-episode series, this occurs a few times to the characters. Especially Shera. There's quite a lot of difference between episode 1's vision of her and her actual appearance in episode 47.
• Happens several times in Arakawa Under the Bridge. Oddly enough one was referring to a western cartoon.
• In an unanimated part of the eighth chapter of Asteroid in Love, when Mai describes the first time she met Mikage (and "fell into admiration"), Mikage's face is drawn in Shoujo style, in addition to the Bishie Sparkles that is also seen in the anime.
• Attack on Titan: The ending credits appears to be hand drawn and includes a stylistic use of Limited Animation.
• In a very brief moment in Baccano!'s anime adaptation, the art shifts to an almost childlike colored pencil sketch animation when Isaac and Miria entertain the idea of Jacuzzi being eaten by the Rail Tracer (who, in their minds at the time, is represented as a comical giant green worm terrorizing the train corridors.)
• Bakemonogatari uses art shifts all over the place. They happen so often that it's almost like the series doesn't even have a "normal" art style.
• In chapter 11/episode 3 of Barakamon, Naru's face changes into a style reminiscent of Golgo 13, which represents how cool and mature she feels after learning how to read katakana. Her face goes back to normal when she realizes she read a word wrong.
• Each short in the anime anthologies Batman: Gotham Knight, The Animatrix and Halo Legends is created by a different studio, all of whom showcase their own unique art styles.
• In Berserk, elves, Puck especially, seem to exist in their own personal Art Shift dimension, appearing as chibi more often than not. Bratty Half-Pint Isidro gets his fair share of super-deformed moments as well.
• Black Butler: In episode 14, when Ciel is discussing entering in the curry contest, it shows a hyper-realistic shrimp curry in the background behind Sebastian.
• Similarly used but played straight in Bleach, during the climax of the duel between Ichigo and Ikkaku, the sequence suddenly turns into the manga page.
• Sakura in Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan occasionally does this whenever he is expressing extreme emotion or is in a harrowing situation.
• Bocchi the Rock!'s anime adaptation jumps extremely often between different art styles. If Bocchi becomes nervous or stressed, you can be sure that the art style will change to reflect how bad her anxiety gets, to the point of sometimes bordering on Deranged Animation. Rare occasions of Medium Blending happen as well, such as claymation, CGI or even the use of a zoetrope.
• In-universe, the illustrations to the Adventures on Trains books are drawn by the protagonist Hal as he solves the mystery. Sometimes they change to reflect the art materials he's been using or a decision to try a new style.
• In A Certain Magical Index, when the "Freaky Friday" Flip situation is hitting its peak before Touma figures out what's going on, he sees Kuroko giving an address of Yes! We! Can! and temporarily shifts into a crudely drawn cartoon figure.
• In Change 123, in which the characters are generally drawn very realistically (at least from the neck downwards), various chibi versions of the main female character are used throughout the series to indicate certain visible moods of hers, but always with a sense of good measure, varying the degree of chibiness. Also, sometimes the artist uses a different line style (a soft pencil style or a charcoal style) to indicate various internal emotional states of characters.
• Chibi Maruko-chan has an episode where Maruko gets a stomach ache (it later turns out to be appendicitis). However, despite her moanings and groanings no one will take her to the doctor thinking it's a simple stomach ache (they don't realise it's appendicitis until later). This prompts Maruko to wonder why she can't pull a look on her face to resemble extreme pain. As this happens we momentarily shift from the style of animation normally used to one normally used in anime where we see Maruko drawn in regular anime style.
• Crayon Shin-chan, while maintaining the overall art style, shifts to a more detailed, shaded art style in one episode. The FUNimation dub lampshades this with the narration, "Will we be able to afford that sweet animation used at the beginning again?"
• In episode 3 of Death Note, the animation shifts to a far cutesier shoujo-esque style for the scene where Light is tutoring his younger sister Sayu.
  • Later, in episode 6, the backdrops for the scenes where Light is lying to Naomi Misora are almost photorealistic, in a clear divergence from the usual style.
• Throughout Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, humorous moments during breather intermissions between arcs become more prevalent to the point that, in some of said comedic moments, Gotouge starts drawing the characters in borderline doodle style, with dots for eyes and shortened body proportions.
• Digimon V-Tamer 01 often switches to a Super-Deformed take on the way the characters are usually drawn when Taichi has an Imagine Spot or when he and Zerumaru are goofing off or when jokes are made at Rei's expense. This tradition would be revisited in Digimon Next.
• Doctor Slump:
  • Senbei Norimaki often changes from a fat, short, ugly man into a tall, handsome, muscular one... and then back in a matter of seconds. "He's like Ultraman... kinda."
  • In one chapter, after Senbei and Arale rehabilitate a bear that was raised in captivity and release him back into the wild, the bear's awestruck reaction shows him in a more realistic style.
• Dragon Ball:
  • The first Non-Serial Movie, Dead Zone. There's an abrupt art shift in flashbacks that's used to unbelievably creepy effect.
  • The start of Dragon Ball: That Time I Got Reincarnated as Yamcha! has a less cartoony art style to show it's set in the "real world". Within the Dragon World itself, each portion of the story matches how Toriyama drew it at the time. For example, the opening Pilaf arc section is more rounded, while the Android era is angular.
• This happens many times in Excel♡Saga, most notably in episode 17, where there are so many rapid-fire shifts (from Looney Tunes to Disney to DC Comics to The Simpsons and beyond) that it's impossible to keep track of them all.
  • And then there are the Puchuus, who suddenly change from Ridiculously Cute Critter to something Golgo 13-esque when you kill them. The also utter something mean-spirited/action-movie-ish when it happens (reflecting their true, evil nature). Sometimes it happens without them being killed, if the gag demands the nasty phrase (e.g. in a scene parodying the survival action-movie fad from The '90s, a Puchuu cuts Excel's rope and spits out, "Burn in hell.").
• Done extremely frequently in FLCL, more and more as the series goes on. Some memorable examples:
  • In episode 5, when it flashes back to Amarao asking for a "manly" haircut in a hair salon, it's done in the same animation style as South Park.
  • The "manga sequences" in episodes 1 and 6, during which the standard animation style is replaced by pans across (semi-animated, with voice-overs for the dialogue) manga pages. This was incredibly hard to animate, and the second one is brought to an abrupt end by Kamon, who breaks the fourth wall to point out "Why can't we be a normal anime!? The animators asked us not to do another manga scene."
  • The grayscale style used for collisions, which comes up a few times.
  • The scene in episode 2 where Haruka, Mamimi and Naota are all talking and the animation style has suddently changes to a more abstract style. As soon as Canti comes back though, the art goes back to normal.
• While Futari wa Pretty Cure Splash★Star uses a solid colour scheme, the title cards are done in a watercolour style.
• Genshiken: When Saki gets really angry or emotional, she becomes crudely animated, often with triangle-teeth, a somewhat oversized head, jerky movements, and pupil-less eyes.
  • Madarame goes through the possible scenarios of telling Saki there's a loose nosehair coming out of her nose, and the art style frequently shifts to look either more like a visual novel or more like Kujibiki♡Unbalance when these scenarios play out in his head.
  • Ogiue's Yaoi fantasy episode has the guys shift to a Bishonen-like style.
• Gintama, in the character poll arc, Shinpachi suddenly finds himself in a Fist of the North Star-esque world. "What the!? The art style just changed dramatically here!! Who the hell is Cyborg Sorachi!? Who the hell is Gudonson!? Who the hell is Afterlife Shogun Ieyasu!!?"
• Good Luck Girl! frequently does this for comedic effect- most notably shifting to the styles of Fist of the North Star and Death Note.
• In Go! Princess Pretty Cure: Go! Go!! Gorgeous Triple Feature!!!, the movie shifts from traditional animation to CGI in the third segment.
• In both manga and anime versions of Gourmet Girl Graffiti, all cases of Orgasmically Delicious are in a more detailed, realistic, hand-drawn style.
• Almost the entire last episode of Gunbuster was deliberately animated in black and white—on color film stock.
• Haruhi Suzumiya:
  • When Haruhi and Kyon are trying to solve a murder, their suppositions are Art Shifted. Haruhi's is in low-res red-filtered live-action (possibly mimicking the CSI Necro Cam), and Kyon's is simple crayon sketches.
  • Also, in the gag series Suzumiya Haruhi-chan no Yuutsu, when Kyon tells Itsuki he loves him, the camera shows Itsuki's face. The simple art style turns in to a shoujo style, with Itsuki's hair blowing in the wind and rose petals in the background.
• In Hayate the Combat Butler, during a Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann parody, the animation and drawing shift to Gainax-style.
• The Hellsing Ultimate OVA occasionally switches from it's usually detailed and glossy art to chibified character designs with thick, solid lines for comedic effect reminiscent of Fullmetal Alchemist. It's particularly jarring...
• The anime of Hetalia: Axis Powers once has England shift out of the default Moe style to the serious style of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure as he plans to get back at Germany.
  • The manga and anime both have France occasionally shifting to a 1970s shojo look. While in the comic itself, America was once shown in New York-style doodles. And that's not counting the chibis...
• Hidamari Sketch, following the lives of several art students, appropriately throws in numerous brief scenes that use a wide variety of different art styles. Yuno's daydream during an art history class starts imitating the painting styles they are being taught about (Fauvism and Cubism); watercolour-style art is occasionally used in particularly emotional scenes; other scenes use imitations of collage, silhouette, pencil sketches and a variety of other media.
• Higurashi: When They Cry:
  • There was a rather comical (and creepy) art shift for a second at the first season's grand finale to show how the gang is back to their normal happy lifes.
  • The manga uses an art shift to a style evocative of ancient Japanese artwork when describing the history of Hinamizawa.
• The protagonist of Himouto! Umaru-chan changes from a classy high school girl to a lazy chibi version of herself once she makes her way home. The change is evident enough that anyone who isn't her brother thinks that she's someone else.
• The anime adaptation of How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend has a crayon style for the backgrounds during the flashbacks of Tomoya's and Eriri's elementary school times.
• In Hyouka the art style changes during the sequences where the characters break down the mystery. Each art style is different from the last, and many dip into the realm of experimental animation.
• Episode 11 of I Can't Understand What My Husband Is Saying has a very surreal art style, due to there being a different art director. Given the theme of the episode, it fits perfectly. Episode 8 of season 2 has a similar style.
• In The iDOLM@STER, whenever Kotori gets into an Imagine Spot, this happens. Thus far, the art sometimes shifted into Shōjo style, or JoJo's Bizarre Adventure style.
• In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders, the segments that show Tohth's predictions are in a slightly surrealistic, more cartoony style.
• Jubei-chan does this constantly, to the point where you'll have several characters in the same scene drawn in completely different styles.
• Kaguya-sama: Love Is War has a Running Gag where the art style will suddenly shift to something more appropriate for a horror series than a romantic comedy. Chapter 74 took it in the opposite direction, when Kaguya, Shirogane and Ishigami are all drawn like they're from a shojo manga (complete with gratuitious screentones, Bishie Sparkles, and obnoxiously large advertisements on the side of the page).
• Done frequently in Kaiju Girl Caramelise with Kuroe Akaishi to signify her shifting moods. One notable example is from the first chapter when Arata Minami invites her to Cafe Serizawa; when Kuroe agrees, she is suddenly drawn in a more detailed, less chibi-esque style that almost makes her look like an adult.
• Kill la Kill does this on several occasions, often Played for Laughs. One incident in Episode 17 has the Mankanshoku family confronting Gamagoori about Ryuko and their daughter's wellbeing. Barazo's design goes from his normal chubby self into a dramatic, heavily shaded, Fist of the North Star style. The reason? First, he wanted to know if Mako and Ryuko were still alive. Second, he wanted to know if the event he had to attend was catered.
• One episode of Kirby: Right Back at Ya! featured quite a few rapid-fire art shifts in King Dedede's homebrew Stylistic Suck anime, presumably because none of the (in-universe) art staff was given a specific style to work with. The style switches between dramatic Death Note style to contrasting bright and cartoony before eventually settling on crude crayon drawings.
  • Becomes extremely noticeable with some of the characters (especially King Dedede), where sometimes they're hand-drawn, while other times they're CGI.
• Komi Can't Communicate: The title character, Komi Shouko, is drawn more realistically with Tsurime Eyes when seen from the point of view of characters who can't see beyond her Aloof Dark-Haired Girl facade. In scenes from her point of view, or from the view of family, friends, and others who know her better, she's drawn in a more simplistic style with Tareme Eyes and No Mouth to emphasize her extreme social anxiety.
• K-On!'s manga had a strip in which the last panel shifted into being scary — a Shout-Out to legendary horror mangaka Kazuo Umezu's characteristic style.
• In Kochikame, Honda is a shy, weakling motorcycle patrol officer, but when gets on a motorcycle or anything alike, he transform into a mean tough motorcyclist.
• In Kyō, Koi o Hajimemasu, the characters shift into a very cutesy chibi style during comedic and embarrassing scenes.
• Lies of the Sheriff Evans: Dead or Love sees the titular Sheriff be drawn in a distinctly Shoujo-style (complete with Bishie Sparkles) a few times during the Proof of Fraud storyline, representing how Oakley's seeing him while tricking herself that a Love Potion she drank is working on her (it does not work. They've got a Will They or Won't They? thing going on).
• Frequently used as a visual gag in Lotte no Omocha, as well as when Naoya tries to draw, or when Asuha is being particularly crafty.
• This happened in one scene of Yuuta in the Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions! anime, when Touka plays an audio clip of his Old Shame so deliberately loud that Kumin could hear.
• Lucky Star makes frequent use of art shift as part of its many anime and video game parodies and Shout Outs — everything from Konata imagining an athletic competition as Track & Field for the NES, to Konata changing to a more "refined" appearance to match her Maria Watches Over Us-influenced behavior, to a rather lengthy Initial D parody done entirely in its art style and a brief one in the style of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Anime Tenchou/Meito Anizawa counts due to originating as a mascot for the Animate retail chain years before Lucky Star existed and being designed by Kazuhiko Shimamoto of Mobile Fighter G Gundam and Blazing Transfer Student fame
• Lupin III:
  • Lupin III: Island of Assassins features flashbacks by Lupin, which are shown as photo-negatives.
  • In the OAV Green vs. Red, the final showdown between the Red Jacket and Green Jacket Lupins is animated in the style of Monkey Punch's original manga, just one of many Mythology Gags to Lupin's four decade history scattered through the film.
• Repeatedly occurs in Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi, with each world often having its own unique art style.
• Magician's Academy parodies Kaiji at one point, and the art style momentarily changes to emphasize this.
• In March Comes in Like a Lion, this is done as a visual gag on Nikaido's face when he's about to go up against Rei, his rival in shogi. The soft, slightly sketchy, shoujo/josei-esque art style Chica Umino is known for changes into a more semi-realistic style, parodying older action-oriented manga for older audiences.
• Whenever Shibaraku wants to get romantically serious in the Mashin Hero Wataru Series, whether it's to impress women or to fulfill a philosophy, he’ll turn his face as Hunk as he can get.
• The anthology series Memories gives each short film a different art style that best suits the material, as well as making each one stand out from the others. 'Magnetic Rose' has a realistic style, and there are few exaggerated expressions. 'Stink Bomb' is classic Otomo in its design, with lots of visual similarities to AKIRA. 'Cannon Fodder' is the most stylistic, with darker colours and visible pencil work, which suit the atmosphere of an impoverished, military city.
• Minami-ke loves switching from its normal style to Bible Black-esque art during close-ups on character's faces. It is... somewhat disturbing. Probably intentionally.
  • The last episode of the second season contains a series of stills showing an intimate moment between the sisters, done in the style of the previous season, which had been produced by a different company. The background music also switches to the first season's opening theme, which creates a nostalgic mood.
• Mini Moni The Movie: Okashi na Daibōken! is primarily CGI, with live-action footage on greenscreens to begin and end the movie, but the flashback to why the Fairy Queen hates cake is done in a realistic oil painting style.
• In Monster, all the sequences of Franz Bonaparta's story books are portrayed this way — most notably, "The Monster Without a Name".
• Episode 3 of Monster Musume has one scene with Miia, Papi and Centorea about to get into a fight and briefly turning into creepy demonic versions of themselves, with jerky animation and colored in solid colors. The whole thing looks like it came out of a Madoka Magica witch sequence.
• Happens several times an episode in multiple scenes to nearly every character on My Bride is a Mermaid.
  • Nagasumi is especially fond of doing this, particularly when turning from Ordinary High-School Student to musclebound icon of manliness (Fist of the North Star-style, there's even a Shout-Out to Kenshiro's battle with Raoh from that series at one point) whenever his fighting spirit kicks in.
  • In the show's second ending credits sequence, while all of the characters are on a conveyor belt, Nagasumi gets to showcase some of his many faces, cycling from one to the next.
• My Deer Friend Nokotan: A double page in chapter 4 specifically points out, as a gag, that the doe-eyed (pun intended) girl blushing behind a box of chocolates on one page is the same character as the dumpy Super-Deformed Pop Team Epic-looking moron with a Playful Cat Smile on the opposite page.
• My Monster Secret sometimes shifts into a horror manga style, usually for comedic reasons by contrasting the absurdity of the situation with how seriously the characters are treating it. At one point, Akane invokes this trope In-Universe: during her "maturity contest" with Youko, she cheats by using her powers to transform into an older version of herself that's drawn in a more Bishoujo art style.
• The Mysterious Cities of Gold: When the story of the Esteban's parents is told, it's done in a completely different art style.
• Naruto:
  • During Pain's attack on Konoha, Nine-Tails gets released and fights Pain. The art completely changes during the fight.
  • Itachi's Amaterasu technique, which, in the manga at least, produces flames that look they came out of a sumi-e painting (think Ōkami) drawn with an ink brush.
  • Sai's Choujuu Giga technique involves the drawing of ink caricatures of animals which he uses to scout, attack, and fly, that are clearly inspired by actual "choujuugiga" (meaning beast scrolls) style artwork.
• This trope is somewhat enforced within Neon Genesis Evangelion, in that in the last two episodes, Studio Gainax ran out of money, and so had no choice but to include art shifts to crayon and Copic drawings where they couldn't have animation, i.e. storyboards. This can go on for minutes at a time. Thankfully, they did it well enough that it can be passed off as Artistic License.
  • Rebuild of Evangelion: in Evangelion 3.0+1.0, this actually is deliberate as a Call-Back to the end of the original series as well as having a story-justified reason, with Shinji remaking the world without the Evangelions from scratch - visually represented as rough sketches and storyboards.
• Happens often in Ninja Nonsense. Especially Onsokumaru, who rarely goes for more than a minute or two before changing art styles.
  • The second half of episode 9 was done in a completely different art style, but with more subtlety (Compare the eyes, chin, and hair of Shinobu with the first half of the episode). It was probably done to see if anyone noticed.
    • Ironically, Onsokumaru looks the same in both renditions.
• No Game No Life's anime adaptation tends to do this for gags:
  • In Episode 2, after she "falls" for Sora, Stephanie always sees him in a very Shojo style including Bishie Sparkle. This stops at the end of the episode, showing the audience that she really is falling for him.
  • Also happens in Episode 3, in a blatant Shout-Out to JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.
  • At one point in Episode 10, everyone except Sora and Shiro look like stick figures.
• Noein had two different lead artists and features three different art styles (when including CGI) that serve to distinguish characters from the past and future. To be precise, two alternate Crapsack World futures fighting to defeat each-other by traveling to the past.
• In Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan, the artwork changes into Sumi-e style whenever yokai characters release their powers. Sometimes for comedic effect characters' faces become extremely simple in the way of smilies or emoticons.
• Ode to Kirihito by Osamu Tezuka uses an art shift to denote a character's descent into madness.
• Frequently used in the works of Japanese comic artist ONE., of One-Punch Man and Mob Psycho 100 fame. His art is usually very sloppy and rough, but ONE makes it much more detailed and professional looking when the action (or the joke) calls for it. This is kept somewhat in Yuusuke Murata's redrawing of One-Punch Man, as well as the Anime, where Saitama is usually drawn closer to ONE's lazy style until he gets serious, and Tatsumaki is the inverse, reverting to ONE's style when her scenes become comedic.
  • The anime adaptation of Mob Psycho 100 goes absolutely wild with this, often shifting art styles and even mediums for both dramatic and comedic effect. The most frequent example is Mob's tendency to acquire a Nonstandard Character Design during his 100% explosions to emphasize the otherworldliness of his power.
• The One Piece anime made use of art shifts to emphasize certain moments:
  • Jyabura's lie to Sanji about Robin being his long-lost sister. The flashback is depicted in an incredibly cheesy way, and with a deliberately ridiculous art style.
  • Boa Hancock's Imagine Spots, during which she imagines Luffy as a typical Bishonen.
  • When Luffy punches the World Noble in his Tranquil Fury, the color disappears and the outlines become very rough, with a sketchy animation. This moment would become a catalyst that ultimately leads to the Time Skip and many shifts to the status quo both in-universe and in the storytelling.
• The Art Shift in Only Yesterday isn't of the in-your-face type, but still noticeable. The characters in the present are drawn a little bit more realistically, particularly with laugh lines and significant indents under the cheekbones when smiling or laughing which are mostly absent in young female characters in the flashbacks. The flashbacks also use less saturated colors, have a mistier air, and characters in them have paler skin as a result.
• Used profusely in Otomen. One of the main characters is a shoujo mangaka who bases his story on his friends; another character is always drawn in classic seventies shoujo manga style; one who tends to fantasize about himself as a hot macho guy is sometimes drawn as a shoujo-style "sexy bishounen;" and Ryo's very manly and macho grandfather is always drawn as if he came from a stereotypical seinen manga.
• This happens to Tamaki in the 19th episode of Ouran High School Host Club where a closeup of his face is in a heavily-shaded Fist of the North Star-esque style. A sign even pops up to indicate that he's Tamaki for any confused viewers.
• Pani Poni Dash! often shifts art styles for scenes or takes or even just eyecatches.
• Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt and Space Patrol Luluco love this trope. In addition to the default Thick-Line Animation style, it frequently shifts into Super-Deformed Flash-style animation during the comedic bits, detailed anime art during the fanservicey moments, and even a realistic style that's reminiscent of Satoshi Kon's work. It also uses rotoscoping in a couple of (more) surreal scenes, live-action sequences with the blown-up models of the defeated Ghosts and with the pair of feminine legs stomping on the Big Bad at the end, and intentionally half-assed Flash animation in the Sanitarybox shorts.
• Paranoia Agent's strikingly detailed character designs and animation give way to animation that looks like cardboard cut-outs when a character is sent to a Lotus-Eater Machine.
  • The art style shifts about in more subtle ways throughout the series, complementing the characters' delusions and breakdowns.
• Petite Princess Yucie is generally quite fluidly animated, which only mild occurrences of super deformity. Some episodes are suddenly very cartoony though, with over-the-top slapstick effects all over the place. Whether this is done deliberately or out of budget reasons is not clear.
• The pilot episode of Pokémon: The Original Series starts with the opening graphics of Pokémon Red and Blue, featuring a Gengar battling a Nidorino, which shifts to an actual anime-style depiction of the battle. The background music also changes, from old-video-game style to orchestral.
• Pop Team Epic switches its art style throughout its sketches, ranging from 2D animation to stop-motion felt puppets.
• The opening scene of Project A-Ko 3: Cinderella Rhapsody was animated by Yasuomi Umetsu, which showed the three main characters playing pool, had less-cartoonish character designs, dimmer colors, and higher-framerate animation than the usual art style of Project A-Ko. This is because the scene is C-ko's dream.
• Basically anything involving the witches in Puella Magi Madoka Magica will have this. Otherwise, the show is surprisingly free of this trope for a Studio SHAFT production. Aside from Kyouko's flashback and that bit with the blood in episode 9...
• Depending on the scene and the mood, the art in QQ Sweeper changes frequently from a more realistic style to a stylized, super-deformed one.
• In Saikano, the art frequently shifts to Super-Deformed when Chise and Shuji are talking with their friends, especially when Chise gets embarrassed or Shuji gets mad.
• Notably averted in Continuity Reboot Sailor Moon Crystal: While otherwise consciously Truer to the Text of the original Sailor Moon manga, Crystal lacks the manga and first anime's shared and frequent shifts to broader comedy tropes like Chibi and Wingding Eyes, and dispenses with some associated Graphical Tropes, (Visible Sighs, large Sweat Drops and the like). While not lacking in slapstick, the result is a less Zany Cartoon tone. Strangely enough, in the third season all the art shifts came back in full force, for reasons that were never explained but that can be associated with a higher budget and better production values.
• In Samurai Champloo's eleventh episode, Gamblers and Gallantry, Shino, the woman with whom Jin falls in love, is drawn in Hayao Miyazaki's style in the beginning and in the end, but not in the middle when she works in the brothel. Why? You guess...
• Washizu Vision and Tsubasa Vision in Samurai Harem: Asu no Yoichi. The first one brings out the Bishie Sparkle and the Love Bubbles on Ibuki and turns Yoichi into an evil stick figure, while the second one depicts Washizu in a flowery shoujo manga style.
• In Sands of Destruction, when Morte decides to throw Toppy at the warden in the third episode, it's shown in extremely minimalistic line art. In the manga, super-deformed characters are sometimes used in Rebus Bubbles, such as when Agan's true feelings show that he values his ship more than the lives of Kyrie and Taupy.
• Episode 7 of Zoku Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei has the show art shift to Magical Girl style, complete with the show's remarkably realistic Hair Colors turning into a rainbow of phenotypes.
  • Another segment in the same episode is completely dedicated to this trope, with the art constantly shifting to styles such as silhouette animation and claymation, finally climaxing with an actual video of a pair of hands flipping through a flipbook.
  • The first segment of the second episode of Goku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei is done in the author's original drawing style. The third segment is animated in a shoujo style.
  • And in yet another episode they were doing acoustic art shifts by switching voice actor around between characters, more or less at random.
  • Zan Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei's eighth episode, the third of the Three Shorts (the "Mystery Train" segment) is animated in a radically different style made up of rough sketches and cardboard cutout animation. It comes across as sort of trippy.
• Happens often in SEX whose art fluctuates between normal "manga" and realistic styles as a Rule of Cool effect.
• Sgt. Frog: Momoka tends to commit this during her plans to get closer to Fuyuki, who appears in a deliberate shojo manga art form, sometimes lampshaded by the Narrator. Similarly with Tamama turning psychotic.
• Usumaru Furuya's surreal Fourth Wall-less, genre-hopping gag manga Short Cuts does this a great deal.
• In Sket Dance, the art style changes to old-school shoujo whenever Saotome Roman turns on her Otome Vision.
• The opening credits of SPY×FAMILY go from child-like drawing (to show how Anya sees her family) to a more realistic style (to show Loid's and Yor's real work as a spy and Professional Killer).
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann episode 11 contains a number of flashback-type sequences which resemble elaborate paper cutouts.
  • Due to having a guest director, the entirety of episode 4 is either Off-Model or an extended art shift.
  • In his first appearance, the Spiral King Lordgenome is uniquely drawn in a rough, sketchy style perhaps as a reference to the style used whenever Kamina and Simon are passionate.
  • The Eyecatches throughout the series show various character in a very angular style resembling the previous Hiroyuki Imaishi directed work Dead Leaves.
  • When Kamina dies, the moment is shown in a white/light blue sketchy style, as a homage to the iconic final shot of Tomorrow's Joe.
• Ichigo in Tokyo Mew Mew has Imagine Spots in Super-Deformed style.
• The Tower of Druaga does this in the first episode during Jil's transformation, where the artwork turns extremely sketchy and deformed as a homage to Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann's more Hot-Blooded moments. There's also episode 5, where various characters try to navigate a part of the title tower that's covered in magical booby traps, some of them changing the victims into video game sprites, and the background into the background from the original game.
• Most of the dance sequences in Tribe Cool Crew are done in rotoscoped CGI.
• In Trigun — sometimes for absolutely no reason other than the Rule of Funny — Vash suddenly looks like Duke Nukem.
• The Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE- anime had almost an entire episode with Syaoran, Sakura, Fay, and Kurogane all drawn in chibified forms. A few other characters they met on their travels also showed up in the episode as chibis. The Art Shift can be explained, though; Mokona was the artist drawing the cast and making up the story. The episode was appropriately named "Doodler Mokona."
• In Tsuritama, the first episode's introduction and the ending credits use a computer-generated art style based around clusters of circles.
• White Album uses art-shifts extensively, occasionally shifting into a style reminiscent of a pastel painting.
• Yo-kai Watch's ending credits have most of the characters in CGI form dancing, while the anime itself is 2D.
• Yuriota ni Yuri wa Gohatto Desu?!: The series is about Fuyu, a Yuri Fan, attending a prestigious Catholic academy hoping to see some yuri among the students in real-life. However, much to her consternation, she discovers one of her classmates is a Gyaru Girl, Ririka. Fuyu silently implores Ririka to realizes she's "drawn different" from everybody else. For that panel, Ririka is literally drawn as a goofy yonkoma chibi while the more refined ladies around her are drawn in an elegant bishojo style.

