Everything Talks

And this is only some of the stuff that can talk in this world.

"Everything talks. I don't just mean the animals, I mean everything. The sun, the moon, the clock—even the water! The water fucking talks! It's like Pee-Wee's... EARTH."

— The Nostalgia Critic on The Wind in the Willows

On TV anything can be made to seem to talk. This is especially common in commercials, where everything from products, to signs, food, body parts, clothes and beyond has something to say. They all want you to buy something too, even your ratty old sneakers have sold out and are working for the man.

One might think that consumers would want their foodstuffs and household products not to be possessed by demons (in fact, a Sprite commercial features a family running in terror from the smiling anthropomorphic sun that bursts forth from a bottle of a Sunny Delight counterpart), but apparently advertisers don't see it that way. At its worst, it can become quite disturbing. Often combined with Animate Inanimate Object.

Some specific subtypes of this are:

• Animate Body Parts
• Ghost in the Machine
• Let's Meet the Meat

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Examples:

Advertising

• Ads for the dish detergent add in JetDry feature a talking JetDry/Detergent dispenser as part of a dishwasher.
• Long used in commercials for Parkay spread, where a tub of the margarine would contradict a housewife and insist that it was butter until she would taste and say "butter!", at which point the tub would smugly announce, "Parkaaaaaay!".
• Mothers Against Drunk Driving ads targeted at drug-impaired driving involved stoned and confused characters being lectured by otherwise inanimate objects (such as a t-shirt) regarding their condition.
• A set of commercials for orange juice had a talking sandwich advise people opening the fridge to drink orange juice instead of going for their intended snack. The usual response of viewers was "If your leftovers are talking to you, your fridge is long overdue for cleaning..."
• It appears that recent Dr Pepper ads use singing soda cans in the voice of Flavor Flav. The mouth is the hole where the soda would come out in real life.
• Tide ran ads, and possibly a contest, called "The Talking Stain."
• A Gillette commercial features a razor blade talking to a guy and telling him that he should replace the blade when the indicator strip changes colour.
• A recent Quizno's commercial features a seductive, deep-voiced oven convincing an employee to advertise a new sandwich in unmistakably come-hither fashion.
  Oven: Scott, I want you to do something . . .
  Scott: Not doing that again. I burn.
  Oven: We both enjoyed that.
• ''Give me back that filet-o-fish! Give me that fish!''
• In some car insurance commercials, things which cause damage, like a pipe which broke a tail light, a branch which broke a windshield, and a pot hole causing a flat tire, the things doing damage to talk with cliché accents. The pipe had a "Russian woman" accent, the branch had a "Brooklyn man " accent, and the pothole had a "redneck girl" accent.
• Parodied in this Sprite commercial which starts out as a standard breakfast food commercial until the happy orange juice container chirps up, at which point the family screams in terror and runs away.
• Sometimes Chevron airs commercials with claymation cars that talk to each other.
• An old ad for Alka-Seltzer had a man and his stomach being interviewed about heartburn. At one point, the man says he likes pepperoni pizza, at which the stomach replies, "Do you like heartburn? Well, you're going to get heartburn whenever you eat pepperoni pizza." The moderator informs both about Alka-Seltzer and all is well again.
• A Polish ad for the "Delma" margarine lampshaded this by having some children chide their mother for "talking to Delma again".
• A 2018 ad campaign for Totino's Pizza Rolls features a couple with appliances and furniture that can talk. In the first one, the microwave hops into the living room when the woman comes home, and pops open to be full of cooked pizza rolls, displaying "YAY!" on its screen, as she sits down to play video games with her husband.
• The NAPA auto parts store has a series of commercials where a metal can of "NAPA Know-How" has a conversation with the customer and sales clerk.
• Apparently the nutritional supplement Ensure has the personality of Drill Sergeant Nasty.
• A Guiness commercial has the frothy heads of several beers singing Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out for a Hero".

Anime and Manga

• Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, which has a talking torpedo, a talking piece of jelly, a talking orange rock thing, and a guy with ice cream with his head who talks.

Comic Strips

• In a Garfield strip, Jon said it would nice if everything could talk, and the toaster would say "Good morning!". Garfield thought that every time a light bulb blew, it would be like a death in the family.

Fan Works

• K-On! The Abridged Series: "Okay, now the gloves are talking? Does everything Yui names talk?"
• The third episode of Ranma ½: The Abridged Chronicles features a talking bucket of water. Well, it is the narrator speaking through the bucket of water, but he cries out "my spine!" as Ranma jumps on the bucket anyways.
• Since fans of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic "ponify" everything, it was inevitable that this would spread to food and inanimate objects as well. Alarm clocks, breakfast, soap, toilets, it seems nothing has been spared.

