Realistic Species, Cartoony Species

This trope is the reason this particular Interspecies Romance didn't go so well.

For various reasons, humans may be illustrated realistically or in detail while animals appear cartoonish and/or unrealistic in a work of animated or illustrated fiction. Alternatively, humans may appear cartoonish, while the animals appear realistic or detailed. Fictional creatures which are neither human nor animal (such as elves and intelligent human-like aliens) may be placed in either category for illustration style when appearing in a work that includes both humans and animals. This trope may also apply to works without humans if there is a similar animal to fill the same role.

The human audience will generally better recognize the appearance of humans than other (real world) animal species, which could explain either form of this trope. If the wild animals look unrealistic, then most of the audience won't notice because they don't remember exactly what that species really looks like. The humans may also look more detailed to diversify their appearance.

If humans are portrayed as cartoony while other animals are realistic, this may be because it is easy for humans to recognize a character as a human even when the appearance is simplified, while they need to see more detail to know exactly what type of animal a character is. This is most commonly found in manga and anime, where the audience is supposed to relate only to the cartoony... MANGA/ANIME-ish! humans with big eyes, small mouths, and pointy noses, which conforms to the principle of creating cartoony-looking characters for maximum relatability and projectability noted in Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. Animals just look like real animals most of the time, even in stories where the animal characters have a more prominent role that doesn't overshadow the human ones.

No Cartoon Fish is a sister trope, where fish are realistic and detailed while everything else isn't. This is a Graphical Trope.

Also see Cartoon Creature and Non-Standard Character Design.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• TOEI animation's Digimon shows, where some of the monsters look more like real-world creatures than the humans, to say nothing of the animals.
• Chi's Sweet Home: The humans, who have Black Bead Eyes, and the cats are more stylized and toony, while the dogs, parakeets, songbirds, snakes, frogs, rabbits, and other animals are semi-realistic.
• Pretty Cure
  • In Futari wa Pretty Cure, Honoka's dog Chuutaro is drawned far more realistic than how she is rendered.
  • In one episode of Fresh Pretty Cure!, Love meets a dog named Lucky. Like Chuutaro, Lucky looks more like a real dog than Love looks like a real human.
  • In Episode 30 of Healin' Good♡Pretty Cure, the girls visit a zoo and see some very realistically-drawn animals, with the shoebill being a notable standout.
• Several Pokémon in The Electric Tale of Pikachu, such as Charizard, Gyrados, and even Pikachu to an extent, are drawn in a more semi-realistic fashion compared to the humans.
• Harlem Beat features a realistic Collie but far less realistic humans.

Comic Books

• In the setting of Jeff Smith's Bone graphic novel series the humans are quite realistic, while the wild animals are more cartoony; except the rat creatures—the antagonists, who are the most detailed (though not realistic). The Bone brothers break the pattern, being extremely cartoony humanoids; a visual reminder that they're only visiting from a distant land where things are implied to work by different rules.
• Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew!: During the story arc "The Oz/Wonderland War", the Zoo Crew and a few cameos such as Hoppy the Marvel Bunny appear in the comics' usual Funny Animal Saturday morning cartoon style, while the inhabitants and backgrounds of the Land of Oz and Wonderland appear in detailed, realistic pen-and-ink style matching the original illustrations of John Tenniel, John R. Neill, and Frank Ver Beck.
• Maus, a true Holocaust story, is an interesting (strange) example. All Jewish people appear as cartoonish, anthropomorphic mice, but this is just a metaphor, as they are humans in-universe. Other humans appear as other animals; such as Polish pigs, American dogs, and Nazi cats. In a panel in the first book, a real rat is seen running on the floor of a room that some Jews went into. There was a comic within a comic in this book written by the protagonist, in which the characters are detailed and fairly realistic humans.

Comic Strips

• In the newspaper comic Bloom County and its sequels, the animals were always cartoony, but got more so during the several occurrences of Art Shift throughout the series.
• In Calvin and Hobbes people are drawn in a very cartoony style while animals (except for Hobbes) are usually seen only in Calvin's Imagine Spots, which tend to be drawn more realistically than the main action.