Comic Books

Creators:

• Brian Michael Bendis loves this trope:
  • Flashbacks in Alias and New Avengers, and scenes after time travel in Mighty Avengers that are set somewhere in the sixties or seventies are imitiating Silver Age style. As well, the flashback with Jessica Jones in her only mission as Jewel is drawn by Mark Bagley, who is known for his more vibrant and somewhat cartoony style with his run in Amazing Spider-Man and Ultimate Spider-Man, which makes the moment where Killgrave tells Jessica to take off her clothes even more powerful - you're not expecting the cartoony, almost family-friendly Bagley to do that.
  • Similiary, scenes in Mighty Avengers that happen in the middle ages are imitating old paintings.
  • In Dark Avengers, scenes in Norman Osborn's mind are drawn by a completely different artist.
• If Fred Hembeck appears in your comic, it is a fact that he will appear as drawn by the man himself in that signature goofy style of his, no matter how much it might clash with the style of the rest of the characters.
• This is a favorite storytelling style for Alan Moore. In Tom Strong, Strong's flashback sequences were often written in classic comic book styles, with artwork to match. In Promethea, during the title character's tour of the worlds of the Khaballa, each issue was drawn (by J. H. Williams III) in the style of a different artist (ranging from Van Gogh and Da Vinci to Escher and Salvador Dali).
• While Andrea Sorrentino mostly has a consistent style with heavy shades and inking, he sometimes switches style for certain sequences:
  • In Primordial, scenes with the humans on Earth use his regular style, but ones with Able, Baker and Laika use a brighter, cleaner style.
  • In Ten Thousand Black Feathers, scenes in the present day use his regular style while flashbacks to Trish and Jackie's childhood years use the same brighter style.

The DCU:

• In Action Comics #649, illustrated by George Pérez, during the scene where the reborn humanoid Brainiac attempts to destroy Superman’s brain, the art shifts to an exaggerated cartoonish style.
• Batman: Black and White:
  • "Legend" is set in a distant future where Gotham has become a "city of light" and Batman is a story mothers tell their children. The present day in the "city of light" is depicted with open linework and no shading or tinting, giving an impression of light and space, while the Fantasy Sequence of the legend of Batman has heavier linework and lots of solid black shadows.
  • "In Dreams" is mostly in hard black-and-white, with no in-between, but the flashback sequence has lighter linework and softer shadows in shades of gray.
  • "Night After Night" is mostly shaded in soft gray tones, but the dream sequence is in hard black-and-white.
• In Doom Patrol, Casey's origins are presented in the various styles of Golden and Silver Age comics to denote that Casey is a comic-book character who came to life.
• In the first Harley Quinn comic series, occasionally the art would shift between a semi-realistic form (when the story was being told by sane characters) and a semi-Timmverse style (when the story was being seen from Harley's... unique viewpoint).
• Heroes Against Hunger, a one-shot comic published in 1986 featuring Superman and Batman, had various pencilers and inkers submitting two pages each of the 48-page story as a benefit for African famine relief and recovery.
• Pages in the graphic novel Joker change from a gorgeous painted look (usually for the larger panels) to a lower-quality colouring style continuously.
• The Post-Crisis reboot of Plastic Man was drawn in the style of his old 40's-era comics — because that's how he saw things. Shortly after falling in a vat of acid, and emerging with goofy shape-shifting powers, he realizes that the acid — like that other type of "acid" — had affected his mind too. He even says "I never saw a car like that [comical 40's-style sedan] before, outside of a comic book." It qualifies for this trope because the first page or two of each issue was done in a realistic style by a different artist, and was referred to as a "reality check" in the credit box.
  • His guest spots in Superman and Power of Shazam both featured a couple of scenes drawn from his viewpoint.
• In "Adventures of Superman #441 at one point Mxyzptlk traps Superman in a billboard and sends expies of several popular cartoon characters after him including Fred Flintstone, Beany and Cecil, Mighty Mouse, and The Smurfs. The scene is drawn in a more cartoony style and Superman himself looks like George from George of the Jungle.
• The Superman Alternate Continuity miniseries Superman: Secret Identity culminates with "real-life" Superman and his daughters flying across the sky, then suddenly shifting into various Golden Age, Silver Age, and even Timmverse art styles that progress through the panels, in a loving homage to the character and the many artists who have drawn him through the ages.
• Strange Adventures (2020) has two primary artists working on the series, Evan "Doc" Shaner and Mitch Gerads. Shaner works in his usual vibrant, clean, and cartoon-y art style for depicting Adam Strange's adventures in space, while Gerads works in his gritty, stylized realism to depict his mundane scenes on Earth, both illustrating the dichotomy of Strange's life as both a pulpy sci-fi hero and a normal man dealing with grounded drama. By issue #10, the illusion that his spacefaring epics were all completely heroic begins to break down, and the clean color fades away.
• Wonder Woman (1987): During the "Gods of Gotham" arc, explanatory panels are drawn in the style of red figure pottery.

Marvel Universe:

• The Mighty Thor: The first appearance of Ego the Living Planet has a splash page where Ego is revealed in an art style far more detailed and photorealistic than anything else in the comic, instantly establishing Ego as something utterly beyond Thor's previous foes.
• Moon Knight: Art shifts are used to incredible effect in Moon Knight (2016), where each of the hero's fractured personalities is drawn by a separate, talented, and highly distinctive artist.
• Runaways: One issue of Runaways (Rainbow Rowell) has an "Interlude With Dinosaurs", which follows Old Lace around as she patrols the Hostel. The interlude is drawn by Takeshi Miyazawa, one of the artists from the old Runaways series.
• Spider-Man: The comic Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane uses the art shift a couple of times, both times it is used to indicate a character is flashing back.

Other:

• All Roads, the Prequel comic that came with the collector's edition of Fallout: New Vegas, had two pairs of artists doing the pencils and inks for different pages. As a result, the line art style subtly shifts back-and-forth over the course of the comic. Some of the pages also have noticeably softer highlighting and shading than others, although this was probably a stylistic choice, as the book had only one colourist.
• Amelia Rules! is drawn in the style of Peanuts for when Tanner and Mary were kids, of Archie for when they were teenagers, and so on.
• The comic book version of Archie: To Riverdale and Back Again uses this to differentiate between the familiar version of the Archie characters (who are done in the usual art style and seen through flashback) and the older version (drawn by Gene Colan).
• Asterix:
  • The brochure for "The Mansions of the Gods" has artwork drawn in a realistic style parodying cheesy stock photography in advertising.
  • One soothsayer (denounced as a charlatan) in the Exposition Dump page of Asterix and the Soothsayer predicts modern high-rise developments in the form of a cut-out photograph pasted to his speechbubble.
  • In Obelix and Co., Mrs Geriatrix is drawn in a much more realistic, detailed style than she usually is — for the whole comic, but most noticeably when she's having her ambiguous romance with Obelix. When asked why, Uderzo explained that she's fairly easy to draw realistically as she is based somewhat on his wife, and added "I like drawing beautiful women".
  • There was a short Pilote one-shot named "Asterix as you have never seen him before", from the late '60s (republished in Asterix and the Class Act), which had the conceit that they were obeying reader suggestions for how to "improve" the comic. This included a Gross-Up Close-Up Darker and Edgier version where they are all fighting Romans with guns, a style parodying Peanuts, a realistically-drawn parody of pulpy 1950s sci-fi comics, and a Fad Super story drawn in the style of Yellow Submarine in which psychedelic Gauls defeat hippie-chick Romans by brushing them with magic flowers, resulting in confusing geometric visual effects that prompt Obelix to complain that he can't tell what's going on any more, and preferred just punching people.
  • A few panels towards the end of Asterix and the Laurel Wreath taking place in a misty street at night are drawn in a monochrome, pontillist style, apparently more as an artistic experiment than anything.
  • How Obelix Fell into the Magic Potion When He Was a Little Boy, being a childhood story recounted by Asterix in the first person, is illustrated with gorgeous, muted water-colour paintings instead of the usual loud, poppy style.
  • The fight scene at the end of Asterix and the Roman Agent is drawn in a style based on history textbooks and museum displays, with two drawings of the typical warrior outfits of either side at the top alongside the title, portraits of important characters along the bottom, and sharp, draftsmanlike art covered with arrows and annotations explaining what is going on in the battle. This is kind of a Take Our Word for It because the battle is explained as being the most intense, dramatic battle in the village's history, but is riddled with plenty of fun gags.
  • The end of Asterix and the Goths is also done in a history book style, explaining in abbreviated style the complicated political fallout of Asterix's meddling.
  • Asterix and Obelix's Birthday: The Golden Book is full of this, such as parodies of famous paintings and the Vitruvian Man.
• Berrybrook Middle School: The Discovery Center lecture is full of realistically-painted environments. Amusingly, Peppi is seen in some of them, and her look clashes with the detailed beauty around her.
• BoBoiBoy Galaxy x Lawak Kampus: SUPERIOR:
  • Each chapter ^note (except for Chapters 4 and 8, both drawn by Ariieya) is drawn by a different artist, leading to every chapter being in a different artstyle.
  • For the "cover" illustration that precedes each chapter, most of them are done by a different artist than the one who drew the chapter itself, resulting in drastically different styles for the same characters and settings. For the cases in which both cover illustration and chapter are drawn by the same artist, the former tends to be more detailed than the latter, particularly in lighting and coloring. The only exception is Chapter 2, in which Toadfrogs draws both of them in equal detail.
• In the early episodes of Buddy Longway the otherwise realistically drawn characters have Little Orphan Annie style white ovals for eyes. Later on they get more realistic, but when Buddy tells his kids a story from his bachelor days, the characters in the flashback have white ovals for eyes again.
• Criminal (2006): Last of the Innocent sees the art shift from a gritty, realistic-noir style for the protagonist's present life and a colourful Archie Comics style for when he has flashbacks to his teenage years, which were supposedly more innocent. The Nostalgia Filter is gradually punctured by the gradual realisation that events in his teenage years weren't exactly rosy even if he wasn't aware of it.
• In Darkwing Duck #6 when a comic book artist brings Splatter Phoenix back from the dead with ink given to him by the Phantom Blot, she leads Darkwing and Honker on a chase as she uses her magic paintbrush to enter various comic books and they take on the appearances of several different comic art styles including Rob Liefelds X-Force, Italian Disney comics, 3D art, Noir, Frank Millers The Dark Knight Returns, Conan the Barbarian, and Japanese manga.
• Desolation Jones often switches styles, from paintings to sketches, black and white inks, two-tone chiaroscuro, and the standard inks and coloring, though it maintains a similar feel throughout.
• In Dirty Laundry, Robert Crumb and his wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb each draw themselves in the comic. At one point when debating what Aline sees as her lack of drawing skill, R. Crumb draws her to show how beautiful she looks to him.
• In Future Quest, characters not designed by Alex Toth were redesigned to unify the comic's art style.
• Also done in Archie Comics style is Hack/Slash #6. This time, however, the purpose is to contrast Archie's clean, light atmosphere with Hack/Slash's massively violent slasher action.
• Jon Sable, Freelance #33 deals largely with the plot of one of Sable's children's books. A framing sequence was drawn by Mike Grell in his usual style, while the majority of the issue is drawn by Sergio Aragaones in a much more cartoony style, representing the illustrations in the book.
• Most of the Judge Dredd story "Emceladus: Old Life" is drawn by Henry Flint in colour, but there's a four-panel sequence where Dirty Frank describes his history with Aimee Nixon which is drawn in black and white by D'Israeli, the normal Low Life artist.
• In Lost Girls, Melinda Gebbie draws each of the three protagonists' backstories in a different style. Alice's story is framed with mirror-shaped ovals, Wendy's in tall stained glass window-like apertures and Dorothy's in wide "landscape" oblongs.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW):
  • Issue #3 starts with a quick summary of the previous two issues in a 50's style sepia-tone and slightly simpler-draw ponies, ala the educational film from "Hurricane Fluttershy". Lampshaded by the end of the issue: in the same sepia style, Spike provides a cliffhanger dialog, and then Angel flips a switch, reverting the art style back to normal.
  • In the second story-arc Luna's exposition of her time as Nightmare Moon and her defeat are told in the same style as the storybook in the pilot.
• In Noob, the art changes towards a more manga-like style (specifically yaoi manga) when Gaea sees romance where there is none. There was also a Dream Sequence during which the style was closer to American comics.
• Pinky and Pepper Forever shifts between various media througough: colored pencil and marker scribbles, MS paint drawings, actual art pieces in watercolor and acrylic, and, in the case of the "Final Piece", a photograph of a real, modified Pinkie Cooper doll encased in resin in a molded bathtub which is how Pinky kills herself in the comic.
• Subtle but present in a Radioactive Man story in which Doctor Crab/Prawn attempts to cure his mutation and eliminate Radioactive Man by regressing them to their earlier forms... which ends up bringing them back to The Golden Age. While under the influence of the regression machine, the poses become more stilted and the backgrounds simpler, often just an expanse of colour, much like real Golden Age comics.
• Rivers of London: In Night Witch, there's a flashback to Varvara getting stoned in the sixties that opens with a splash panel in the style of Robert Crumb.
• In Seconds (2014), panels have been seen jumping around from cute Super-Deformed appearances to rather realistic illustrations.
• Most of Spotlight: Kup is drawn in a scratchy style to represent Kup's deteriorating mental state. The art shifts to a cleaner style when the point of view shifts to Springer and his rescue mission, and both styles are used together when the two plots converge.
• During the middle of the Marispan affair (or the beginning of the Bet Your Life arc) in SpyBoy, the art changes from anime-style to something out of Mike Mignola's mind and back again.
• In IDW's Star Trek/Doctor Who crossover, a flashback scene in which the TOS-era crew and the Fourth Doctor encounter (old-style) Cybermen is done in a simpler, flatter, more cartoony style, in contrast with the more photorealistic style on display in the rest of the comic.
• Stormwatch had an issue where Jenny Sparks relates her historical adventures in the style of the cartoons from those periods. This includes duplicating the look of The Spirit, Dan Dare and Watchmen, amongst others.
• In the first issue of Strikeforce: Morituri, illustrated by Brent Anderson, the comic-book-within-a-comic-book is drawn by Whilce Portacio.
• The first issue of the Super Mario Adventures comic (it ran in Nintendo Power during the 1990s) featured a scene where the plumbing in Peach's castle goes haywire — upon running up to the courtyard, Mario almost immediately shouts out "Oh no! It's a pipe-o-rama!" What makes this scene unique is that the artist shifts — for this one panel only, and never again — to a hyper-realistic rendition of the title plumber.
• In the Alan Moore run of Supreme, the story became involved with the history of comic books and comic tropes. When Supreme flashbacked to the 1950s, he entered into EC Comics artwork, first from their horror and SF comics and finally from MAD. In the lens of Mad, Supreme transforms into something very similar to their old parody, "Super Duper Man".
• In the German comic Werner: After the complaints about the books from Wer bremst hat Angst! to Exgummibur!, Brösel sort of went back to the roots and drew almost all of Volle Latte! himself in a much simpler style. The only exceptions are the very beginning which parodies the mainstream-compatible, high-quality Werner drawings and guest drawings by Jörg Reymann who had done a lot of drawing for Brösel before, this time in his unmistakable own style which was intended to clash with Brösel's, also to mock the fact that Brösel couldn't draw women.
• The Wicked + The Divine:
  • In issue #4, the Fresco of Baal in Valhalla is done by Nathan Fairborn, who Gillen hired solely for the two panels it appears in. The inking was still done by regular inker Jamie McKelvie.
  • Later taken to new extremes when the entire third arc was drawn by artists other than McKelvie. As each issue focused on a different, less-prominent character dealing with the aftermath of issue 11, it served to highlight the differences in personality between the gods and the narrative fragmentation caused by the apparent death of protagonist and narrator Laura.
  • And then again in issue 23, written as an in-universe magazine with interviews from different pantheon members, where there were no action panels or dialogue, (and indeed, very few illustrations at all) but instead paintings in the style of fashion photography of the gods being interviewed created by Kevin Wada.
• Wilson is told in one-page segments and follows several different styles throughout; at some points the characters are exaggerated cartoons with oversized heads, at others they look almost photorealistic.
• The past and future scenes in Zombies Christmas Carol are drawn in a different style than the present day, and the issue covers are drawn in a more gritty, realistic style than the comic itself.

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes:
  • Calvin's fantasy sequences are often drawn in a very realistic and detailed style, unlike the rest of the comic strip. This led, quite intentionally, to the effect of fantasy looking more realistic than reality.
  • Similarly, Suzie Derkins's fantasies (seen on the rare occasions that Calvin plays with her) are illustrated in the style of a soap opera comic strip. One excerpt from Calvin's comic book collection is shown in a similar style.
  • As an art history buff, Watterson occasionally used an unusual art style as a metaphor, like a Sunday strip in stark, outlineless black and white for a joke about "seeing things in black and white," or a Cubist style to suggest Calvin's difficulty with seeing others' "perspective."
• A Flash Gordon story running over the first week of 2024 had an "entropic anomaly" warping reality around Flash, shifting him into various previous art styles of the strip, as well as realities based on the serials, the Filmation cartoon, the 1980 film, and the 90s cartoon.
• Garfield: The strip for May 5, 2018 has Garfield noting "Laziness is contagious. Right, Jim?" The second and third panels are done in a deliberately crude and scribbly art style, and Jim Davis has written the word "Right!" next to his signature in the last panel.
• In FoxTrot, background crowd scenes behind the main characters have incredibly simplified, "cartoony" people, as opposed to the details of the main characters.
• In "Hounded" from Knights of the Dinner Table #183, Sara has a dream about the Untouchable Trio Plus One. The dream is illustrated using art from Knights of the Dinner Table: Illustrated by the Fraim Brothers.
• Mad Magazine:
  • A parody of the classic comic Bringing Up Father, pictured here and here (courtesy of here).
  • Used effectively in an article detailing the history of courtship in your grandparents' time (1890s), your parents' time (ca. 1940) and the present (1967). The earliest segment uses intricate hatching like a Charles Gibson drawing, the next one is still detailed but done in ink washes, and the last is a bit more pared down (sometimes no backgrounds). All of these are in artist George Woodbridge's typical realistic style — then it looks at computer dating in the future, and the characters are uncharacteristically big-headed and cartoony, in flattened-out surreal backgrounds.
  • The final pages of the parody comic "Mickey Rodent" shifted (with considerable Lampshade Hanging) to a less cartoony style with realistic shading, shadows and five-fingered hands.

Fan Works

• Calvin & Hobbes: The Series has an episode partially set inside the MTM, apparently changing the art style to CGI ("think Jimmy Neutron"), and the narration even notes that Calvin's hair looks rather awkward in CG.
• Naru-Hina Chronicles: The Mini-sodes and Eroti-sodes are drawn with a Super-Deformed artstyle. However, on occasions, certain panels have the characters drawn with more realistic proportions, as shown here with the second panel.
• PONIES The Anthology has a few shorts that are done in the style of the work they're parodying. Such as Gilda and the ponies as South Park Canadians, Pony Quest I or SPIKEDOR.
• Bonbon in the Reading Rainbowverse puts up various pictures to show her stories. Not only do these pictures vary with each other, this is also the only blog in the verse that uses original art as its primary medium.
• Touhou M-1 Grand Prix's first two contests had different artists for each skit.
• Turnabout Storm briefly changes the Visual Novel style of Ace Attorney to an animated sequence done in the simplistic "pointy pony" style when Twilight explains the mechanics of teleportation to Phoenix. This style returns later without animation to accompany the Finale Credits.
• Though Flippy retains his original design in VS Flippy, it was slightly altered to better match the style of Friday Night Funkin'.
• Vs Sonic.exe:
  • Partway through "You Can't Run", the setting briefly changes into that of Green Hill Zone from Sonic the Hedgehog, with the characters turning into Genesis-style 16-bit sprites to match.
  • Rather than being in the usual 2D flash style of Friday Night Funkin'', the bonus song "Sunshine" instead has Boyfriend and the Tails Doll rendered as simplistic 3D models.
• Zany to the Max: Whenever the Warners drink Acme Super Carrot Juice, they spin around as part of the theme song plays (namely, the part with the lyrics "So just sit back and relax; you'll laugh till you collapse! We're Animaniacs!"). When they stop spinning, they have an "Animeniesque" appearance that parodies The Powerpuff Girls.

Films — Animation

• In Alice in Wonderland, the backgrounds become more abstract and boldly-colored after Alice lands in Wonderland.
• In Barbie: Video Game Hero, each level in the game is done in a different style. The racing game is close to Barbie's normal style, the match-three game is done like Funko Pop toys, and the sandbox-style game is done in the style of Minecraft.
• The Mushroom Samba sequence in Beavis and Butt-Head Do America is done in the style of a Deranged Animation music video to showcase how spaced out the titular duo are. Unlike the rest of the film, which was directed by Mike Judge, this scene was directed by Chris Prynoski.
• The Book of Life:
  • The prologue and all flashbacks are animated traditionally in a style resembling El Tigre.
  • The designs in the Framing Device and the story proper are also distinctly different, with the characters in the latter resembling puppets or dolls with jointed limbs and wooden textures.
• The Bunyip song in Dot and the Kangaroo, features animation based on Aboriginal rock paintings.
• El Arca:
  • The film features this, though whether or not it's intentional is debatable — the art noticeably shifts depending on how many characters are in a scene. In a scene with only one or two, or even a small handful, the art is of quality comparable to Disney. However, in scenes with many characters present, like when Kairel is trying to get everyone organized right after they get on the Ark, and Xiro completely ruins her efforts, the designs quickly become comparable to a toddler's scribbling.
  • An example that was clearly on purpose would be when the villain describes his future plan for the prey animals, and visualizes what it will be like.
• Entergalactic: Character retellings of events are often done in a distinctly different art style from the main one:
  • Ky's story about the girl at his laundromat is rendered in a flat, cartoon style, with simple bright colors and sketchier outlines.
  • Karina's story about her first date with her husband is Animesque, with rounded eyes, Sweat Drop, scratchy blushes, and so on. Fitting because the guy is an Occidental Otaku with a "thing" for feudal Japan.
  • Downtown Pat's story about a hookup who stole all his stuff is rendered like childish graffiti, with very simple line art and spray paint-like colors.
• The infamous line-dancing sheep scene in The First Snow of Winter is animated in a much more cartoony style than the rest of the movie.
• The art style of Foam Bath changes every other second, sometimes within a single shot. The film was made to push Off-Model Deranged Animation to the extreme. Some of the psychedelic musical segments go even further. There is also heavy Medium Blending, with the final scene being done as a pair of paintings with minimal animation, Stop Motion foam and a live-acted hand.
• In the CGI Horton Hears a Who! (2008):
  • An entire sequence narrated by Horton is done in the style of a colorful anime. The producers explain that this was simply for the entertainment of the children watching.
  • Earlier, Horton has an Imagine Spot which was animated like the 2D illustrations of Dr. Seuss.
• The How to Train Your Dragon short "Legend of the Boneknapper" shifts from CGI into cartoon when Gobber has a flashback.
• In the first Ice Age movie, we see how Manny lost his family as rendered in animated cave paintings.
• The Incredibles: Invoked. The opening and closing themes are animated in a shiny, '60s and '70s deco art.
• Entering the Abstract Thought Chamber in Inside Out caused the characters to turn into 2D figures with increasingly less defined shapes.
• Kung Fu Panda seems to love this trope.
  • While it's primarily filmed in CGI, the first film opens with a traditionally animated Dream Sequence and Creative Closing Credits.
  • Secrets of the Furious Five shifts to traditional animation to show the Five's backstories.
  • Kung Fu Panda Holiday has yet another 2D Dream Sequence.
  • Kung Fu Panda 2 opens with a sequence resembling Chinese shadow puppets, and has a few traditionally animated flashbacks and one Dream Sequence that are animated traditionally.
  • Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness features at least one 2D-animated sequence in every episode.
• The entire point of Osamu Tezuka's short film Legends Of The Forest (along with a Green Aesop). It shows the long, epic story of a forest's slow cannibalization by humans, showing the passage of time by shifting through the different styles of animation. It starts out by panning across realistic-looking woodcuts, moves into an early, B&W Disney style, and then turns to color, Termite Terrace-influenced style, and then into a more lush, Cinderella style, and finally into something similiar to Fantasia.
• The song "I Just Can't Wait to be King" from The Lion King (1994) featured stylized character designs and backgrounds based on traditional African fabric patterns.
• The flashback of Lagoona and Kala as children in the Monster High film Great Scarrier Reef is d kkone in Flash.
• A dream sequence seen about halfway through the song "A Girl Worth Fighting For" from Mulan appears to be animated in the style of traditional Chinese watercolor paintings.
• Mune: Guardian of the Moon is a CGI film, but in bits where the movie talks about the history of the world—and later in the dream realm—the movie shifts to a traditionally-animated style.
• My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Rainbow Rocks:
  • The opening credits use black silhouettes of the characters (with only the facial cutie marks as spots of color). They are also often more stylized, notably with legs ending in pointy tips instead of feet.
  • The ending credits, on the other hand, use monochrome still frames of the characters in a more detailed style.
• The story in the middle of The Nutcracker Prince, most of the film is animated in a Disney-esque style but that sequence is animated in a bouncy more cartoony style.
• In the Studio Ghibli film Pom Poko, the tanuki shift from realistic to Funny Animal to Super-Deformed.
• The Prince of Egypt features a dream sequence that plays out in the form of an animated mural, drawn in the exact style used by ancient Egyptian painters.
• In The Princess and the Frog, Tiana's vision of her restaurant in "Almost There" is done in the same Art Deco style (inspired, according to the director's commentary, by Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas) as the picture she carries with her.
• The Prophet: The production's defining aspect. The film contains numerous segments where the animation shifts to a variety of new styles, each directed by a guest animator. It's all set to music or Mustafa's narration.
• Most of Rudolph's Shiny New Year in done in stop motion animation, but when Rudolph tells Happy New Year his origin story it’s done in hand drawn animation.
• Sahara: Most of the film is in CG animation, but the Disney Acid Sequence when Eva is hypnotized by Omar's flute is rendered in 2D animation.
• Used all over the place in The Secret of Kells, which plays with perspective and the draws inspiration from the different styles of medieval illumination. Notable examples include Brendan's slate sketches, the tale of Collum-Cille, and the Viking raids.
• Sita Sings the Blues takes this trope up to 11. It features not one, not two, but six different art styles, and they change every several minutes as the story demands.
• Utilized in Space Jam when Mr. Swackhammer fantasizes his use of Michael Jordan in Moron Mountain after Jordan makes a bet with him but before he seals the deal. In this sequence, Jordan is animated rather than live-action, and the characters are drawn in a shadowed solid color.
• In The Sponge Bob Movie Sponge Out Of Water, all the underwater scenes are done in traditional animation like the show (and is given the cinematic budget like the first movie), while all the scenes on land are in live action with the SpongeBob cast done in CGI, unlike the last movie. Also, Bubbles is stop-motion, and the rap battle at the end is Flash.
  • Its follow-up, The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run, makes the jump to all-CG.
• The credits The Tigger Movie tells the events of the film drawn in the style of E.H. Shepard's illustrations in the original Winnie the Pooh books.
• Every scene in The Tragedy of Man was done in a period-appropriate style: Egyptian wall art, ancient Greek vase decorations, Roman mosaics and statues, medieval manuscripts, comic book pop art for the imaginary phalanstery scene, and so on. The genesis scene has a dreamlike, surreal style with shapes freely blending in and out of each other and Adam and Eve as colorful human silhouettes. The stone age scene, which is the only one to definitely take place in the real world, is Limited Animation using realistic paintings. Since the film was animated one scene at a time over a period of 20+ years, the animation methods and quality also fluctuate.
• In Turning Red, when Ming explains to Mei about the legend of Sun Yee, the story is presented as traditional Chinese paintings.
• WALL•E:
  • During the credits, the art goes from simplistic cave paintings up through the history of art. It's implied that this is humanity slowly regaining its artistic ability as they readjust to life on Earth.
  • The video message of the President is live-action footage of a real human being, so the implication may be that humanity became "animated" as we essentially de-evolved. Best shown in the paintings of the various Captains, seen on the bridge — the first few are actual photographs, while the latest ones are CG. The ones in between are a hybrid
• The film version of Watership Down begins in a simplistic, limited-animation style while explaining the legend of El-ahrairah, but then shifts to lush, photorealistic animation of the English countryside for the rest of the movie.
• "The Backson Song" in Winnie the Pooh is done as colored chalk drawings.
• Wolfwalkers:
  • The movie's art style regularly shifts between scenes that take place in the town of Kilkenny and scenes that take place in the forest. Characters and scenes in the town are drawn in an angular, geometric style based on period woodblock prints, right down to the slightly misaligned color, which symbolizes how rigid and controlled life is for its citizens. On the other hand, Mebh, Moll and the wolves living in the forest are drawn with penciled curves inspired by Celtic art. Their outlines are rougher and sketchier, and they even have visible construction lines in some scenes, giving them a more natural, dynamic feel compared to the townsfolk. Notably, as the story progresses, Robyn's design switches between both art styles as she alternates between spending time in each place.
  • There's also a noticeable shift in art style whenever Robyn's point of view (and later, Bill's) in her wolf form is shown, known by the filmmakers as "Wolf Vision". The style becomes even more loose and sketchy with minimal color, showing how wolves can "see" smells and sounds.
• In Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: The Tiger Prowess, the animation becomes a Mario-style video game when Weslie and Wolffy enter the temple. The Mario-esque sequences now happen frequently in the show the movie is based on.