Films — Animation

• Most of the furniture and dining objects in Disney's Beauty and the Beast talks, because they used to be human.
• The Brave Little Toaster is set in a world where every mechanical or electrical appliance is secretly sapient and capable of talking (at least to each other). The fact that humans regularly discard such things is played up for a lot of drama.

Literature

• Older Than Feudalism: "The Two Pots" in Aesop's Fables.
• In the Xanth series of books, Magician Dor's talent makes this possible. It started at a very young age — his own baby crib was singing lullabies to him already.
• Harry Potter. Just don't trust anything if you can't see where it keeps its brain!
• In The Stormlight Archive the Cognitive Realm is made up of a lot of beads, each of which represent the "soul" or cognitive aspect (how an object is seen by people and how it 'sees' itself) of an object in the Physical Realm. Those with the power to Soulcast can "talk" to these to convince them to change into something else, though it's not clear whether they are actually self-aware in the sense we would understand it or if it's just how the Soulcaster conceptualizes what they are doing.

Live-Action TV

• In an episode of Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe, he comments on an ad with a talking toilet, wondering why it wants its owner to shit in its mouth.
• Pee-wee's Playhouse, in which pretty much every single object in the house could talk, including a chair, a window, a globe, a clock, a kite, food, flowers, all animals, and even the floor. His name was Floory.

Mythology and Religion

• Most mythologies have an animistic view of things, with everything from the wind and sun to specific mountains having a god or spirit.
• An example played for horror, or at least Black Comedy, appears in the K'iche' Mayan epic Popol Vuh. The sky god Huracan is displeased by the prototype humans he created out of wood and has determined to destroy them by The Great Flood. As it starts to rain, several monsters appear and everything becomes animate, talking, and furious. Household tools come to life and start berating the humans for treating them poorly while bashing their faces in (pestles go, "Now we'll see how you like getting your face rubbed against stone!"). Dogs start speaking and chasten their owners for abusing them before eating them in revenge. When the surviving humans try to climb trees, the trees shake them off; sentient caves close up before them. None of the wooden men survive.

Puppet Shows

• Most of The Muppets are animals or vaguely-human, but as well as the Singing Food, there are the Talking Houses from The Muppet Show, the various objects from the "Here is Your Life" skits on Sesame Street, just about everything in Elmo's World, and so on. In the Peter Ustinov episode of The Muppet Show, Ustinov tells Kermit he was very surprised to have a conversation with the hatrack in his dressing room. Kermit replies that the hatrack is one of the writers.

Video Games

• In the Banjo-Kazooie series, NPC characters are usually a sentient version of an inanimate object, with googly eyes. This includes (but is by no means limited to) musical notes, honeycombs, hives, oranges, jigsaw pieces, Leaky the Bucket, Cheato the Cheatbook, Loggo the Toilet (!) and even the Banjo-Kazooie cartridge.
  • Conker's Bad Fur Day, which is essentially a Rated M for Money version of Banjo-Kazooie from the same company, continues using this trope, frequently to darkly hilarious effect.
  • Really, anything and everything can be a living, breathing character in a Rare game.
• Following fairytale conventions, the Unreliable Narrator puts words in the mouths of trashcans, scissors, buckets, etc. in Rule of Rose.
• Pajama Sam. Especially in Thunder and Lightning Aren't So Frightening. The characters are inanimate objects, and even the things that are treated as objects also display sentience, including trash cans and stone paper weights.
• Total Distortion plays this for laughs. Interacting with the environment often results in random voice clips saying what you're doing, but the objects in question aren't alive. Your Interdimensional Guitar Case says "Guitar Case!" or "Crack it open!" when opened; spinning disks in a stacking minigame shriek if they fall off, and most famously, a harmonized voice sings "Yum-Yum!" after you've eaten something.
• Fallen London: Polythreme deconstructs this one. Sure, everything is alive and talks, but it doesn't take much pondering to realize why that isn't necessarily a good thing for the things in question, or for you. And if you'd rather have witnesses, the locals, the Clay Men, can tell you plenty about it:
  "IN POLYTHREME THE BED I SLEPT ON WAS A SLAVE. THE ROOM WHERE I SLEPT WAS HACKED FROM SCREAMING STONE. THE WATER I DRANK BEGGED ME TO STOP. THEY PAID ME IN COIN THAT PLOTTED MY DOWNFALL. THE MEMORIES ARE TROUBLING. THIS PLACE IS BETTER."