Films — Animation

• An American Tail: The humans are realistic, but the mice, cats, and other animals are cartoony, with the exception of a group of roaches and a few fish.
• Koda's mother is drawn as being far more realistically than the other bears seen in Brother Bear, such as Kenai post-transformation and her son Koda, who are all drawn in a cartoony manner to make them appear more sympathetic. When we see Koda's mother's ghost at the end of the movie, she is drawn to look exactly like the other bears in the movie.
• Cinderella: The animals (the mice, the songbirds, the chickens, Bruno the dog, Major the horse, and Lucifer the cat) are cartoony but humans are semi-realistic or at least less cartoony than the animals. The four mice-turned-horses and other horses other than Major are semi-realistic though.
• The Anglerfish, Jellyfish, and the Whale from Finding Nemo and Becky the Loon, the Otters, and the Squid from Finding Dory are drawn more realistically than the other animal characters in the movies, despite many of them being based on actual fish species.
• Garfield mostly averts this trope, but this trope is played straight with the panther from Garfield in the Rough, making it look downright terrifying.
• The Little Mermaid has cartoony fish and sea creatures, birds and land creatures, and dogs, but relatively realistic humans.
• The Great Mouse Detective: The humans are realistic, but aside from the realistic horses, the animals (the mice, bat, rat, cat, dog, lizard, and octopus) are cartoony.
• Ice Age; the original film only, as the sequels strangely didn't have humans. Although a few talking animals such as Manny had fairly realistic anatomy—Sid the sloth had strange eyes on the side of his head, as well as some other stylistic shapes on supporting characters. The adult humans looked fairly realistic, and the baby to a lesser extent.
• Despite not featuring any humans, the main animal characters in The Lion King (1994) are drawn as being far more cartoony than the background animals, as best demonstrated if one compared Timon's design with those of the meerkats seen briefly at the very beginning of the movie. Averted during the song "I Just Can't Wait to be King", where all the animals are cartoony and sporting stylized designs.
• Mr. Bug Goes to Town has cartoon bugs against rotoscoped humans.
• Mulan: The humans are semi-realistic, while Cri Kee the cricket and Mushu the dragon are cartoony. Khan the horse is semi-real though, as are the panda bear and Shan-Yu’s hawk (who looks cartoony after his feathers are scorched away).
• Over the Hedge has big-headed cartoonish animal protagonists. All of the humans are somewhat realistic, with accurate proportions.
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Snow White, Prince Charming, the Queen (before and after transforming into a hag, but especially before) and the Huntsman are realistic, while the animals are more cartoony, although still semi-realistic. The Dwarfs are appear as heavily cartoonized humans, the most cartoonish in the film, one more hint that they may be supernatural or faerie beings rather than mortal human beings.
• The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie has cartoonish animated anthropomorphic sea-creatures. All humans (David Hasselhoff and the scuba diver/shopkeeper) are live action. The scenes outside of water have live-action backgrounds, and the sea creatures are live action when they dry and die.
• The bees and other insects in Bee Movie are cartoonier than the humans.
• Brave: The adult bears, Mor'du and Ellinor as a bear, the dogs, Angus the horse, and the fish caught by bear Ellinor look realistic, but the humans and Merida's triplet brothers as bears appear semi-realistic or cartoony, more typical of the Pixar style.
• Up. The human characters are very caricatured (Carl's face is a perfect square, Russel's facial features are too close together, Muntz is unrealistically skinny), but the dogs (apart from Dug, whose eyes clearly show sclerae and are placed close together) look like real dogs. Kevin the "Snipe" is cartoony, but then, on the other hand, her species is fictional, so what is her species meant to look like?
• In Turbo, the crows and beetles as they are photorealistic and more realistic than the humans, who are semi-realistic, while the snails are cartoonier than the humans.
• Pinocchio: Monstro the whale, the tuna he eats, and the moths are semirealistic, but Cleo and the other fish shown, Figaro and Gideon the cats, Honest John the fox, the boys turned into donkeys, and Jiminy Cricket (who is also an Informed Species) are cartoony. The Blue Fairy (basically a woman with wings in appearance) is realistic and Rotoscoped so as to look ethereal, but the humans (Geppetto, Stromboli, Coachman, Lampwick, Pinocchio as a real boy) are cartoony to almost semirealistic. The Blue Fairy as a dove is also realistic. Pinocchio as a puppet is cartoony with Four-Fingered Hands.
• The Hobbit: While Elrond looks very noble and close to human, the wood elves are much closer to the original Scandinavian depictions of such creatures, being short, a bit ugly, and having blue skin.
• The fairy Prince Cornelius' pet bumblebee from Thumbelina (1994) is drawn more realistically than the other animals in the movie, including all the other insect characters.
• Tom & Jerry (2021) features live-action humans and animated animals. It even features cartoon cuts of meat.
• Pokémon Detective Pikachu features live-action humans and CGI Pokemon in place of animals.
• In the Sonic the Hedgehog film series, humans (including Robotnik) and non-sapient animals are in live-action, while Funny Animal characters retain most of their cartoonish designs from the games. The only sapient animal exception to this is Longclaw the owl who looks realistic.
• Wreck-It Ralph: The video game characters of different eras looks very different, with the old characters like Ralph and Felix being very cartoony, while new characters like Calhoun are more realistic. They can apparently notice these differences, since Felix is impressed with Calhoun's "high definiton". Whether they're technically different species is up for debate.