Films — Live-Action

• Producer Norman Maurer attempted doing this for The Angry Red Planet by having all the surface of Mars footage to turn directly into hand drawn animation from live-action, or at least to simulate that through the use of CineMagic technique, which enables hand-drawn backgrounds to look as real or as unreal as the live-action footage. However, the Mars scenes do shift from Technicolor to a red hue.
• The stop-motion animated musical dream sequence with dancing hamburgers in Better Off Dead. Yes, the whole movie is cartoonish, but otherwise as realistic as 80ies teenage comedies go.
• During the stretch of Spike Lee's Crooklyn that takes place away from Brooklyn in rural Virginia, the image is horizontally squashed, leaving everything looking freakishly tall and skinny. Those scenes were filmed in widescreen but with anamorphic correction deliberately left unapplied.
• Enchanted starts off as Disney animation a la Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and then switched to live action modern New York.
• The latter entries in the Faces of Death series took advantage of handheld camcorders becoming affordable and popular, and shot footage in both film and video to help sell the illusion of them being real documentaries rather than mostly original footage.
• In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, when Hermione is reading aloud the tale of the three brothers, the scene shifts to a deeply stylized animation reminiscent of shadow puppets with Hermione's narration over it.
• The opening exposition of Hellboy II: The Golden Army is depicted with huge CGI armies of puppets whaling on each other, illustrating how young Hellboy imagines the battles his foster father describes to him. This allows the movie to show the scope of the ancient human/Fair Folk conflict, without giving away the appearance of the actual fey races prematurely.
• In the film adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy, a stylised cartoon accompanies each of the Guide's definitions. As well, at one point the characters briefly turn into stop-motion-animated yarn puppets after the Infinite Improbability Drive has been used.
• Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2 also feature this. A sword fight is completely done in silhouettes, the begining of Vol. 2 starts in black-and-white and O-Ren's backstory is completely anime. (Done because, quite simply, showing such a story in live action would have earned to film an NC-17 rating, given what it depicted.)
• In Limitless, the colors are initially washed out. After Eddie begins taking the drug, the colors become highly saturated.
• Never mind the fact that Looney Tunes: Back in Action has a mix of animation and live action, changes of art style occur in the Louvre museum as Elmer Fudd gives chase to Bugs Daffy through several famous paintings. As they move through each painting, they change style to match. Unfortunately for him, Fudd fails to art shift back after emerging from a pointillist painting, and Bugs simply blows him away like dust
• 1966 French film A Man and a Woman bounces back and forth between color and black and white for no obvious reason. Director Claude Lelouch had originally intended to shoot in black and white because he had No Budget and black-and-white film stock was cheaper, but after an American distributor gave him $40,000 he shot as many scenes as he could, including most of the outdoor scenes, in color.
• Melancholia: The opening montage is shot in a completely different style than the rest of the film.
• In Fritz Lang's Film Noir Secret Beyond the Door... (1948), there is a scene in which the male protagonist, Mark Lamphere (played by Michael Redgrave), engages in an Inner Monologue about his involvement in his wife's death. In contrast to the realism of the rest of the film, the monologue plays out as a stylised courtroom scene, with Redgrave pleading as both defendant and prosecutor in front of a faceless judge and jury.
• There were talks of producing a sequel to the film adaptation of Daniel Handler's A Series of Unfortunate Events as a stop-motion animation, and writing off the previous live action foray as Adaptation Distillation, established so as to not distress the audience to the extent that it would have otherwise.
• Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022): When Tails is explaining the origins of the Master Emerald, the arts shifts to a myth-like animatic.
• In Stay Tuned, one of the TV shows that the protagonists get sucked into is a Subverted Kids' Show parody of Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry, animated by none other than Chuck Jones.
• A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas turns into claymation after the guys unwittingly drink some eggnog laced with drugs.
• The zombie-display sequence from Waxwork is shot in black and white, in homage to Night of the Living Dead (1968).
• The Wizard of Oz may be one of the earliest and most in your face uses of this trope in film. The switch from the sepia tones of Dorothy's Kansas to the technicolor world of Oz is almost jarring.

Literature

• In-universe, the illustrations in the Adventures on Trains books are drawn by the protagonist Hal as he solves the mystery. Sometimes he gets new art materials or tries a different style, and the illustrations reflect this.
• David Macaulay won a Caldecott medal for his picture book Black and White, which tells four overlapping stories simultaneously, mostly about cows, using four markedly different styles of illustration.
• The Walt Disney Fun-to-Learn Library uses this trope depending on the topic used. The books utilizing basic concepts of learning, such as colors and numbers, use cartoon art similar to those used in a Disney animation. However, the books about science and social studies, such as Animals and their Babies and It's a Small World, use realistic art to illustrate animals and humans (with the exception of Mickey and co, obviously).
• Used in The Heroes of Olympus series via book cover art to highlight and visually accentuate the cultural differences between the Greek and Roman demigods.
• Relativity is a series of short stories in prose form, but two stories are presented as comics.
• In David Weisner's picture book retelling of The Three Little Pigs, the pigs realize partway through the story that they can escape their book and visit characters in other stories, all of which are illustrated in different styles. This one also received a Caldecott medal.
• Mervyn Grant illustrates Where's My Cow? with three different art styles. Sam and Young Sam (and the later scenes featuring Ankh-Morporkians) are realistic; the world of the book within the book is all pastels, and the third, Young Sam's imagination, is cartoony. Then they start to blend together...

Live-Action TV

• Community:
  • The second season Christmas episode "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas" was stop motion-animated. In fact, Abed's noticing of the art shift that no other character notices is central to the episode's plot.
  • There are Deliberately Monochrome segments in the Clip Show spoof in season 3, one of the tags is an animated Show Within a Show created by the Dean, and one episode is styled after an 8-bit video game.
  • In Season 3, Jeff and Shirley engage in a game of table football which is shown in anime. There's no real explanation — it appears to be for no reason other than the fact that they couldn't think of a better way to make table football suitably dramatic. More likely Harmon was playing on the fact that anime tends to contain a lot of Mundane Made Awesome.
• Deadly Class:
  • Whenever the origins of one of the characters is revealed, it's animated in the style of Wesley Craig, the artist from the comic-book series.
  • In "Saudade", Marcus gets very, very high on LSD and during his subsequent ride through the Vegas Strip, the style switches between various forms, including live-action, traditional animation, and computer animation.
• In the Doctor in Charge episode "There's No Fire Without Smoke", the climax in which the doctors of St. Swithin's hospital rush in comically inept style to a fire (which one of them assumes is just a drill) is done in the style of a silent film comedy, complete with title cards for dialogue and lively piano accompaniment.
• The animated version of lost Doctor Who story “The Macra Terror” uses a different approach than other animated reconstructions. Whereas all previous animated projects simply took notes from existing footage and stage directions, the animators of this episode decided instead to essentially show what it would look like with the comparably higher budget the new series has.
• Eureka used this in the Christmas Episode "Do You See What I See?" A machine in town malfunctioned and turned everyone into various animated styles. They used everything from Peanuts to claymation.
• The opening of Even Stevens is done in claymation.
• Farscape:
  • When Harvey turns out to be Not Quite Dead, Crichton sees him as Nosferatu in a scratchy blackwhite film.
  • Another episode has Crichton in a coma, envisioning the dilemma he's trying to solve in the style of a Warner Bros. cartoon, specifically a Roadrunner cartoon.
• Friends: During scenes involving Joey's soap opera work, the show goes from 30fps to the soap opera standard of 60fps.
• In a rather unexpected example, we have Fringe where in the episode "LSD", in Olivia's mind it suddenly changes to a cell-shaded/cartoony style when Walter and Bishop enter Bell's Room. Apparently they couldn't get Leonard Nimoy to appear in person so they had to use this.
  Walter: Bellie, why are you a cartoon?
• The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special opens and ends on a pair of 2D rotoscoped animated sequences to Peter Quill’s first attempt to introduce Christmas to the Ravagers.
• House does things like this a lot.
  • The episode with the father and daughter with nearly no emotional reactions is done with a blue filter until they get cured.
  • When House has insomnia, all scenes with him in have a bloom effect.
  • Many of the cold open scenes in House are directed in the distinct style of a different kind of series or show, so much that they may confuse a less savvy viewer.
  • The season 5 episode in which Kutner dies has strangely subdued lighting throughout, presumably to emphasize its serious tone.
• Hustle does this for certain exposition scenes. A description of a very old con trick is done via a B&W silent movie, and an explanation of fugu fish preparation is done via anime.
• The two part episode of JAG in season eight which served as a backdoor pilot for NCIS had much faster cuts and a completely different musical score from the usual fare on JAG: whenever the NCIS characters were on screen (except for when they went to JAG HQ).
• LazyTown: The second half of the episode "Once Upon A Time" takes place inside a storybook and features the characters in a 2-D animated art style similar to that of Disney.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: In episode "Partings", the flashback of Gil-Galad's story about the origin of mithril is shown to be heavily stylized, similar to the 300 movie.
• M*A*S*H had an episode where the various characters were interviewed by a film crew about their experiences during the war. The interview segments were very tight shots, using a very grainy, black-and-white newsreel style, which contrasted greatly to the clear, open, full-color photography used for the rest of the episode.
• My Name Is Earl: When Earl tries saving everyone from pollution and melts down from the realization there's too much for him to do alone, Randy starts seeing every human character in claymation after ingesting some powerful herbal ointment after being explicitly warned not to in the same episode. This lasts until Earl's done with the meltdown mentioned above.
• An odd live-action one occurs in the final TV movie of Saved by the Bell, which is filmed on more traditional film cameras and lacks the show's brighter lighting and soundtrack. (Compare this to the show's first TV movie, "Hawaiian Style", which is filmed using the show's cameras.)
• Going the other way, the Scrubs episode "My Life in Four Cameras" had J.D. musing on the concept of life as a sitcom being able to solve problems, which turns the normally naturalistic filming style of the show into a garish, brightly lit set with a laugh track, a silly plot about a talent show and all the female cast members in overly sexualized outfits, before revealing that it was just wishful thinking, and the problems posed in the episode (a man discovers he has terminal cancer; budget cuts force a loved employee to be fired) have depressingly real consequences.
• In Spaced, some flashbacks are done in a blurry, pink-hued style.
• Stargate:
  • In the Stargate SG-1 episode "Heroes", the interviews filmed by reporter Emmett Bregman are done either using different equipment or different film, and as a result look distinct from the rest of the show. The show usually has more of a "cinematic" feel compared to the more "live TV" feel of Bregman's footage.
  • Stargate Atlantis: "Vegas" has an Alternate Universe Sheppard in a CSI-like cop show, complete with recurring camera-zoom-in to a close-up of the evidence he's talking about at the moment. The crime he's investigating turns out to have been committed by a Wraith who is on a covert mission on Earth.
• In one episode of That '70s Show, Fez says that he wishes he was in Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, and that episode's scene in the circle is animated in the style of '60s' Scooby-Doo.
• Some sketches in You're Skitting Me are live action, some sketches are animated.
• In You're the Worst' "Sunday Funday" episode, the main cast is followed all day by a group of Hipsters. Whenever they show up, direction switches to a 2.35:1 ratio and quick cuts to look more like an action movie.

Music Videos

• aespa's "Savage" video switches from live action to animation during the song's bridge.
• The music video to "Telecommunications" by deadmau5 and Imogen Heap features various different art styles, such as different styles of CGI, stop-motion, and minimalistic 2D.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic's music video for "Polka Face" had a variety of different animated art styles for the different songs sung in the medley. "Womanizer"'s segment was in live-action.

Pinballs

• Played with in America's Most Haunted via the two different versions of the game. The "Animated Blue" version has hand-drawn cabinet and translite art, while the "Reality Green" uses photographed models. The playfield art is the same in both cases, though.
• Stern Pinball's Batman combines original animated art with digitized clips from The Dark Knight, with jarring results.
• Similarly, Indiana Jones combines digitized clips from the four movies with hand-drawn animated sequences.
• The center of the playfield of Joker Poker has a roly-poly cartoon jester with surprisingly detailed and realistic hands.
• The cartoonish playfield art of Lights... Camera... Action! is interspersed with several women drawn in a more realistic style. According to artist Brian Johnson, they were added by the art director because management felt Johnson's women weren't "sexy enough".
• The cabinet for WhizBang Pinball's Whoa Nellie! Big Juicy Melons eschews the conventional design of pinball machines, and looks instead like a series of melon crates stacked on top of each other.

Puppet Shows

• In the Donkey Hodie episode "Fashion Donkey", Donkey briefly changes into a small finger puppet for the shot where she spins around in the "Passion To Be Me" song.
• The intro for Sooty & Co. is animated.
  • Weirdly, a set of cels from the intro are recycled when Sooty reveals the Granada notice using his magic wand.

Tabletop Games

• Sentinels of the Multiverse
  • The Enclave of the Endlings takes its style from old sci-fi comics and the stylings of Jack Kirby, to whom the expansion the cards come in is dedicated.
  • Guise has this on a few of his cards, portraying him as a Rob Liefeld style musclebound hero, and as a super-deformed anime character. In his case, it's justified because he's a shapeshifter.
  • The Rook City art is deliberately darker and more "realistic," even including a lot of blood on many of the characters.
  • Gloomweaver's Strength of the Grave card is drawn in the style of Hellboy.
  • The Operative's incapacitated art is drawn in the style of Sin City
  • The "Xtreme" Prime Wardens are drawn like over the top Antiheroes from the early 90s.
  • Taken to the Logical Extreme with Definitive Edition, which sees all the card art updated to be in different styles depending on the era the "panel" is from. For instance, the art on Legacy's "Danger Sense" card in the Enhanced Edition shows the current Legacy in the "modern" art style, but in the Definitive Edition will instead have the Golden Age Legacy, in Golden Age art style.
• Spellfire: The art for the game came from TSR products that were made in a range of 20 years. The different styles clashed horribly together.

