Sluggish Sloths

"A sloth? That's about as laid-back as you can get!"

—Riley, after a post office worker is replaced by a sloth, The Replacements

A fairly common stereotype of sloths in fiction is to depict them as slow, somewhat stupid, and sleepy. This extends to them being depicted as quite the Lazy Bum or The Slacker, with some more nuanced portrayals of them depicting them as Brilliant, but Lazy. They may also have a habit of speaking very slowly. They may be used to show that a character is going so slow, that even they outpace the character. The point is that compared to other animals, they're a bit slow on the uptake.

They may sometimes be linked to the Seven Deadly Sins (usually represented as "Sloth").

This is actually Truth in Television; sloths have an extremely low metabolic rate, which leads to them moving at a languid, sluggish pace through the trees. Indeed, they, on average, travel 41 yards per day — which is less than half the length of a football field. They are also poikilothermic (their body temperature changes depending on their surroundings), unusual among mammals, so they have to spend much of their time basking in the sunlight to warm up and save energy.

This extends to their naming. Their German name is Faultier ("lazy animal"), whilst its name is old English for "Slow". The Spanish word for sloth is "perezoso" and "paresseux" in French, which also means "lazy".

Note that in fiction, the types of sloths featured are usually three-toed sloths; two-toed sloths will rarely ever appear. This could be because three-toed sloths have a more distinctive appearance, particularly the facial "mask" with dark markings around the eyes. If prehistory is involved, the giant ground sloth Megatherium is quite common, though the smaller ground sloth Megalonyx may turn up.

Sub-Trope of Animal Stereotype. If they're modified to go faster, then it becomes an example of the Speedy Snail. For another animal often portrayed in a similar manner, see Sturdy and Steady Turtles.

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Examples:

Advertising

• There was a Series of PSAs against Cannabis by the Australian Government which depicted a Sloth. The Sloth was meant to represent the behaviour of a stereotypical stoner and it spoke and reacted very slowly, much to the disappointment and annoyance of those it interacted with.

Anime and Manga

• A minor character in Beastars is a sloth tattoo artist whose tattoos are agonizingly slow. He also has an extremely Delayed Reaction when talking to people. When he speaks, he is actually responding to things people said to him hours ago and the person he is talking to may not even be present.
• Crayon Shin-chan: Shin sometimes pretends he's a sloth (and dresses up like one), which corresponds well with his laziness.
• Seton Academy: Join the Pack!: Miyubi the sloth girl; any sort of exertion will cause her to die. Don't worry, she'll be fine. Unlike most examples, however, this is purely a physical limitation, not laziness or stupidity. She actually tries to work hard and is quite intelligent.
• Shirokuma Cafe: Along with Tortoise, Sloth has a very slow speech and pace. In one episode, he offers to go to the convenience store to buy refreshments for a cherry blossom viewing, only to come back when the others have gone and it's nighttime.

Fanworks

• Prehistoric Park Reimagined: Zigzagged with the prehistoric ground sloths. On the one hand, they are all described as moving with a slow shambling gait. But on the other hand, the larger ones are also described as being capable of swinging their arms about at a viciously fast pace when they're in the midst of battles.

Films — Animated

• Rio 2: Zigzagged with the sloth who appears a few times. She raps very quickly, but she often randomly falls asleep.
• Zootopia: The DMV is entirely staffed by sloths. Every action and even conversation is ridiculously slow, turning the whole sequence into an Overly Long Gag. Nick's friend Flash Slothmore is said to be the fastest one there...but the fastest sloth isn't saying much. "Fastest" has nothing to do with his work speed, it's actually a reference to him being a skilled street racer.

Films — Live Action

• Aguirre, the Wrath of God: Discussed when the title character finds one on the side of the Amazon:
  Aguirre: This animal sleeps its whole life away. It's never really awake.