Puppet Shows

• The Ferals: The humans are played by actual people while the animals are played by puppets.
• British science Edutainment Show Cats' Eyes did this as well. Humans Alf, Katie and Janet/Dora are played by people while cats Jimmy and Juke are puppets.
• Most animals seen in Sesame Street are played by Muppets, aside from Elmo's fish Dorothy, Telly's hamster Chuckie Sue, and Bert's pigeon Berniece.

Toys

• LEGO minifigures have simplistic shapes and unrealistic proportions (as well as all-yellow skin^note Except for sets licensed from media), probably to match the rectangular style of Lego pieces and models. The animal figures, however, have better curved shapes and more realistic proportions—probably so that humans will recognize their genus/species.

Video Games

• Aside from Dr. Eggman, humans in the Sonic the Hedgehog series from Sonic Adventure to Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) (pictured above) were rendered as anime or realistic styled, compared to the very cartoony Funny Animals. Sonic '06 upped the realism of the humans and even gave Eggman a more realistic design. Due to negative fan response, Eggman reverted to his previous design in the next game Sonic Unleashed, where the humans are made to look like Pixar characters.
• In Go Vacation, humans are anime-styled while animals look more realistic.
• Kingdom Hearts generally toes the line with this trope by having Funny Animals alongside anime-style and Disney animated humans, but it comes fully into play in the Pirates of the Caribbean World, which due to being adaptions of live-action films, features realistic humans alongside Donald Duck.
• Planet Zoo: In this zoo simulator, the animals look extremely photorealistic and as anatomically accurate as possible, whereas the humans are cartoonish-looking with Black Bead Eyes.
• In The Universim, the human-like Nuggest are very simple, with Floating Limbs and no faces. In contrast, the various wild animals are more detailed and realistically-proportioned.
• Animal Crossing: Both the human player characters and anthropomorphic animals are very cartoony, while non-sapient animals like the collectible fish and invertebrates are realistic.

Webcomics

• In The Whiteboard, the Funny Animal main characters are drawn in a fairly realistic style, while human extras are drawn as featureless "bubbleheads" distinguishable only by their clothing. Inanimate objects are the most detailed of all, since before starting the comic the author mostly drew hardware or machines. Later on the comic switched to just having everyone be funny animals, and implied that the extras' earlier "human" appearance was simply a lack of description rather than an indication of species.
• In Hyperbole and a Half, none of the pictures are drawn completely realistically, but the animals (usually dogs) have a tendency to be drawn with more complexity than the humans, who can look like they were drawn by a five-year-old.
• In TetZoo Time!, the humans are cartoony like in the show it is based off of, while the animals are realistic aside from having dots for eyes.
• The Perry Bible Fellowship spoofs this by showing a realistic rabbit in a town of clothes-wearing Funny Animals, who is promptly busted for public indecency.