Video Games

• Combined with Art Evolution in AdventureQuest, as one quest involves a distortion in time, thus causing characters' art to reverse to its original and first images.
  • One monster-hunting quest has never had its art updated, but had a Lampshade Hanging added to it halfway through when your character complains about searching for aquatic beasts in a picturesque lake.
    "Also, [this NPC's] pants look funny."
• Antichamber: The final area before the end is a really soft and rounded area in what up to that point was a very blocky, angular game.
• Arthur's Nightmare combines this with Medium Blending in the ending, which is shot in live action.
• Most of the Assassin's Creed games have a realist aesthetic, however Assassin's Creed: Chronicles shifts to a fantastic art shift where episodes in China, India and the Soviet Union take on the aesthetic elements from the respective culture and time period.
• The inside of Bendy and the Ink Machine's Joey Drew Studios is sepia tone and could easily be mistaken for an early 30s cartoon. The short parts of chapter 5 that take place outside it are realistic and colorful.
• In Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Maria Renard asks Alucard if he has seen Richter Belmont. Maria has a thought bubble depicting Richter's 32-bit sprite. Alucard responds by describing the time he fought alongside Trevor Belmont, who he remembers in the form of Trevor's 8-bit NES sprite.
  • Also, Richter's sprite in Symphony of the Night is the same as his Castlevania: Rondo of Blood sprite, which doesn't match the artwork for the game. However, the Sega Saturn version has the option to play as him in a more accurate getup.
• Crash: Mind Over Mutant enjoys abusing art shift for its animated Pre Rendered Cutscenes to amplify its wackiness. Across the 17 such scenes, there are twelve art styles used in total! These styles include: Shadow puppet cutouts, hand puppets, old frame animation akin to old Marvel shows, somewhat abstract yet technological-looking, more streamlined and flash-like animation, Chinese and Super-Deformed-like animation, South Park-ish construction paper cutouts and an anime-style akin to Dragon Ball Z.
• Elite Beat Agents and Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan do this cleverly; while the agents/ouendan dance in 3D on the bottom screen, the results of their cheering is shown on the top screen in a mix between manga style (there are manga effects and word bubbles) and limited animation. The most clever use is in the Jumping Jack Flash stage of Elite Beat Agents: as all of the agents' clients try to break the agents out of their stone status, the bottom screen is black. When they are freed, the agents jump down onto the bottom screen and start dancing.
• In Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, although most of the game's sprites have a FFVI-esque appearance, flashbacks will show them with the same dwarfish proportions they had in the original.
• Friday Night Funkin': The game is drawn in a thick-lined, chibi-esque style reminiscent of old Flash cartoons, like the kind you would find on Newgrounds. Week 6, which takes place inside an old Japanese PlayStation game, instead features sprites and animesque character designs.
• Game & Watch: The designs varied from game to game, from ultra-stylized (Helmet, Fire) to comparatively detailed (Fishbowl, Snoopy Tennis), and from monochrome with a white background to a black background and simple color in the tabletop and panorama series.
• Golden Sun: Dark Dawn has the "Sun Saga" books-within-a-game, retelling the events of the original game and Lost Age games with simplistic 2d figures instead of the rest of the game's lush cel-shaded 3d animation.
• In Goodbye Volcano High, most of the game plays out in a visual style similar to an animated show. But during the tabletop game segments, it switches to a typical Visual Novel layout (large text box in the center, with character sprites appearing behind it when speaking, and no voice acting). The characters have a more illustrated look with less details, and the backgrounds have a painting-like look to them.
• In Granblue Fantasy, playable characters are depicted in a Super-Deformed style in battle. When facing other playable characters, they stick to this style or the game takes advantage of having more space to depict opponents in an art style closer to the one the game uses regularly.
• Hiveswap: The Ace Attorney-style trial in Act 2 switches the character art to look more Animesque, befitting an actual Visual Novel.
• Happens briefly and unexpectedly during a Dream Sequence in A House of Many Doors, coming hand-in-hand with a Genre Shift. The game switches to pixel art for the duration of the dream.
• I Don't Even Game has a minor one after you get past the nuclear core level. The white background changes to a grassy field.
• JR's: The gameplay inside of JR's is in a photorealistic style, while The Barrens are depicted with low-poly 3D graphics and the cartoons on the VHS tapes are in claymation.
• The developers of killer7 hired two different anime studios to create brief, fully animated cutscenes for some of the game's more bizarre levels, one level featuring what look like flash-based animations while another level is filled with more traditional cel animation, which serve as a welcome break from the game's usual in-engine cutscenes.
• Kingdom Hearts II:
  • In Timeless River area, all the characters shift to the style of 1930s Golden Age Disney cartoons (into their own character designs for Mickey, Donald, Goofy, and Pete).
  • Port Royal and the characters in it are more detailed than the rest of the game and feature a lot of Real Is Brown since they are based on a live-action movie. Sora and his friends point out that this world looks different when they first arrive.
  • The final cutscenes are also generated using much more realistic-looking CGI. It can be a bit of a shock the first time you see it, but it looks extremely good.
  • More subtly, weapons and common Heartless get their textures shifted in Halloween Town and Space Paranoids into darker, detailed textures for the former and Tron Lines for the latter while keeping their models (the heroes do get shifted in those worlds too, but their changes are more drastic than a simple texture swap). To wit: a regular Soldier◊, a Halloween Town Soldier◊ and a Space Paranoids Soldier◊.
  • Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance] has The Grid, also based on Tron (with an in-story reason for why it's a different world.) It features enemies covered in Tron Lines as opposed to their usual designs just as Space Paranoids did, and more realistic models for the characters from the movie, since it's Live-Action. Country Of The Musketeers, based on Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers has this for the reality shift feature, with the target enemy being pulled into a Comic-Book on the bottom screen with several panels of them being attacked in wacky ways by Sora/Riku, Donald, Goofy and Mickey, who are all drawn in Disney Comic-Book style (it's more of a shift for Sora and Riku). Amusingly, the enemies themselves are simply flat images of the in-game models. The comic-book images also appear to be very flat, being on the bottom screen as opposed to the top-screen which may have a 3D effect enabled for the entire rest of the game.
• The opening cutscene of Kirby's Dream Collection: Special Edition has Kirby, King Dedede, and Meta Knight appear onscreen as their 8-bit sprites from Kirby's Adventure before noticing a 3D Warp Star above them, which floats down to Kirby. He inhales it, which causes the three of them to change into their then-modern 3D designs.
• Any H-scene involving the Chosen in The Last Sovereign is deliberately drawn in a much more cruder art style to highlight the fact that the Chosen... aren't really the kind of guys you should task with saving the world.
• In The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening remake, the cute plastic model look of the rest of the game is temporarily shifted in the intro to 2D animation with a Link that matches his design in the Oracle games and the old promo art for Link to the Past. The drastic difference in styles between Koholint and the outside world is a good indicator of the secret behind the island. The ending, naturally, shifts back to this when Link awakens, and the true ending gives us a glimpse of Marin in this style.
• Compared to the other stage intros in Lethal Enforcers 3, the intro to "Justice & Judgement" is done in anime-style.
• The menus, loading screens, and Game Over screen for Lollipop Chainsaw are all presented in the style of a vintage comic book from the 70's or 80's. And then in Chapter 2, there's an art shift that happens during gameplay: Being struck by lightning (or electrocuted by the boss's electric attacks during the boss battle) results in X-Ray Sparks, viewing from the front shows us that Juliet—a realistic-looking character (or as realistic as the Unreal Engine allows)—has a CARTOON skeleton.
• Manifold Garden: The ending cutscene, which is a morphing series of colorful and highly organic and detailed fractals, contrasting with the game proper's entirely orthogonal architecture.
• Mario Kart 8: The Switch version contains the Booster Course Pass, with the tracks looking less detailed than the tracks seen in the original Wii U version, thanks to the fact that the Booster Course Pass tracks were ripped from Mario Kart Tour, with added shading.
• Super Meat Boy has a rather large contrast between somewhat realistic in-game environment, cartoonish style in menus and cutscenes and pixellated in-game characters.
• In Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Snake dozes off on his way to a location and has a dream. The dream is all in the same graphics and engine as Metal Gear Solid for the PS1. (This is because it's actually a real section from the original MGS1.)
• Zero's art changed so radically from Mega Man X5 to Mega Man Zero that fans were left wondering if it was really the same Zero.
  • Zero 3 answered it in a rather confusing manner.
    • To be precise about it, it's revealed that Zero's body in the Zero series is a completely new body. When you fight the final boss, Omega, his final form is Zero's original body. Which wouldn't be so confusing, except Zero's "original" body looks just like his new one!
    • Although Omega Zero's sprites change to Zero's old sprites temporarily whenever he uses certain animations, so this might just be laziness on the part of the developers.
  • The Zero and ZX games in general have a different art style from the X series. Likely to accommodate the transition from TV screens to tiny handheld displays.
    • Both the Zero and ZX character designs were done by Toru Nakayama. The original and X series was still done by Keiji Inafune.
    • Keiji Inafune only handled the character designs for Mega Man 1-6, 9, 10 and X 1-3. Hayato Kaji was responsible for 7 while Shinsuke Komaki worked on 8. Haruki Suetsugu for X4-X6 and Tatsuya Yoshikawa for X7 and X8. Inafune more or less draws the same as he did in the Famicom era.
• The Messenger (2018) starts out as an 8-bit platformer in the style of Ninja Gaiden, only to abruptly become 16-bit when you get sent 500 years into the future. After a couple more levels, the game turns into a Metroidvania with Dual-World Gameplay between the 8-bit past and 16-bit future.
• Persona:
  • During the 6 year release gap between Persona 2 and Persona 3, the series's main artist changed from Kaneko Kazuma (who also does the majority of the Shin Megami Tensei artwork) to Shigenori Soejima, who has a softer, more anime-like (albeit only to a certain extent) art style compared to Kazuma's imitable style. Soejima had worked on minor characters in 2, but all the major characters and Personas from 3 onward are his designs. Kazuma himself even put out at one point that he deliberately let another artist handle the Persona series because he felt his art style did not fully match with the tone and overarching world (which is more down-to-earth and focuses as much on the daily lives of the characters, even with a supernatural backdrop) that it embodies. However, most of the Personas that aren't tied to a specific character still retain Kazuma's demon designs from other SMT games, and his Persona designs for the first and second games were retained in the remakes.
  • A further shift occurs in Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth. While most Persona games have realistic proportions, Persona Q borrows its style Etrian Odyssey, making everyone super-deformed even in the anime-style cutscenes. This fits with the game's whimsical, fanservice nature.
  • Despite still being designed by Soejima, Persona 5 shifts to a much more comic book-esque look, with thick lines, bright colors, complex shading, Speech Bubbles and Speed Stripes to accentuate the Phantom Thief motif, instead of the previous titles' more "standard" Video Game Interface Elements.
• AZ's story in Pokémon X and Y turns the 3D graphics of the game into a unique 2D storybook-like cutscene.
• Poptropica normally has a standard look where each character has a giant floating head attached to a large torso with noodle limbs, except for islands based on other properties. Those islands have all the inhabitants drawn in the style of that work. For Big Nate Island, the art changes to the art style of a two-dimensional illustration. The same thing happens when you go to the Peanuts-themed Great Pumpkin Island, the Diary of a Wimpy Kid-themed Wimpy Wonderland and Wimpy Boardwalk, and Timmy Failure Island.
• [PROTOTYPE] uses real-life photos with special effects mixed with in-game footage, sometimes together at once.
• Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 acknowledges Puyo Puyo Chronicle's leap into 3D by rendering the Grimp Forest background in an entirely different style than the rest of the game.
• In Rage (2011) the final mission eschews a Borderlands- or Fallout-esque dusty post-apocalyptic look for a sci-fi futristic high-tech look, including littering the level with ammunition for the futuristic Authority MG's upgraded ammo and the even more futuristic BFG, both of which give off sci-fi laserlike streaks and "pew pew" noises rather than gunshots.
• In Rakugaki Showtime, which is done normally in a low-detailed, scribbly art style, does a momentary art shift in its intro movie. Yukiwo, the main character, is momentarily rendered in typical anime style for comedic effect before a dramatic attack.
• Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time (and, to not quite the same extent, its predecessors Tools of Destruction and Quest for Booty) use drawn, 2D images in place of 3D renders for photos and flashbacks.
• Rayman Origins looks a lot different to the previous games. The game features 2D environments with enemies from the first game, but with a more Thick-Line Animation styling to the characters, and watercolor paintings for backgrounds. Rayman Legends carries on this style with a more realistically-shaded and lineless approach, which also allows them to incorporate a Sprite/Polygon Mix.
• Rhythm Heaven has varying art styles throughout its many minigames. For example, Blue Bear and Glee Club are drawn in a more squiggly style with Line Boil, Super Samurai Slice and its sequel are designed to look like an old sprite-based game, Rhythm Rally and Airboarder use low-poly 3D models, and Tangotronic has a slightly more realistic art style.
• In Robopon, the first game had Pokemon-esque overworld sprites; the second had much more detailed GBA sprites. This had the side effect of making characters two tiles tall. It also made Professor Don and Sam, from the first game, look decidedly inhuman.
• In Saints Row IV, the recruitment mission for Johnny Gat involves the Player Character being transported into an old-school beat-em-up called Saints of Rage, complete with badly-compressed sounds and dialogue and digitized graphics a la Pit-Fighter.
• The Secret of Monkey Island has close ups for some of the important conversations Guybrush has with Cobb (the 'Ask me about Loom' guy), Elaine, Captain Smirk and Carla. In these close ups, the characters are much more detailed and look like they do on the box for the game. It is thought that all the graphics would have looked like this had technology permitted it at the time.
• Charon's most recent game, Shihori Escape, features a significant change in the game-play. The character sprite is bigger and more animated and the background is more detailed.
• Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind uses three art styles: ink-and-watercolor for the bulk of the game, woodcut for historical events, and a third style for events in the realm of the gods.
• Soundtrack Attack: The player characters are noticeably less shaded than the Crystal Gems, due to the amount of customization involved with them.
• South Park:
  • In South Park: The Stick of Truth, Canada and its inhabitants are rendered in blocky 8-bit 2D, like an old Commodore 64 game.
  • After getting Tweek and Craig back together in South Park: The Fractured but Whole, they will both get a new, shared ultimate, Eros Eruption, where the game momentarily swaps its usual style for an overblown anime art style (out of the episode Good Times With Weapons), complete with Gratuitous Japanese.
• SpongeBob SquigglePants is themed around art, with the Framing Device of a SpongeBob-themed art gallery made by Patchy the Pirate. Each painting represents a different level, and each level has a different art style, ranging from pop art to pixel art.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • The cutscenes for Super Mario 3D Land are all animated in-game, but the "photos" Bowser took of the captive Peach are hand-drawn.
  • Super Mario Galaxy also uses in-game graphics for the cutscenes, but flashbacks are drawn in the same style as the children's picture book The Little Prince.
  • Super Mario RPG had a part where you would go behind a curtain and Mario would go from pseudo-3D-rendered-isometric sprite to 8-bit just as he appears in the original Super Mario Bros..
    • Super Mario RPG uses pre-rendered graphics that creates a psuedo-3D image. A big clue that Culex is not from Mario's world is that he's a two dimensional sprite, much like something you would see in an older Final Fantasy game. In the Japanese version, Culex even states he's a 2D being, and wants to fight Mario and company so that he can understand the power of the third dimension.
  • Paper Mario had a similar scene that was a Shout-Out to the same scene from SMRPG.
    • Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door would also 8-bit-ize your partners in yet another room. It's almost a running gag in the series.
    • Super Paper Mario has power-ups (Pal Pills, and the Superstar) that summon up "mini" 8-bit versions of your current character, and turn you into a GIANT 8-bit version of your current character respectively. And they stay when you switch characters. So yes you CAN get Peach surrounded by her own legion of 8-bit Bowser protectors.
  • Yoshi's Island likes to employ this with its mainline games, probably because it already started doing this with Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, which was very different from Super Mario World.
• Due to being a dolled-up version of an unrelated Famicom game, Super Spy Hunter has a completely different art style.
• During the Mii News segments in Tomodachi Life, the news story will show Miis plastered onto what's basically photographs of real life locations and objects, heavily contrasting with the game's very cartoony looking design.
• The graphics of UFO: After Blank have gotten a lot more cartoony with each game in the series, partially as a way of compensating for the engine becoming more dated.
• Undertale:
  • Most of the game is in a Retraux, EarthBound (1994)-esque style with Deliberately Monochrome, white, pixel art enemies for the battle segments. But the final boss of the Neutral route is shown in a horrifying photomontage/glitch-art style with bullets to match. The fact that this boss is officially known as Photoshop Flowey hints at this.
  • More subtly, the farther you get from the beginning, the less fantasy the shopkeepers (the most fully illustrated characters) become. The first is drawn in deeply-shadowed pixel art, while the last is clearly emulating The Ren & Stimpy Show by constantly going Off-Model.
• Wanted: Dead: Flashbacks to Hannah's past is seen via anime Cutscenes, in contrast to the realistic art style in the rest of the game.
• Used a lot in the WarioWare series for the mini games, where even ignoring the deliberate retro style choices in 9-Volt (and 18-Volt)'s microgames, the games seem to range for sprite to cartoon to semi photo realistic style on a per game basis. The music changes about as frequently as well.
• In World of Warcraft most of the game is rendered in cartoonish low-poly meshes: mostly so that the game can run on lower end hardware. You can't exactly claim your game is "Massively Multiplayer" if hardly anyone can play it. Even pre-rendered cutscenes use the low-poly models, although they tend to feature custom animations and other effects that aren't possible in the game. But, tantalizing glimpses of Azeroth can be had in cinematics: which use a much higher-fidelity style. Characters are rendered in much greater detail, with complex cloth and hair physics as well as more complex lighting and particle effects. Warcraft III also featured higher-fidelity cinematics of this type. They've also released shorts drawn in a manga-esque style. There have also always been comics, which have used a very distinct style: though this is of course to be expected since it is a change in medium.

Visual Novels

• In ATOM GRRRL!!, Jessica suddenly turns chibi upon pulling a gun out at the dealer at the casino. This happens again with an image of Jessica and Anna cuddling.
• Danganronpa:
  • Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc art shifts four times at the end of each case. First is into a much cruder hand-drawn style for the "manga" sections where you must piece together how the murder took place, then into an accusation image with a similar style but spoofing a different genre of Manga depending on the character accused, and afterwards into a NES 8-bit style for a few seconds as the condemned perp is walked across the scene. Finally, the actual executions themselves have a similar artstyle to the rest of the game, but with darker, more detailed shading.
  • Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair features a Wild Take on Kazuichi's part when he finds out that ditzy Genki Girl, former "light-music club" school band member and Ultimate Musician Ibuki is into singing death metal of all things that actually changes his portrait to a completely different art style.
• Kokoro No Doki Doki Senpai: Moku goes from a cartoony art style to a semi-realistic anime style when she transforms into Neko Neko Princess. The same thing happens in the sequel, complete with an animation bump. Event CGs also feature more detailed art styles compared to the rest of the game.
• Marco & the Galaxy Dragon has animated sequences which are drawn in a much simpler, more cartoonish style than the rest of the game’s artwork. Compare Marco as she appears in the VN segments◊ to how she appears in the animated segments.◊
• Several scenes in the Tsukihime sequel Kagetsu Tohya use this. Notable example, the curry restaurant scene with Ciel where she acquires blank white eyes, three v shaped teeth, cartoony hands... oh, and a head larger than her torso.

Web Animation

• Bowser's Kingdom:
  • The scene where Hal fought Donkey Kong in episode 6 was 8-bit. Hal and Jeff used sprites from the original Super Mario Bros., while Donkey Kong used the orginal Donkey Kong sprites.
  • The story in episode 9. Everyone was drawn in Flash.
• The art style in Chadam varies between Video-Game CGI, and a hand-drawn Limited Animation style.
• In Appisote 18 of Da Amazin OT Advenchr, Lite freaks out as the show starts getting colours, shading, and backgrounds. It's all fixed in the end, though.
• Damaged: After episode 6, the original animator left the show. When a new one was hired, the show got a new animation style as well.
• DEATH BATTLE!:
  • During "Deadpool vs. The Mask", Deadpool attempts to use the Continuity Stone to defeat the Mask, but ends up blowing the animation budget instead. The next scene is rendered in uncolored storyboards until the Mask gets an idea. Cue a live-action montage of the two doing various things to raise money (streaming video games, selling cookies door-to-door, armed robbery) until they get enough and the fight continues in 2D animation.
  • In "Saitama vs. Popeye", the combatants's overpowered punches causes the animation style to shift several times (from handdrawn to sprites to handdrawn to 3D to handdrawn). The art style mostly looks the same... except for Popeye's 3D design which is unusually muscular and shirtless.
• Ducktalez:
  • In episode 3, when Vegeta pulls a Captain Ginyu on Scrooge McDuck. Vegeta gets Scrooge's animation style and Scrooge gets Vegeta's animation style. Dewey and Louie immediately wonder why Scrooge looks crappy.
  • Kind of in episodes 4 and onward. The animation switches from 2D to 3D while still keeping the Stylistic Suck art.
• Extra Credits:
  • In "Innovation", and whenever a guest artist is invited. They generally imitate the style while putting their own twists on it.
  • In Season 4, they added LeeLee to their ranks, and while her and Allison's styles were mostly similar, difference between the two could be seen during certain points.
  • "The Economics of Obsession" is presented in Extra Sci-Fi's art style, but when Matt's casual self shows up at the end to promote Nebula, the episode switches to its usual art style.
• Feng Ling Yu Xiu: The series's art style differs appreciably from that of the original music video. The second episode is particularly notable.
• Homestar Runner does this all the time. Several alternate versions of the main characters exist to parody various media genres, such as the "20X6" anime versions, the old-timey versions, the 60's cartoon mystery-solver versions... all of which have their own art style.
  • This also applies to The Brothers Chaps side series Two More Eggs, which has various segments which all feature different animation styles, including intentionally dated CGI.
• In Mr Plastimime, when Graeme and Betsy are dancing in their apartments, the art shifts into a flat 2D black and white plane that features them dancing together.
• Manga Soprano: The episode "My parents left me on a deserted island, and ten years later I became a yakuza" cuts to a frame where Ram's abusive parents and spoiled sister Momo are drawn in Nobuyuki Fukumoto's style after her husband Kairi was through with them.
• Rabbit Games: The bright and cheery Flash animation is interrupted with black and white sketchy lineart animations of Percy looking terrified or enduring pain.
• Red vs. Blue: In the original series, a few episodes were filmed with the game Marathon when Church gets sent back in time. Everyone else got sent forward in time, and the series switched to Halo 2 graphics instead of Halo: Combat Evolved graphics. After Monty Oum (the creator of Haloid and Dead Fantasy) joined the Rooster Teeth staff, a few scenes in Revelation use CGI alongside the Halo game-generated content. In Season 9, instead of trying to integrate them together, they have the flashbacks involving the freelancers in CGI and things involving the Blood Gulch teams in machinima (For added bonus, Season 9's machinima was done using Halo: Reach assets while the CGI used Halo 3
• RWBY:
  • Comedy moments will involve cutesy artwork: Ruby turns into a chibi as she gushes over student weapons, Ruby and Yang's catfight is shown as a Big Ball of Violence and Ruby's thoughts while running through the forest being stylized as comic characters.
  • Flashbacks and in-universe storytelling of myths and legends get a 2D anime-style animation, ranging from Blake's White Fang idealism as a child to the dark, gritty forest nightmare that almost got Yang and Ruby killed as very young children.
• StoryBots gives each music video topic a separate animator, giving a variety of styles. This means that the songs about Body Parts will look entirely different from the songs about Colors. Some extra-long subjects, such as the Alphabet, for a change of pace, hire various animators for a couple letters, leading to a large mix of styles.
• The end of episode 5 of Tomorrows Nobodies. The animation changes from the series usual style to live action, to crude squiggly animation, and back several times.