Literature

• In the The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids story The Resurrection of the Wellsians, it is mentioned that zoologist Edwin-750 somehow succeeded in creating a psychic link between himself and a sloth in an effort to study them better. Inevitably, he ends up sleepy to the point of uselessness.
• In the Dick King-Smith book The Great Sloth Race, Dozy the sloth challenges Snoozy (who is also a sloth) to a race and the race lasts for hours. Eventually, the onlookers leave out of boredom. Dozy ends up reaching the finish line first, but Snoozy is declared the winner because the point of a sloth race is to see which sloth is the slowest.
• The title of the kids' book If I Had a Sleepy Sloth, which suggests that sloths as a whole are lethargic.
• Score One for the Sloths gives us the sloth residents of Sleepy Valley Sloth School, who spend most of their time sleeping, and have poor academic scores as a result. Sparky on the other hand is a subversion of the trope, being quite out-going and proactive, and she tries to convince the other sloths to do the same.
• Who's in the Loo?: This trope is discussed when the narrator wonders if a sloth fell asleep in the bathroom. As it turns out, however, an octopus is the one hogging the bathroom by washing all eight of his hands.

Live-Action TV

• A sketch on Saturday Night Live subverted this. A zookeeper introduces a video made by high school students to teach people more about sloths. The video is a heavy metal video depicting sloths as raucous party animals and violent hoodlums. After the video, the zookeeper says "That's not entirely accurate."
• Walking with Beasts: Played with in the episode "Saber Tooth". The Megatherium, an elephant-sized beast and the largest known species of sloth, moves about as quickly as any large mammalian herbivore at walking speed; not that it really matters, as their sheer size makes them practically invulnerable to predation. However, when a Megatherium challenges the Smilodon pride over a carcass, one of the pair of male Smilodons leading the pride attempts to scare it off. The Megatherium answers by striking the male hard and fast enough that the Smilodon was unable to leap out of the way in time, and as a result was killed instantly. The rest of the Smilodon wisely decide to back off and yield their kill afterwards.

Newspaper Comics

• Zits: One arc had Jeremy find an escaped sloth in his closet. He had it dressed up as himself and attend school, and no one noticed, the joke being that Jeremy is as lazy as an actual sloth.

Puppet Shows

• It's a Big Big World: Snook the sloth doesn't move too slowly, but he is an even-tempered Mellow Fellow.

Toys

• Transformers: Slo is a beastformer who is based on a three-toed sloth. He's also quite slow (although he can create the illusion of being faster with the help of the Slo-Bar Spear, which can slow time for sixty seconds) and spends most of his time sleeping.

Video Games

• Pokémon has the Slakoth family. Slakoth sleeps around for more than twenty hours a day and does not move very much. It also has the ability Truant, which means that it doesn't move every other turn. Its evolution Vigoroth subverts the trope, being unable to sit still for a minute and gaining Vital Spirit (which prevents it from being put to sleep) in the process, whilst Vigoroth's evolution Slaking also plays the trope straight, being considered one of the laziest of Pokemon, and regaining Truant (although in this case it's a balance issue as Slaking has one of the highest attack ratings among all Mons).
• Tsuki Adventure: Momo the sloth usually speaks in short sentences, often broken into pieces or single words with pauses in between. At Tsuki's birthday, while everyone else has already arrived at the party, Momo can be seen slowly making her way towards it.
• Crusader Kings II: With the Seven Deadly Sins as well as Seven Heavenly Virtues being character traits in the game, Slothful is represented by an icon of a sloth.
• The Magic School Bus: Explores the Rainforest has two in-game cartoons that emphasize the sluggishness of sloths. In one cartoon, a pair of sloths are playing Go Fish, and it takes a whole day for one of them to even speak, with the cartoon ending with a To Be Continued. In the other, a sloth is shown sleeping through an interview about a fallen tree.

Web Animation

• Pinkfong: The song "A Lazy Sloth" is all about this trope. It's sung by a sloth who goes on about how he sleeps a lot. At one point, several animals are waiting for him to climb onto a podium, and by the time he gets there, it's nighttime.