Web Animation

• In the beginning of Robert Winchester's "Half-Beard" flash cartoon, Rob has a conversation with his beard when he faces the necessity of shaving again. When he tells it to stop screaming in pain, it obliges.
• Hanazuki: Full of Treasures features several structures and landscape objects all over Hanazuki's moon that have faces and a capacity for speech. The Treasure Trees grown by Hanazuki also have faces, but are The Unintelligible. It takes a dark turn when the moon is slowly engulfed by an eldritch cloud of inky blackness, which is bad enough on its own, except we also get to see a pair of adorable talking mountains wheezing and on the verge of death as they beg for help.

Web Original

• Moonflowers draws heavily on mythology and fairy-tale elements. So far animals, a comb, and houses are confirmed to speak.

Web Videos

• The Annoying Orange has spoken to pretty much anything that could conceivably be found in a kitchen, and then some.
• AMV Hell: The "Because I Got High" clip
• Taken to its logical, terrifying conclusion with this vid. "Stuff Talks When You're Not There 2: This Time, Everything Talks". Rated G.
• The Warp Zone: Discussed in "If Pixar Had Facebook 2", after Dug the Dog posts about his trip to the groomer:
  P.T. Flea: Hey old man! Want to explain what the hell happened to my beautiful condo?? I just remodeled the entire second floor, and that bath destroyed everything!
  Carl Fredericksen: My apologies, I had no idea.
  P.T. Flea: You know we live in a world where everything down to kid's toys are sentient! So try and be a little more thoughtful!

Western Animation

• The entire cast of The Babaloos (well, except for seldom-seen Kevin and his even-more-rarely-seen parents) is composed of sentient household objects- the two closest things (no pun intended) the series has to main characters are Baby Towel and Teaspoon, and it seems the only restriction on what can be alive in the show is that it has to be manmade and (reasonably) small.
• The animated series The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat was set in a world where pretty much every single inanimate object was sentient, capable of speech and could spawn eyes, a nose and a mouth whenever necessary.
• Welcome to Tonka Town: In Tonka Town, the trucks talk. In Tonka Town, the stoplights and streetlights and bridges and traffic cones talk. In Tonka Town, the freaking houses talk.
• Zula Patrol. Like The Twisted Tales Of Felix The Cat, but in a galaxy (or more) instead. But their homeworld cannot.
• Parodied in a Rosanne Bar cartoon special where she went to a land of cartoons where everything talked. She got off on eating food that screamed while she ate it.
• In Chowder almost everything in that show is alive (but Chowder still freaks out when he finds a talking toilet).
• Handy Manny with the talking tools.
• Word of God is that literally everything in The Amazing World of Gumball is fully able to talk and think. This doesn't come up every episode, but periodically some random object will still start talking, which has included seemingly non-sentient animals and food, microbes, appliances, walls, body parts, the internet, and celestial bodies (including the Earth, moon, and sun). And this is entirely separate from the rest of the cast, who all started acting like humans.
  • An example:
    Jamie: Hey, everybody! I'm gonna throw the TV out the window!
    TV: (grows face and limbs) Please, allow me! (jumps out the window)
  • The entirety of the episode "The World" is a salute to the trope, since the focus is on several inanimate objects in Elmore. It even takes the trope into mild Body Horror when Gumball's eyes turn into mouths, Corinthian-style, and briefly sing in the ending jingle.
• Cartoon Network is actually very fond of this in general. Regular Show has a talking bluejay, raccoon, Sasquatch, Benson, a talking gumball machine, and episodes with things like a talking computer. Adventure Time! has things like the Candy Kingdom, where everyone is a talking piece of candy or some other sugary treat and the other kingdoms where everyone is a talking hot dog, breakfast food, space cloud, etc. Uncle Grandpa is yet another example, with a giant talking reptile, a talking fannypack (or Belly Bag) and a talking slice of pizza.
• The Tick had a talking sunflower, soldiers that resemble army toys, and Chairface, a guy whose head is a chair.
• A magazine article on DC Nation's animated Amethyst Princess Of Gem World shorts describes one of the obstacles Amethyst must overcome as "a forest of super-saccharine, talking everything". The short look in "Level 4: Random Encounter" attests that this is pretty much accurate.
• During the golden years of Betty Boop's cartoons, everything in the world would come to life at some point and would usually do everything possible to aid Betty.
• In Care Bears in the Land Without Feelings, the trees, flowers, and rocks in the titular land all talk.
• Big Mouth throws this trope around like confetti. Socks talk, scallops talk, genitals talk...
• Kaeloo: Starting in season 4, objects and food items are given the ability to talk depending on Rule of Funny.

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