Webcomics

• 2/0 turned into an arcade game in this strip.
• 8-Bit Theater has done this a few times.
  • And then the epilogue for the series was done in handrawn art by the artist who worked on Brian Clevinger's other webcomic In the Style of Akihiko Yoshida, the man who made the official artwork for the remake of Final Fantasy III, the original being where most of the sprites used in the comic came from.
• Academia has frequent dream sequences set in Dante's Inferno, which are drawn in the style of Gustave Doré's illustrations for Dante.
• In The Adventures of Shan Shan, Backpack's fantasies are childishly drawn.
• When Aisopos wants to retell a story, the drawings change to a style that looks exactly like it's been taken from a greek pottery.
• Alabaster: The Doomed Session changes vision everytime a main player takes over the perspective. For example, Batori's view is like an old-fashioned art-nouveau artwork, while Renart has patterns on everything.
• Anecdote of Error: Whenever Atshi reveals part of her backstory, it’s illustrated the way she draws her own doodles.
• Apricot Cookie(s)!: The art style changes suddenly while Apricot is talking with Starlet's father.
• Archipelago has short Art Shifts for some flashbacks, but in the Maze of Dreams the styles reflect dreamers' fears: Tatami has rough, sketched dream, since he's giving exposition on this whole situation; Riley, who's afraid of abandonement, gets harsh angles and straight lines; Tuff, a Socially Awkward Hero, gets deceptively soft pastels; Raven's dream is at first more realistic than most of the comic, but when he works out it's a Lotus-Eater Machine, everything turns Picasso.
• Arthur, King of Time and Space:
  • The heavily-stylised "triangle" format, which indicates either Arthur's comic-within-a-comic or that Paul Gadzikowski has less time to draw than usual or a broken scanner. A not quite as stylised version (the same one used for his fanfic comics) was used for the Alternate Continuity of Arthur King of Time And Space 2.0
  • Merlin's comic (now Nimue's) is done in a different style as well.
• Fern's design in Awful Hospital suddenly becomes Animesque for a few panels when the comic temporarily turns into a dating sim. Later, the strip takes on a slightly pixelated style when Fern is shoved out of the Morgue and into worm land.
• Bailin and Li Yun wheels between highly-detailed illustrations, chibi-like doodles, moderately-detailed illustrations, and everywhere in between.
• In Behind the GIFs, there's usually at least one or more panel that utilizes an animated GIF of something from the realistic real world that differs from the rather cartoony and digitally drawn ones.
• In Bird Boy, the opening strips, recounting a legend, differ substantially from the main story.
• The majority of Black Adventures is done in a simplistic noodly cartoon style. However, certain scenes (such as transformation sequences) become more detailed and Animesque, and at one point in-universe N tries graffiti and displays improbable spray-paint skills and a fondness for Alphonse Mucha. To say nothing of the parts that openly parody Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt and Space Patrol Luluco, which itself are known for this trope (recursive art shifting?).
• Each of the short stories in Book of Lies has a vastly different art style due to different illustrators.
• In Champions of Far'aus while characters don't get too much detail to begin with, (the hands for example look like half ovals) when they get small enough in a picture, they turn into stick figures.
• This dream of Tony’s in Charby the Vampirate.
  • Charby's imagine spot here.
  • Tony's escape plan.
  • Kavonn recapping events for Yiska.
  • Kavonn explaining the downside of a manticore as a mount.
  • Mannick trying to explain his portals to Charby.
• Cinema Bums does an homage to The Family Circus in this strip.
• College Roomies from Hell!!! has at times shifted to a more realistic style of art for dream sequences and flashbacks, only to fall back on the usual stylized designs when returning to the present storyline.
• The Comic Adventures of Left & Right: One strip titled "Webcomic" is drawn in the stereotypical webcomic style, complete with "really long buildup and stupid punchline".
• Commander Kitty shows us Mittens and Fluffy's plan to fake having a working Flashy Teleportation transporter through crayon-esque drawings.
• Cucumber Quest:
  • Cabbage's (and later Nautilus') explanation of the background of the Nightmare Knight is accompanied by a shift to paper cutouts.
  • Whenever Noisemaster is in the scene, the palette changes to really bright, popping colors.
• The Cyantian Chronicles: All comics written/drawn in The Cyantian Chronicles have at least some changes in the art style over the years. Although the art shift is especially apparent in Cesilee's Diary (Available via purchase only) and in Genoworks Saga. Typically, major art changes occur between the published comic books.
• The Daily Derp: Derpy "gets serious" by turning from a cartoonish style to a realistic art style.
• Dear Children often indicates flashbacks or other data presentations in this manner:
  • Emma explains Hearthbrook High School's club and clique structure to Gabe. She does this by making a rapid pencil-sketch. This is in-Universe, as Gabe compliments her for her art skills, and the JoJoJo's comment on the presentation.
  • In Chapter 3, Hal Taylor and Peggy McAries tell Gabe the tale of The Crooked Saint, which mostly took place in the 1950's and 1980's. This is done in a black-and-white Film Noir style, quite distinct from the webcomic's normally colorful style.
  • A little later in Chapter 3, Emma tells Gabe the story of how Devin and Aaron went from being best friends to outright enemies. This is rendered in the same pencil-sketches she used to explain the high school's cliques.
  • In Chapter 4, Taylor Armstrong relates something odd she saw in the night. The flashback looks like high-detail chalk art, compared to the more three-dimensional and full-color style normal to the comic. This is meant to convey Taylor's personality.
• Debugging Destiny has this distinguishing between the simulation and the real world. Since both are drawn in PowerPoint, they are still reasonably similar.
• Deities 's Pyramid Arc, there is a flashback drawn in the style of Ancient Egyptian art. It can be seen here in this strip.
• In Digger, the art switches to extremely simplified "cave painting" style when Ed tells a hyena legend about She-Is-Fiercer, and later when he talks about his exile.
• The comic Doodle Diaries is made by three different people, who draw eachother in very different styles.
• The second half of Doraemon's Final Episode, set 35 years in the future, are notably sketched in pencil instead of ink to reflect the distance from the present timeline.
• Dragon Ball Multiverse:
  • The Specials are done by different artists, with different styles each.
  • There was an obvious shift in art as Gogeta left the project.
• In El Goonish Shive, this is done in one panel to show seriousness.
• In Erstwhile, Maid Maleen's story opens with her own pictures, and shifts to more ordinary pictures.
• Everything is Fine: The color scheme switches from a soothing pastel pink to an intense red whenever gory or violent scenes are shown, starting with Winston's dead body.
• The Extremely Post-Modern Adventures of Flint and Hinawa Had one of these, in response to the "Fan Art" it recived.
• Final Blasphemy has bittage shifts, with things changing from 8-bit to 16-bit to 32-bit at random. This is lampshaded.
• In The Forgotten Order the art style shifts to a colorful and lineless style when in the dream world.
• Freefall: Strip 1401 has "Guest color by Patch." instead of the normal color by George Peterson.
• God Mode has done this multiple times due to ever-changing artists. The first artist then the second artist then the third artist and finally the most recent artist.
• In The God of High School almost any moment meant to be funny or heartwarming has the characters drawn chibi-style with puffy cheeks. On the opposite end of the spectrum, everyone's faces become more angular and detailed when things get serious.
• Grim Trigger: the art style changes to paint-y, more realistic style in horror scenes, as opposed to the usual bright cel shading.
• Guilded Age: The world that most resembles ours is drawn in a more realistic style, and sepia-toned with occasional spot-coloring. A futuristic Tron-style world is rendered in bright neons, with strategic pixelation for effect.
• Gunnerkrigg Court is fond of this.
  • There is a switch to a more detailed shading and exaggerated perspective when Kat narrates a flashback to her childhood,
  • Similar switches happen periodically throughout the comic when Annie uses the Blinker Stone to see.
  • It switches to stylized, Native American-inspired art whenever Coyote tells stories. This includes the first nine pages of Chapter 54.
  • When Anne is humiliated by her father the new Biology teacher, the art briefly switches to a simpler, more childlike style.
  • In the next chapter, when said teacher gives an account of his previous whereabouts, his reminiscences are in a highly-detailed, realistic style.
• Homestuck uses several very distinct art styles. Theoretically they communicate context and mood, although Andrew insists that no such thing is taking place.
  • The primary style uses sprite sheets that give the main characters a Super-Deformed, babyish look and emphasizes that they are characters in a game. By the second half of Act 5, Sprite Mode mostly phases out in favor of Hero/Villain Mode.
  • The walkarounds generally use a highly pixellated sprite style reminiscent of Super Nintendo-era game graphics. ^note However, the differing styles of the talksprites in the first troll walkaround, "[S] Past Karkat: Wake Up", were the unintentional result of using contributions from multiple artists, and thus not a deliberate art shift. Since then, only one artist has supplied talksprites and some of the sprites were redrawn for future walkarounds.
  • Hero/Villain Mode features less stylized artwork with more realistic — if rather willowy — proportions and is used to indicate seriousness. Hero mode appears most often during combat or moments of extreme passion or grief. Also possibly because it looks totally awesome. Hero/Villain Mode replaces Sprite Mode as the default character art style by the second half of Act 5.
  • A shaded variation on Hero/Villain Mode, featuring a great deal more detail (and noses, for the first time!), sometimes referred to as "Hussnasty mode", which appears to be used mostly just for the hell of it.
  • A scribble-style used occasionally for a few Running Gags. For example a character tasting something horrible may shout "Bluh" while going into scribble mode, an occurrence occasionally referred to as "doofus mode" or "scribble mode". Where John is involved, this may be accompanied by a yell of "THIS IS STUPID!"
  • Some panels are drawn certain characters' personal art styles. This is a major downgrade in the case of Dave's Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff art and an even more extreme one in the case of Caliborn's absolutely execrable fanart (which is an almost indecipherable bunch of lines), but something of an upgrade in Calliope's beautiful art style.
  • The art shifts are lampshaded in a scene where Doc Scratch demands that the Handmaid "render [her]self in a more symbolic manner", forcing her from Hero Mode to Sprite Mode.
  • Later on, art from artists other than Hussie starts to appear. Some of it is styled after Hussie's material, but most is drawn in the artists' own styles.
  • The finale, Act 7, is an animated short with a vaguely Animesque artstyle.
• I'm the Grim Reaper: Chase’s backstories have different ones. The one where he details his abusive ex starts off with a bright, pastel color palette before slowly turning back into the series’ usual darker tones. His backstory regarding how he got his X starts off with muted colors, but as it goes on his mother’s colors become brighter...while his stay muted.
• In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!, when Lari the Ninja fights Rocko Sasquatch, they are drawn to resemble Ranma and Bluto respectively... and after a few strips, the whole thing degenerates into a Big Ball of Violence explicitly called a cloud of "Beetle Bailey dust."
• Irrelevator has this in this comic◊, a panel which also confirms that the stick figures colors match their skin color. Artstyle to smaller faceless versions were also used when zoomed out◊ and when they were tripping.◊ The animation style also shifted when they were tripping.
• Keychain of Creation: Downplayed when the comic switches from using a stick-figure style for limbs to illustrating them fully. In-Universe, it coincides with two main characters gaining the power of Sorcery, which involves "changing how you perceive reality itself", and they have a Freak Out upon seeing their hands for the "first" time.
• Khaos Komix shifts between realistically-drawn and chibi characters, with the chibis usually representing inner thoughts or moments of high emotion.
• In the Legend of the Valkyrie webcomic on ShiftyLook, the characters and comic as a whole undergoes a massive art shift starting with Time for a Change. And yes, the characters lampshade how random the whole experience is.
• Level 30 Psychiatry has multiple rotating artists, but special cases include:
  • Child of Plight, drawn to resemble its namesake.
  • Brawl in the Tribute, a tribute to Brawl in the Family, done in the style of early ones.
  • Lampshaded in Style Un-savvy with Athena's moeification, complete with Painting the Medium.
• Used in The Life of Nob T. Mouse to demonstrate passage between universes, or shifts in genre.
• Most of Little Robot, Big Scary World was communicated in drawings, while some updates were done in different art styles and mediums, including claymation and stop-motion.
• Artist Kanela was fond of inserting chibi versions of the characters in M9 Girls!, for comedic purposes in reaction panels.
  • The M9 Girls switched to a steampunk look as a homage to I, Mummy during an April Fools exchange.
• Medic Pics contains a few.
  • One of the first episodes about the early hospital visit has the artist portrayed in a pixel art style as opposed to the hand drawn 2D art.
  • The Beach Episode is quite literally drawn on the beach.
  • The Dream Sequence uses a different shading style to the regular cel shaded comics to highlight the difference from reality.
• In the Korean webtoon Mental Rope and its animated adaptation, the character and background designs sometimes shift, notably the former's deformed cartoon style to an anime-like one, particularly in serious events. This is explained and demonstrated according to this English-language summary.
• Mr. Boop: In Alec's Journey to the Center of the Mind after being shot by Sonic the Hedgehog.
  • Again in strip number #166 when the real Alec is depicted.
• My Delirium Alcazar uses sprite art◊ for regular scenes and digital drawings◊ during the recurring nightmare.
• Nature of Nature's Art uses a slow transition (along with a medium painting shift of the usual site's black background to white) to illustrate the character XZ/Nutsedge, previously conceived as innocent and childlike by the viewpoint character no longer appearing as such to the aforementioned character. The original stylized appearance the character was drawn in shifts into a more realistic rendition until the end of that story arc.
• Combined with Painting the Medium in this Neopian Times strip.
• Nicktoons Tales does this occasionally, but the most notable shift is in the Nicktoons Tales of Terror segment, When The Crickets Cry.
• The Night Belongs to Us: Side stories from the point of view of Hank's cat are cartoonier in style, and almost all in monochrome/sepia with a few muted colors.
• In Not a Villain, Life is mostly solid colors and simple lines. Reality looks much darker and grainier, and has more shading.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • The multi-strip flashback to the legendary events that shaped the world are drawn in the distinctive stick-figure style, but with crayons. Same thing later with Jirix recounting his short time in the afterworld.
  • One strip has a police sketch artist draw up a picture of two antagonists, which he does in a much more realistic style than the comic itself. Naturally, he was then sacked for being rubbish at art — I mean, it looks nothing LIKE them! (This one was actually a bit of a Take That! to critics claiming that the comic's style was due to a lack of talent rather than an aesthetic choice.)
• In Out-of-Placers, pages showing Yannit's perspective display that she sees in infrared, and her thoughts are depicted in a very simple, almost cave painting-esque style.
• Poppy O'Possum switches to (drawn) hand puppets for a single panel during its Tournament Arc, to explain what "lucky stars" are.
• Raven's Dojo does this occasionally to illustrate the crudeness of Rodney's descriptive abilities. Illustrations become sloppily drawn in crayon, and everyone but Rodney becomes very small and stupid. Example here
• In Roommates the more serious the mood the more realistic the art gets (but remains animesque) just to become Super-Deformed when something silly happens. its Spin-Off s Girls Next Door and Down the Street tend to do the other way around (because they are heavier on comedy), the art can go all straight (so not even animesque anymore) when something NOT silly is going on. It does this even more in the Buildingverse. Even the fics can go "and the art went all straight and all".
• In Rusty and Co. you get several, once-a-frame art shifts in a few strips, thanks to a "Girdle of Genre Bending".
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: "Requiem for a Dil" is drawn in the style of Dilbert, which it darkly parodies, but for one panel, it shifts to a more detailed and relatively more realistic shot of Dilbert's face. Another panel shifts from colour to greyscale.
• Shortpacked! goes manga style whenever a panel is told from Ninja Rick's point of view.
• Susan in Sire can be displayed either as an angrier version of her blonde haired counter-part or as her "true" self design depending on who is controlling the body or is being spoken to. Sometimes on the same page.
• Skin Horse has a permanent art shift during the 'My House is Me' arc, when they learn that the titular governmental organization should very much not be trusted. At that point, Pancha Diaz comes in as colorist, and the rest of the comic is in color, mimicking to some effect the moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy wakes up in Munchkinland.
• Sleepless Domain: In Chapter 9, Undine has a Dream Sequence during which the art temporarily shifts to a lineless style, giving her dream a less defined and more surreal atmosphere.
• Slightly Damned:
  • happens several times during Dream Sequences.
  • Also, Flash Backs, like when Kieri reads through Darius's diary, are done in the same style. Another recent flashback is for Kieri's past.
• This Sluggy Freelance uses art shift to make the Dream Sequence that much mindscrewier.
• Snow By Night does this for "Feathers and Frost: A Snow by Night Vignette." For reference, here is the first strip of the main comic, and here is the first panel of the vignette.
• Loki's first person in Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki is rendered as an impressionist painting, in contrast with the comic's Animesque style.
• S.S.D.D. added a bit of realism in one comic.
  "When I stop hallucinating, I'm gonna really kick your arse Kingston!"
• Suicide for Hire uses a shift into poorly-drawn cartoons with scribbly shading here in a flashback sequence; the character narrating the flashback is telling very flimsy lies, and the listeners know exactly how untrue his allegations are, hence the art being, in the artist's words, "as poorly composed as his story".
• Super Brothers changes styles and coloring depending on the location. Scenes in the Koopa Kingdom are in dark colors and heavily shaded, Brooklyn is in full color with mixed shading, and the Mushroom Kingdom is in sepia with minimal shading.
• Superego illustrates every character's viewpoint, but in a thought bubble instead of taking over the entire screen.
• Although Union of Heroes is a photo-comic, if the background of a character is told, the strips are drawn.
• Universal Compass sometimes has the characters in a deformed style to emphasize humor. Also, the artist used to draw in a more detailed style to show the importance of a scene, but then she switched to giving every page that style.
• In Warrior U, during the "Cailburry Tales" arc, the drawing style changes whenever someone holds Leenan's illusion staff.
• What's Shakin' uses this in every flashback. Each flashback has a different art style.
  • Page 37 - Ell's flashback uses the old B&W animation style.
  • Page 38 - Pai's flashback uses a childish crayon style.
  • Page 39 - Nith's flashback is in a B&W manga style.
  • Page 40 - Coffin's flashback uses an old disco painting/tarnished style.
  • Page 49 - Fred's flahback has a monochrome red grunge style.
  • Page 52 and Page 53 - The Sister's flashback uses an old cartoon, like Scooby Doo kind of style.
• Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic:
  • Comic #674 is a homage to The Order of the Stick, with the art changing to its characteristic stick-figure style.
  • Also, strip #1076 shifts to medieval tapestry style to go along with the "bardic" rhyming narration. This is an homage to Ed Gorey and the theme song to the TV show Mystery!, for which Gorey did the animation.
• YU+ME: dream : Throughout the second section of the story, which takes place in the Dream World, the webcomic basically lives on this trope as the style changes every time the characters walk into a different area.
• Zero Percent Discount takes on an MS-paint style in this strip.
• Zombie Ranch switches between a more realistic style showing actual happenings on the ranch (and beyond), and a cartoony style representing the in-universe media ads and inserts for the TV show.