Western Animation

• In Dora the Explorer, protagonist Dora and the other human children look cartoony, and the adults are more realistic. However, her anthropomorphic animal friends are more cartoony, often more so than the children. Her sidekick Boots the monkey, and a few other animals, hardly resemble the animal that they are supposed to be.
• Baby Jaguar and other animals in Go, Diego, Go! are more realistic than Boots, Tico, Benny, Swiper, Isa, and other animals in Dora the Explorer and are as realistic as the humans in both shows.
• Most of the incarnations of the Alvin and the Chipmunks franchise, but moreso the 1983 cartoon series Alvin and the Chipmunks, the 1987 film The Chipmunk Adventure, and the two VHS movies released in 1999 and 2000, Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet Frankenstein and Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet the Wolfman; in these incarnations, the human characters have rather realistic designs (especially true for The Chipmunk Adventure), while The Chipmunks and Chipettes are cartoony, roughly three feet tall, and walk, talk, dress, and eat like people.
• In SpongeBob SquarePants, most of the characters are cartoonish, animated anthropomorphic sea-creatures. Patchy the pirate, and his friends, are live action humans (and a mermaid)—save for his pet parrot, who is a marionette.
  • The episode "Pressure" has SpongeBob and his friends go on land, they appear as live-action puppets outside the water.
  • Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy are the only cartoony humans in the show, who are otherwise portrayed in live-action sequences.
  • According to "Feral Friends", the underwater animal characters can become realistic, but only if exposed to Neptune's Moon. It has no effect on the jellyfish whatsoever, and Neptune's Sun has this effect on Sandy, but changes Potty's species outright, with him remaining a puppet. (Implying the character is a puppet in universe)
• In Gaspard And Lisa, the main dog characters and their family and relatives are cartoony and over-stylized, whereas the other animals (like Burlee the kitten and even non-anthropomorphic dogs) and the humans are semi-realistic.
• We Bare Bears: The bears and other animals are drawn in an extremely simple, cartoonish style, while the humans, although still stylized, are more detailed and realistically proportioned.
• In Jonny Quest, the humans and nearly all the animals are drawn quite realistically for a Saturday-Morning Cartoon, with the single exception of the Plucky Comic Relief dog Bandit, yet somehow it works. Word of God is that Bandit's more cartoonish appearance is the direct result of Executive Meddling.
• After Jonny Quest, other HB and Ruby Spears shows had more realistic human and animal designs like Space Ghost, Scooby-Doo, Harlem Globetrotters and other knockoffs. Excluding the team pet and a few others. Also the humans may have Black Bead Eyes in some of them.
• South Park:
  • The humans are cartoony, but the animals in later seasons are realistic. Cats and cattle are still cartoony, however.
  • Also averted with the Canadian humans and animals as both are cartoony.
• The Simpsons: Except for those introduced early on the series (Blinky the fish, Snowball II, Santa's Little Helper), animal characters are depicted more realistically than the humans.
  • From the beginning, the producers established a rule that animals would behave as they do in real life, although that rule has gotten a little looser in later seasons.
  • Stampy the elephant is actually semi-realistic, unlike most of the other animals and the humans.
  • The Funny Animals from The Itchy & Scratchy Show, however, are exempt.
• In The Wild Thornberrys, the humans are very cartoonish. Most of the wild animals in the show, who are numerous, are more realistic. Darwin the chimp is as cartoony as the humans however.
• Sanjay and Craig: The human characters and Craig the snake look cartoony, but the other snakes look semi realistic.
• Bob's Burgers: The human characters look cartoony with very weak chins, but the other animals, including the horses appear closer to semirealistic.
• In Gravity Falls, animals are depicted more realistically than the humans.
• Wild Kratts: humans are cartoonish, while animals are realistic.
• Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous: The humans are relatively cartoony, while the dinosaurs are more or less a one-to-one depiction as they appear in the live-action films, and therefore have much more detailed textures and colours.
• In DuckTales (2017), Funny Animals are cartoony while non-sapient animals look realistic. This even extends to original characters that underwent Adaptational Nonsapience for the show, such as Tootsie, Rhinokey, Butterbear, and Poe's raven form. When humans make an appearance in "Quack Pack!", they are just as cartoony as the Funny Animal cast other than having five-fingered hands.
• In 12 oz. Mouse, Skillet and the humans from Season 3 (not counting the Kid) are realistic while the rest of the humans and animals are cartoony.

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