Web Original

• From Froghand:
  • For Halloween 2016, Froge decked out the site in a spooky black and orange, inverting all the pictures colours, and changing all the "Fuck yous" to "Spook yous". These changes are always unannounced and leave just as soon.
  • There was a brief, glorious moment in time somewhere in November where the site was turned into a pulsating, swinging, Hotline Miami bootleg, with the title screen music to boot. This heralded the Shitty Vaporwave Indie Game Reviews and the Arbitrary Vaporwave Week, despite expressing regret tes hat it was more Outrun than Vaporwave, and lasting for a few days more than a week.

Web Videos

• Don't Hug Me I'm Scared:
  • Just before the Creativity Explosion in DHMIS 1, the characters and set briefly turn into poorly-rendered, crudely-built CGI.
  • And then during the actual sequence, Yellow Guy and the Duck Guy switch from being puppets to people wearing costumes like the Red Guy (with a few noticeable physical differences, like Yellow Guy's wild blue mane and Duck Guy's longer beak).
  • The second DHMIS features even more shifts, mostly with claymation/stop-motion animation, such as the "Victorian Time" scene, the rotting apple, and Yellow Guy's reflection.
  • The third video has noticeably fewer art shifts, but it shifts during the clouds scene and the scene telling the story of Michael.
  • A major point in the fourth video, where most of the experience is 3D animated.
  • In Episode 6, the dream sequence that Yellow guy is forced into is entirely in fluid 2-D animation, although it only lasts like half a minute, also scenes with Red Guy are done in widescreen, with the scenery looking much more muted and realistic. There's also a brief switch to 3D animation when Colin appears.
• Briefly in the first episode of ''Flicker there's two frames of Elaina's dad that's done by a different artist (Gabe DOESNT Draw Stuff).
• Nintendo Direct sometimes does this, as a fun way of promoting certain games. Examples include Iwata being shown with a "paper border" from Paper Mario, when showing Paper Mario: Sticker Star, and showing a LEGO version of Iwata, before showing LEGO City Undercover.
• Petscop: After Paul inputs the code written on the note and steps outside the Even Care building, the art style suddenly shifts from a cheery, bright and colorful world to a dark forest with more realistic graphics and thick shadow obscuring the surroundings.
• In Return of the Cartoon Man, Peter's story about his father and Oswald Sherzikien is told through a series of black and white 2-D drawings with some Limited Animation.
• StephenVlog: The vlog for September 2nd, 2019 is told through RPG Maker.
• Most University Ever After Season 2 episodes are filmed in varying styles. For example, "Tale as Old as Time" is filmed in black-in-white, instead of the full color of most episodes, as an Homage to Film Noir.
• YouTuber IceFox37, in his more recent videos, changed the Afton Family’s designs.

Western Animation

In General:

• This was basically the shtick of both HBO's A Little Curious and Cartoon Network's MAD, much like its magazine counterpart. Both of these shows used various art styles by different animators and companies.
  • The animation in the Spy vs. Spy skits range from ink scribble style, clean Flash animation, and stop-motion.
  • Despite being on Cartoon Network, the latter show also has the style of various Nickelodeon series due to creators who either left Nickelodeon (Mark Marek, Jorge Gutierrez) or joined after the show ended (Gary "Doodles" DiRaffale and Steve Borst) working on the show.

By Studio:

• Van Beuren Studios:
  • The three Cubby Bear cartoons outsourced to the Harman and Ising cartoon studio are drawn and animated in a very different style than the rest of the series, which was usually very loose and haphazard.
  • The Little King Van Beuren shorts have more of an Art Deco aesthetic to some of the character designs to match the look of the comic it adapted from.

By Series:

• Flashbacks in The Adventures of Puss in Boots are depicted in a 2D storybook art style as opposed to the usual 3D CG.
• Adventure Time:
  • "Belly of the Beast" and "Power Animal" each briefly used Flash for one scene.
  • "Guardians of Sunshine": Finn and Jake get stuck inside a video game and consequently, the art style becomes a sort of blocky 3D animation style complemented with green and black graphics for the in-game characters and levels.
  • "A Glitch Is a Glitch": The episode is animated in crude CGI by David O'Reilly (serving as special guest animator) to reflect the fact that the Ice King has unleashed a computer virus to delete everyone in Ooo. The show's intro was even reanimated in this style.
  • "Food Chain" uses a lower framerate, yet with a more highly detailed style courtesy of guest director Masaaki Yuasa.
  • "Water Park Prank" is guest-animated by David Ferguson, and is done in a lineless art style with blocky character designs.
  • "Bad Jubies" is done entirely in stop-motion animation, complete with a stop-motion version of the show's intro.
  • "Beyond the Grotto" was animated by Alex and Lindsay Small-Butera, resulting in smoother animation with Line Boil.
  • "Ketchup" has three different art styles to it: A style similar to "Beyond the Grotto", a simpler animation style with black shading and a lineless one that resembles a greeting card.
• The Amazing World of Gumball:
  • The rap segment in "The Kids" was animated by the French collective studio crcr (who also aided in animating the Cartoon Network 2013 Summer Indent), giving it a flowy, lineless look.
  • "The Money" has a sequence done in Animesque art style parodying Japanese commercials. Near the end of the cartoon, the Watterson's financial straits get so bad, the animation starts becoming cheaper and sloppier. As they rush to a local fast food joint to agree to do a commercial, the animation degrades to sketches and low-poly CGI, then to storyboard images, and finally to crude sketches on sticky notes.
  • In "The Job", Gumball's lazy Bumbling Dad Richard gets a job as a pizza deliveryman, which is so out of character for him it actually tears apart the universe. The other family members drive right behind him and go through numerous art shifts in the last couple minutes at an accelerating rate, some of which also changed mediums as well. Right before the climax, Gumball, Darwin, and Anais go through more than a dozen different art style changes each in about one second. The fact that the show itself already doesn't have a consistent art style makes it even crazier.
  • In "The Ollie" Simon Landrein, a guest artist, directed and animated the skateboard scene. As a result, colors are bright and flat.
  • In "The Fury", the flashback to Nicole and Yuki's childhood is done as a series of manga panels in the style of Dragon Ball. Their big rematch at the end shifts into an Animesque style, with Nicole and Yuki depicted as more humanoid and their kids depicted as chibis. The art-shifted animation was done by Studio 4°C.
  • Sussie's "I Am" Song in "The Weirdo" is animated very crudely, with the scribbly crayon-esque animation constantly shifting. The art was actually done by a kindergarten class!
• American Dad!:
  • In the episode "The Longest Distance Relationship" when Jeff and Sinbad travel through the wormhole they morph into several different animation styles including South Park, The Simpsons or Futurama, The Powerpuff Girls, Clone High, and characters from the computer game Dragon Scuffle from the earlier episode "Dungeons and Wagons".
  • The episode "In Country...Club" has two shifts: one in which Steve, who is suffering from PTSD, has a "flashback" rendered in a realistic style on papyrus, and another in which Roger, after eating a special bird, gets high and has a CGI hallucination.
  • In "Jenny Fromdabloc", Stan repeatedly blacks out after drinking strong martinis, and he becomes convinced that Francine is a witch. During one of his blackouts, Stan dreams of Francine in the title sequence for Bewitched, complete with the screen becoming pillarboxed (this episode is in HD).
  • "Stanny Slickers 2: The Legend of Ollie's Gold" has a musical sequence parodying Schoolhouse Rock!, complete with mimicking the art style.
  • The opening and ending of "The Legend of Old Ulysses" features a sea shanty done in the style of old storybook illustrations.
• Animaniacs (2020):
  • "Bun Control" has an anime fight by Studio Yotta that shows the Warners in a style similar to Gurren Lagann and Kill la Kill.
  • "The Cutening" has Dot turn the world into a chibi wonderland.
  • The math stories in the "Math-terpiece Theatre" segments have a dramatic old film effect.
  • The two new segments, Starbox and Cindy and The Incredible Gnome in People's Mouths, have completely different art styles. And the effect is rather jarring.
  • Episode 11 has a one-off segment entitled "Things That Go Bump in the Night" which also has a different art style.
  • The Warners entering The Bayeux Tapestry causes a small one, making them—and the other characters on it—look like a tapestry come to life.
  • The cold open for the Season 2 finale has the Warners parodying ThunderCats (1985), complete with the same style.
  • "Rejected Animaniacs Characters" has a bunch of fake segments in different animation styles.
  • "Mouse Madness" transforms Pinky and Acme Labs into a Robot Chicken-esque stop-motion animation due to Brain's device.
• Arthur:
  • The episode "The Contest" shifts between many different styles of animation to represent each of the kids' stories, including parodies of South Park, Beavis and Butt-Head, and Dexter's Laboratory.
  • A subtle example from the episode "Mom and Dad Have a Great Big Fight", when Arthur and D.W. have an Imagine Spot about living alone in a cottage in the woods. The character designs and animation style don't change, but the backgrounds for this sequence are painted in a more gouache Disneyesque style, as opposed to the series' usual watercolor backgrounds.
  • In one episode Arthur and D.W. give a recount of a recent event with Arthur using crayon drawings. The art style shifts as such.
  • The movie Arthur's Missing Pal is done entirely in 3D CGI.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender: The flashbacks seen in "The Great Divide" differ in art style from one another while keeping the Animesque aesthetic. The flashback told by Gan Jin tribe doesn't differ significantly from the show's usual art style. The backstory of the Zhang tribe meanwhile is animated in a style reminiscent of Dead Leaves (from which it was inspired according to director Giancarlo Volpe). The "backstory" told by Aang at the end is animated in a Super-Deformed style.
• The Avengers Assemble episode "Molecule Kid" features a Flashback to the era covered in The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, and as such the characters are all drawn in Timm Style, complete with their EMH costumes.
• Bibleman: The show will often stop to have a sequence done up in flannel-styled Clip-Art Animation and told by a hand puppet Sunday school teacher and her magic flannelgraph board.
• The Big City Greens episode "People Watching" contained different stories by the different characters. Cricket's was Animesque with influence mainly from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Tilly's was done in the style of an old cartoon, Gramma's was done in the style of old European stories, and Bill's was in a stick figure style that eventually gets the styles of the others' stories in the end.
• Ben 10 (2016):
  • The scenes inside the arcade machine in "Xingo's Back" are animated in a more "pixelated" style to better match the visuals of an old videogame.
  • Season 3's "And Xingo Was His Name-o": the part of the episode inside Xingo's cartoon are drawn in a smoother, simplified style.
  • In "Tales from the Omnitrix," the Tennysons tell campfire stories that are shown in different animation styles, resembling those of Tim Burton (though in 2D), Schoolhouse Rock!, and Dragon Ball respectively.
• Bobby's fantasy sequences from Bobby's World are sometimes done in the styles of different cartoons like for instance "Bobby's Broadcast" featured homages to Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, Popeye, Dudley Do-Right, Yogi Bear, and Peanuts, and another episode features a scene done in the style of Batman: The Animated Series.
• Bob's Burgers: The season eight premiere "Brunchsquatch" is done with character designs and backgrounds submitted by 65 different artists portraying the show in their own art style, and the show does not use its own art style for the whole episode.
• Care Bears: Adventures in Care-a-Lot seems to be unable to decide on whether they want the franchise done in CGI or traditional animation.
• CatDog:
  • The episode "It's A Wonderful Half-Life" portrays CatDog's dreams as a Deliberately Monochrome homage to old black and white cartoons.
  • Dog's dream where he goes mad during the full moon is animated in a pencil sketch style.
• Central Park has Molly's comic that she draws. When the show switches to Molly's comic, it's in black and white and resembles her drawing and makes it look like a comic book.
• Clarence does this throughout the episode "Goldfish Follies", paying homage to Fleischer Studios. The intro music is also changed for this.
  • Ocassionally Sumo will go bizarre, unexplained art shifts where he becomes very crudely animated. Nobody seems to notice.
• Codename: Kids Next Door: In "Operation: R.E.P.O.R.T.", after a failed mission, the members of Sector V give their different accounts of why "The Goods" were lost, each in a different art style:
  • Numbuh 1's story is done in a CGI style with a featureless green grid for a background.
  • Numbuh 2's story mimics the style of Golden Age superhero comics.
  • Numbuh 3's story is told in a rather crude "children's drawing" style.
  • Numbuh 4's story is done in an Animesque style that parodies Dragon Ball Z.
  • Numbuh 5's story is in the animation style of series co-creator Mo Willems, as seen in Sheep in the Big City and "The Offbeats" shorts from KaBlam!
• Two notable instances happen in the last two episodes of Courage the Cowardly Dog:
  • In "Remembrance of Courage Past", Courage's backstory is shown through a series of flashbacks which resemble crudely-drawn crayon art that children usually make.
  • In the series finale "Perfect", Courage has several nightmares with each one being drawn in a different style of animation, such as CGI for one that features a creepy blue trumpet thing and stopmotion for another that has Courage performing in a talent show.
• Crashbox has some traditionally-animated segments in addition to the predominantly stop-motion ones.
• The animated TV version of Curious George features George's Imagine Spots and dream sequences done in the style of the original books (such as all of the character's eyes being black eyes instead of full eyes).
• Detentionaire sometimes shifts from the usual flash animation to something else. For example, the big prank that kicks off the plot is only shown through image stills with sound to convey the utter chaos going on in the gym. The last shot of the intro is in a more traditional, sketchy animation style. When there are closeups of hands, they tend to be drawn in more detail, and several nameless background characters are drawn in different styles as well.
• Dexter's Laboratory: The animation for the outside sequences in "Snowdown" is a Homage to Calvin and Hobbes.
• Doc McStuffins:
  • Has a few mini-episodes called "The Doc Files" that usually show in between commercials (or after the main show in markets where Disney Junior has no commercials) where Doc relates a past case. When she does so, the style switches to 2D Flash-style animation.
  • In "Into the Hundred Acre Wood", when Pooh explains why he's using balloons to float, he's shown with a thought bubble depicting him using the balloon to get honey from the bees in the traditional 2D animation style of the older Pooh films.
• Dog City:
  • "You've Gotta Have Hart", in which the Show Within a Show is cancelled and Eliot needs to sell Ace elsewhere, includes an Ace Hart comic book, which is represented by more detailed still images.
  • In "Old Dogs, New Tricks", Eliot's animation teacher is visiting and keeps trying to take over. His more "old-fashioned" style gives everyone White Gloves and Pie Eyes, as well as being Deliberately Monochrome.
• The Epic Tales of Captain Underpants is a 2D animated series most of the time, but it switches things up some episodes.
  • The episode "The Costly Conundrum of the Calamitous Claylossus" has its climax done in claymation, to go with its clay-themed Monster of the Week.
  • The tenth episode of Season 3 has the characters playing a game of "Plot Potato" where they all have to tell a story before Bo finishes eating one of Stanley's potatoes. Every character's story (Except Dressy's, whose style is the closest to the usual animation of the show) is animated in a different style.
    • George and Harold's story is presented as one of their usual comics.
    • Stanley's story is a Western with thick, angular lines.
    • Jessica's story is Animesque and resembles an animated commericial for a line of girl doll toys.
    • Gooch's story has flat colors and lineless animation.
    • Erica's story is a realistically-animated law drama.
• Face's Music Party: During "Pirates", the animation shifts to stop-motion paper cutouts in one scene, similar to South Park.
• The Fairly OddParents!:
  • "Spaced Out" features Show Within a Show Crash Nebula animated in a more realistic style.
  • In "The Good Ol' Days", Timmy and his Grandpappy are transported into the world of "rubber hose" cartoons from the 1930s.
  • Channel Chasers parodies the art styles of countless other cartoons, including Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, Speed Racer, and Tom and Jerry.
  • The Jimmy Timmy Power Hour specials utilized this, particularly due to the distinctive art styles between the two shows.
• Family Guy has done this several times:
  • Peter's cutaway in "Let's Go to the Hop" features him being shown in live-action.
  • In "Breaking Out Is Hard To Do", Chris winds up in the music video for the song "Take On Me" where he is animated in the same pencil contour style as the video.
  • In "No Chris Left Behind", Stewie briefly becomes a ruler more powerful than King Friday XIII which shifts the series over to being a puppet show.
  • "Road to the Multiverse", especially the Disney and Robot Chicken scenes as well as a brief live-action segment where Brian and Stewie are played by an actual dog and baby with their voices dubbed over.
  • Brian appeared in Die Hard and Real Time with Bill Maher using the Roger Rabbit Effect in "Brian's Got A Brand New Bag" and "Brian Writes a Bestseller", respectively.
  • Lois and Bonnie took a trip to Paris and took a "Muppet-style sightseeing" montage in "Foreign Affairs".
  • In "Back to the Pilot", Stewie and Brian go back to the series' pilot episode, which retained the more crudely-drawn art style that the original seasons had. They later go into the future which is ultra-realistic CGI.
  • Brian has a "dog party" in "Carter and Tricia" in the style of Go, Dog, Go!
  • In the last scene of "Cat Fight" Meg moves away to Japan to live with a Japanese family. The entire scene is rendered with an anime look.
  • In "Stewie's First Word" Lois briefly finds herself binge watching Caillou after blaming the show on teaching a bad word Stewie said. Clips of the show appear in its animation style with cel-shaded characters on a watercolor background that fades out at the edges. Later Peter is shown meeting in the park with Caillou's father in the same animation style.
  • In "Cutaway Land" the family is briefly transported back to the show's first ever cutaway gag with Adolf Hitler working out in Das Gym.
  • In "Meet The Quagmires", there's a cutaway that parodies the intro to The Jetsons, where George calls out Jane for taking his wallet. The entire thing mimics the original show's Hanna-Barbera art-style as closely as possible.
• The Futurama episode "Reincarnation" consisted of Three Shorts in different animation styles. The first was rendered in a Disneyesque Inkblot Cartoon Style, the second like an 8-bit video game, and the third as an Animesque adventure.
  • Two later episodes did a similar thing, but with a specific theme: "Naturama" reimagined the characters as various animals in a spoof nature documentary, and "Saturday Morning Fun Pit" featured three different parodies of Saturday morning cartoons.
• In the Garfield TV special Garfield: His 9 Lives, most segments are animated in the traditional Garfield style, but two of the shorts have a completely different style, the first being "Diana's Piano" which has more realistic character designs and has a water colored painting style, and the second being "Lab Animal" which has a very Don Bluth-esque style and is much darker and scarier than the other segments.
• The Gravity Falls episode "Weirdmageddon" has a scene where Dipper and Wendy are being chased by Lil' Gideon and his prison buddy Ghost Eyes in a high-speed chase and become exposed to Bill Cipher's "weirdness bubbles". While inside, Dipper and Wendy become Anime, turn into meat products, and switch to live-action, while Gideon and Ghost Eyes become blocky 3D graphics, change sexes and switch to an Inkblot Cartoon Style (complete with a silent movie intertitle card that reads "AAAAAAAAUGH!").
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy:
  • "My Peeps": Billy gets eyestrain, and Grim uses his magic to fix Billy's eyes, accidentally giving the boy precognitive powers. Grim ends up repeatedly altering Billy's sight in an effort to fix things, demonstrated by point-of-view shots through Billy's eyes as the art shifted to a sketchy Jhonen Vasquez-inspired style, then an Animesque style, then a cutesy little-kids' show style.
  • The Big Boogey Adventure movie also did this when the characters have to paddle through a vortex, briefly turning them into puppets (Billy even lifts up his shirt to reveal a arm underneath causing the others to scream) Grim comments it as "disturbing" once they exit out of it.
  • The show even switches to the style of The Powerpuff Girls (1998) at the end of one episode, after Mandy smiles and breaks the laws of physics.
• Originally, the pilot episode of Invader Zim, was going to have the foodfight between Zim and Dib completely in CGI.
• A Groovies short on Cartoon Network, "Josie and the Pussycats in: Musical Evolution" had the Pussycats performing their theme song in about half-a-dozen musical styles (from original 60s pop-rock, to disco, to punk rock, to country music, to arena rock, to EDM, and back to pop-rock), with each change in musical style accompanied by a change in animation style.
• The Jungle Bunch: In "Princess Groundhog", whenever the story is being told, the animation shifts from the typical 3D model style of the show to a 2D one.
• Kaeloo
  • In Episode 104, when Olaf explains his tragic backstory to Kaeloo and Mr. Cat, the art style shifts into a series of 2D illustrations.
  • In Episode 105, Kaeloo interrupts the theme song of the show and complains about it. She then proceeds to make her own 2D animated intro for the episode.
  • In Episode 176, the main four are turned into 2-dimensional versions of themselves in various art styles for a song.
  • In Episode 218, Kaeloo turns the main four (and Pretty) into poorly drawn 2D versions of themselves for the purpose of deliberately reducing the animation budget required for this scene so she can invoke an Animation Bump later in the episode with the money they saved.
• The King of the Hill episode "Death of a Propane Salesman" has Kahn telling an old Laotian fable that is animated in a sketchy papyrus style.
• The 2014 incarnation of Lassie switched from traditional hand-drawn animation to cel-shaded CGI in season 2.
• During a two-part episode of The Legend of Korra that details the origins of the first Avatar, the art style takes on a look and feel reminiscent of the paintings of feudal Japan, with watercolor backgrounds, lots of swirls in things like fire and dust, and a pale tint.
• Little People (Egmont) went from claymation to cel-shaded CGI when the series was changed from western animation to web animation. It was then changed to traditional CGI when the new show premiered on Sprout.
• Merrie Melodies: An ealy cartoon from 1936, "Page Miss Glory", involves a hotel in a farm town awaiting the arrival of a celebrity, the titular Miss Glory. As a bellhop falls asleep waiting for Miss Glory, he dreams of working in a glitzy hotel in the city. The cartoon is mostly rendered in Warner Brothers' 30s house style, but the dream sequence shifts to a more art-deco appearance.
• Mia and Me uses live-action for the Earth scenes and shifts to CGI when in Centopia.
• Kevin's near-death experience in Mission Hill has backgrounds done with oil paints that are constantly shifting from one to the next, while the rest of the show (and the characters) are done with animation cells.
• Molly of Denali: In "Home Made Heroes," when Molly and Tooey come up with their comic story, the art style changes to that of a Motion Comic.
• For the Muppet Babies (2018) episode "Best Pals Pizza Delivery", when Kermit enters the world of the Wacky Alpacas TV show, he's made into 2D like the show itself.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • While Pinkie describes her plan to become friends with Cranky in "A Friend In Deed", the art style switches to an arts-and-crafty style with characters made of cloth. when we return to Flash animation, she's still holding a check mark made of cloth.
  • Pinkie changes art styles again while plotting to break into Canterlot Castle in "Sparkles Seven", where she imagines going to space in a much more simplistic animation style
  • Occasionally, during songs or exposition, the show will switch to a more simplistic style of animation dubbed 'Pointy Ponies' by fans. We also see a couple of in-universe dolls drawn in this style.
  • During Cheese's song in 'Pinkie Pride', it switches to live action footage twice- once of a dancing rubber chicken held up by strings, and once of a baby alligator.
• My Little Pony: Make Your Mark: In "The Traditional Unicorn Sleepover", Sunny and Misty tell each other different versions of how the pony races were divided, which are presented in a paper-like art style instead of the show's CGI.
• Ninjago: Starting in Season 11's Ice Chapter, some flashbacks are in a more "anime" art style.
• Oggy and the Cockroaches:
  • The episode "For Real" features Oggy and Joey turned into a realistic cat and cockroach, respectively, with much more detailed animation to go with it. In the end, after Oggy and Joey are turned back to normal, Jack, Marky, Dee Dee, and Bob end up with the same fate, though Bob becomes a photo cutout of a real bulldog, and the effects are...disturbing, to say the least.
  • Additionally, The Movie (Yes, seriously) begins with a Parody of Evolution where the art style is drawn much more simplistic.
• OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes: In "Monster Party", Enid's flashback to her days at Ghoul School are in the style of Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School.
• The Patrick Star Show:
  • The show has a more painterly look to it than the main series. You'll see Medium Blending used very often with live-action objects showing up.
  • Dr. Plankenstein and his castle are always shown in Deliberately Monochrome Stop Motion animation.
  • Captain Quasar and Pat-Tron's segments are done in a UPA cartoon style, with settings being sharp and angular, and the coloring of props and backgrounds are slightly displaced from their line art.
  • The Cave Patrick segment in "Late for Breakfast" (and nowhere else) is done in a different style, having varying line widths, Line Boil, and a more washed out color scheme.
  • When Squidina draws out a plan in "Who's a Big Boy?", the animation shifts to rough pencil drawings.
  • "Super Sitters" contains a scene where we get a full look at a Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy comic. It takes up the entire screen and is stylized like a classic comic book, with it going panel by panel as the characters read out dialogue.
  • The opening of "House Hunting" is styled like a classic 1930s cartoon. It's even presented in 4:3.
  • Most of "The Lil' Patscals" takes place in a Retraux style based around 1920s cartoons, with all the characters having pie eyes and being drawn in grayscale.
  • Downplayed with "The Drooling Fool". The episode was done by a guest art director, so it has a noticeably more angular and Zany Cartoon-y style than the rest.
• Each dimension in Penn Zero: Part-Time Hero is depicted in a slightly different style than the original one, with the characters changing to match it. Some shifts are more extreme than others:
  • The Sugar Bowl dimension of "Baby-Pocolypse" is made up of pastel colors and fabric/quilted textures.
  • The "Cereal Criminals" world is designed to look like a cereal box illustration, with the cartoony brand mascots having thick pencil lines and flat colors while the scenery behind them is textured and realistic.
• Powerbirds changes its artstyle from a typically modern Thin-Line Animation form to a retro Thick-Line Animation form inspired by comic books whenever Ace and Polly transform into their superhero forms.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998):
  • During Fuzzy Lumpkins' animalistic rampage in "Fuzzy Logic", he and the backgrounds are tinted red, while the other characters are painted solid white.
  • The girls' stories in "The Bare Facts" each use a different art style depending on which girl is telling her side of the story. Blossom's is the regular style but uses washes of pink and red; Bubbles' is various crayon drawings; and Buttercup's uses black and white monochrome fashion.
  • The scenes in the time portal from "Get Back Jojo" are done in a sketchy, monochromatic style.
  • The scenes inside the silent movie from "Silent Treatment" are done in the style of 1920's cartoons.
• The Powerpuff Girls (2016): In "The Wrinklegruff Gals", the flashback to Bubbles destroying the old Pokey Oaks school is in the style of the original show.
• The Random Cartoons short "6 Monsters" contains sequences in different animation styles, going from traditional, CGI, Flash and digital 2D.
• In several parts of the Ready Jet Go! episode "Diggin' Earth", Sydney imagines Commander Cressida and her crew digging to the center of the Earth, in a 2D style.
  • A comic-book art style is used for various montages and scene transitions, like in "Sean Has a Cold".
• The Ren & Stimpy Show made extensive use of art shifts in many of its stills. The paintings would often be hyperrealistic and grotesque, with emphasis on abject features like body parts and excretions like eye gunk, hair, liver spots, etc.
• Rudolph's Shiny New Year switched from stop-motion to traditional cell animation during a flashback sequence where Rudolph tells Happy his story.
• Samurai Rabbit: The Usagi Chronicles: Compared the show's usual softer All-CGI Cartoon visual direction, Flashbacks and Imagine Spots are presented in a watercolor-style limited 2D animation. They're supposed to resemble the artwork of its original comic source material, Usagi Yojimbo.
• In the Sanjay and Craig episode "Prickerbeast", Craig momentarily becomes jarringly detailed in a close-up shot when he is told to look "real scary" by Sanjay.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power:
  • In the episode "Roll With It", Glimmer's Imagine Spot is done in an anime style, coloured entirely in pink and black.
  • In the episode "Huntara", Hordak's flashback is done with simplified, stylized art and copious shadowing.
• On Sid the Science Kid, Sid's "Super Duper Schmooper Big Ideas" are presented as animated kids' drawings, though the show is otherwise an All-CGI Cartoon using a proprietary system called "digital puppetry".
• The Simpsons has done this a few times:
  • The first was in "Treehouse of Horror VI". In the story "Homer³", Homer is transported to an alternate universe where everything is rendered in 3D computer animation.
    • The earlier segment "Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace" of the same episode has a very subtle one - Bart's dream that opens the segment is done in style of a more gag-oriented cartoon - while characters and objects generally look the same as in the usual show, the backgrounds are drawn in a painted, outline-less style as opposed to the outlined style of the show intended to blend in with the animation cels. Also, the character animation is much more exaggerated and has far more cartoonish effects than is usually the case in the series.
  • In the episode "Homer Simpson, This Is Your Wife" the intro is redone in live-action. This is actually an advertisement for the show done by British Channel Sky 1.
  • In the episode "Luca$" the intro is re-done in the style of Minecraft.
  • The episode "The Fight Before Christmas" has the segment "A Fluppet Family Christmas" where the whole family are portrayed as puppets.
  • Almost the entire episode "Brick Like Me" is rendered with LEGO pieces.
  • The opening of "Treehouse of Horror XXVII" renders the Simpson family as animated candy bars in the style of Sausage Party. Later on the segment Coralisa had Lisa going back and forth between the normal animation style and the style of the film Coraline.
  • "Treehouse of Horror XXXI" had the story "Toy Gory" which was rendered entirely in mid 90s-style CGI in the same style as Toy Story along with an epilogue of stills that were done in crayon. The story "Into the Homerverse" had a Homer that was rendered as a Japanese anime style and another that was an 8-Bit video game style.
  • In "Ned 'N Edna's Blend", Ned Flanders has a nightmare that spoofs Davey and Goliath, and thus is animated in claymation.
  • The Cards trailer in "Mommie Beerest" is animated in CGI.
  • "Angry Dad: The Movie" contains a few claymation sequences.
• South Park has had quite a few:
  • In "Good Times With Weapons", the kids' imaginary adventures as ninjas have an Animesque art style.
  • In "Chinpokomon", the kids smile in a cutesy Animesque fashion as a result of the Chinpokomon influence.
  • A scene in the episode "A Scause For Applause" is animated in Dr. Seuss' style.
  • The episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft" is half machinima.
  • In "Major Boobage" Kenny's hallucinations after he gets high on cat urine are animated in the style of Heavy Metal.
  • In general, Canadians are animated in an even cruder style than the rest of the charcters.
  • Live-action is sometimes used in sharp contrast to the rest of the show. Some examples are Mr. Garrison's rhinoplasty in "Tom's Rhinoplasty" (which causes his face to resemble David Hasselhoff), Saddam Hussein's head, and the intentionally atrocious news re-enactment in "I Should Have Never Gone Ziplining".
  • The "Coon and Friends" trilogy constantly shifts from the usual flat CG cutout style, to a much more rounded and detailed 3D CG look for Cthulhu and the other extra-dimensional beings, to still hand-drawn comic book pages which represent Captain Hindsight and the Coon's adventures.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • The theme song begins with a painting of a pirate with a live-action mouth.
  • During the climax scene of the episode "Pressure" the action changes to a crude looking set of a tropical island with all the characters being rendered as objects on a stick, except Sandy who takes on the look of a taxidermy squirrel.
  • The "New Student Starfish" episode has Mrs. Puff shift to the same incredibly messy art style as a sketch of her that offends her.
  • The special "Atlantis SquarePantis" had several different shifts of art style during the various musical numbers including an old video game, a green parchment look similar to U.S. money, and several different styles of painting during Squidward's song. The inside of the bus in this episode is rendered in 3D CGI.
  • The special "Truth or Square" had a few shifts of art style as well, including an animated TV commercial from the 1950's and a "rubber hose" Disney-style cartoon.
  • The episode "It's a SpongeBob Christmas!" breaks the art style for the whole episode since the whole episode, including the Patchy segments are done with stop-motion, similar to the classic Rankin Bass holiday specials.
  • The episode "Rodeo Daze" went to a live-action sequence with all the characters portrayed as rubber toys.
  • The episode "The Legend of Boo-Kini Bottom" is done in the same stop-motion style as "It's a SpongeBob Christmas!" but it includes an art shift itself as the special moves from stop-motion into a frilly animated style similar to The Amazing World of Gumball or something from 80's Nickelodeon that's done by Sally Cruikshank who is well known for her short films such as Quasi at the Quackadero, Make Me Psychic, and Face Like a Frog, as well as numerous animated segments on Sesame Street.
  • In "Moving Bubble Bass", there's a brief scene in Synchro-Vox when Patrick gets mad at Bubble Bass for eating the free food he'd offered SpongeBob and Patrick.
    Patrick: If my friend SpongeBob doesn't get his free lunch, things are gonna get CRAZY!
  • In "Karen's Virus", Karen's internals are rendered in full 3D.
  • At the end of "Yellow Pavement", SpongeBob makes his own driving instructional video, done with cardboard cutouts and live-action.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks: In "Crisis Point", the Movie Within a Show holodeck simulation is portrayed with sharper lighting, lots of Lens Flare and even an Aspect Ratio Switch.
  • As a Mythology Gag to Star Trek: The Animated Series, any time images from the TOS era are shown, they're made to resemble the low-budget Filmation models of that show (including characters who weren't in that version), as opposed to the exaggerated, Rick and Morty style designs used for everyone else.
• Steven Universe:
  • In "Garnet's Universe", Steven makes up a story about what Garnet did on a mission, and the animation shifts to an Animesque, video-game style.
  • In "Your Mother and Mine", Garnet tells Steven, Lars, and the Off-Colors her version of Rose Quartz's origin, and the animation changes drastically to two-dimensional beings made of shape and solid color. It only shifts back to the show's usual style at the end of Garnet's story, and when Rose Quartz manages to save Garnet and Pearl from the attack on the Crystal Gems from the remaining three Diamonds. This may have been because that was the only part of the story that was actually true.
• An episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles depicted the 2012 Turtles travelling to the dimension of the Turtles from the 1987 TV series and vice versa, alternating between hand-drawn animation and CGI.
• Teen Titans (2003):
  • Larry turns the city into a crayon drawing in "Fractured".
  • The viral core in "Crash" is rendered in pixel art.
  • Mad Mod turns the city into a black-and-white collage in "Revolution".
• Teen Titans Go!:
  • In "Books", when the Titans argue whether or not comic books count as real books, they're drawn as panels in a Silver Age comic.
  • In "Real Orangins", Robin's recounts of leaving Batman and forming the Titans are all done in different styles, such as him leaving Batman to be on his own is done in a style similar to Batman: The Animated Series and him meeting Starfire is in an Animesque style.
• Testament: The Bible in Animation had a different style of animation for each episode and sometimes the styles would switch within the episodes themselves.
• The Time Squad short "Recruitment Ad" has a realistic and heavily-shaded animation style, completely forgoing the show's typical Thick-Line Animation.
• TripTank due to being a Sketch Comedy show and animated by different animators.
• In the Ultimate Spider-Man (2012) arc "Spider-Verse", some of the alternate universes are art shifted: Spider-Man 2099's world is CGI, Spider-Man Noir's is Deliberately Monochrome, Spider-Ham's has a Looney Tunes feel to it.
• A favorite of Tuca & Bertie:
  • In "The Sugar Bowl", Tuca's journey to Bertie's apartment is done in the style of an 8-bit video game.
  • In "The Sex Bugs", a flashback is done with sock puppets.
  • A flashback in "Yeast Week" is done in grainy black-and-white.
  • In "The New Bird", Tuca's thoughts are done in claymation.
• The Venture Brothers:
  • In "Everybody Comes to Hank's", whenever Hank is wearing his fedora, he slips deep into the role of Hardboiled Detective. The video changes to black and white, and film streaks are added to enhance the Film Noir homage.
  • In "Spanakopita!", Billy Quizboy has a dream inspired by the fact that his archenemy is ruining his Greek vacation. The enemy is animated as a Stop Motion monster, in keeping with the episode's numerous allusions to Clash of the Titans (1981). He even name-drops Ray Harryhausen.
• In the Very Short Treks short "Holograms All The Way Down", keeping with the series' celebration of all things Star Trek: The Animated Series, the short starts off in the style of TAS even as we visit the eras of Star Trek: Enterprise, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine via holodeck programs... until Tendi calls out "Computer, freeze program" and it shifts to the Star Trek: Lower Decks animation style before Zero calls out the same thing and we're shown a more stick figure-esque animated style for Star Trek: Prodigy before it shifts back to TAS.
• What's New, Scooby-Doo?: In "A Terrifying Round with a Menacing Metallic Clown", a flashback to Velma's 5th birthday party is animated in the style of A Pup Named Scooby-Doo.
• Winx Club:
  • In Season 5, when the Winx travel to the Infinite Ocean, everything becomes CGI.
  • The same technique is used in Season 6 whenever the Winx go into the Legendarium World.
• Work It Out Wombats!: Often when Zadie imagines things, her thoughts are shown in the style of arts-and-crafts with cardboard, puffballs, and popsicle sticks.
• Xiaolin Showdown: The flashback to the fight between Master Monk Guan and Chase Young in their debut episode is drawn in pencil without being colored and the artstyle is more realistic than the show's normal artstyle.

---