Web Original

• SCP Foundation: SCP-2774, the Slow Burn Sloth causes this effect in humans. It looks like a person in a sloth costume that appears in non-live media, and any unfortunate victims who see it have a 40% chance of eventually turning slothlike after 40 hours — losing all cognitive functions and ability to make decisions except for a 150-second lucidity period every 24 hours.

Web Video

• Discussed in the Sam O'Nella Academy video on Animal Weaknesses. Sam compares the life of the creature to that of the average college student.
• SuperMarioLogan: In "ChicKEN!", Cody invents a ray gun that can turn anything into a random animal. When Bowser Junior zaps Chef Pee Pee with it, the ray turns him into a sloth, causing him to talk incredibly slow.
  Sloth Chef Pee Pee: Jun...ior! What... did... you... do... to... me?!

Western Animation

• Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog gives us the sloth family in "Slowwww Going". They're quite slow going and they speak pretty slow as well (depicting one of them insisting that he's the fastest sloth in Mobius). However, when they get hit by Robotnik's broken Slow-Mo Ray, they end up moving quite fast.
• Brandy & Mr. Whiskers: In the episode "Stress Test", the main cast gets captured by hillbillies, with the only way to earn their freedom is by beating one of them at a banjo-playing contest. When that fails, the gangs opts to run for their lives instead, which proves to be far easier as the hillibies are sloths.
• Futurama: In "Fun on a Bun", an attacking clan of Neanderthals release a Megatherium on a screaming Hermes. The giant sloth moves very slowly towards him, causing him to get bored and pull out a newspaper to pass the time (while still screaming).
• George of the Jungle (2007): In one episode, George meets a sloth that doesn't react to an act of heroism he performed. In fact, the sloth doesn't react to anything at all. He asks everyone else why this is, and they all conclude it doesn't like him, leading George to spend the episode trying to win the sloth over. At the end of the episode, the sloth starts clapping and congratulating him for what he did at the beginning of the episode, which was days ago at that point.
• In the Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures episode "The League of Super-Rodents", the Cow, after defeating all the other members of the League of Super-Rodents, gets punched out by the Rampaging Sloth, who is never shown to actually move, but had apparently been gearing up to hit him the entire time.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "Fluttershy Leans In", Fluttershy befriends a three-toed sloth named Lola, who spends much of the episode either lying around or clinging onto Fluttershy's hindleg. The end of the episode has Fluttershy giving Lola a bed on a tree to sleep on in her new animal sanctuary.
• Ovide and the Gang: Alvin is a sloth who is always shown sleeping.
• Pat & Stan: Stuart the Sloth is a narcoleptic and has a Running Gag of falling asleep at the most inopportune times.
• The Replacements: The episode "Kumquat Day" has Riley asking FleemCo to replace an extremely high-strung post office worker with someone that is more laid back, with Conrad making the replacement a sloth.
  Riley: A sloth? That's about as laid-back as you can get!
• Spliced: The episode "Roots" has the Slouch Potato, a mutant who is "part potato, part sloth, all lazy", even lazier than Entrée could ever hope to be. However, he ends up getting eaten by the Wunny Sharbit offscreen because he was so lazy he was waiting for someone else to run away for him.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: The interdimensional megastore Quest Buy is staffed by anthropomorphic sloths, who are lazy, unmotivated, and entirely unhelpful to customers. Don't get them mad, though.
• Timon & Pumbaa: In the episode "Hakuna Matata U.", the duo start a school teaching Hakuna Matata, and their only students are a nerdy owl and a sloth that does nothing but sleep. Timon chooses the sloth as his student and quickly views him as a prodigy. At the end, the sloth does not attend the graduation, because he rolled in his sleep and somehow ended up on a plane.
• T.O.T.S.: "Slippery When Wet" features the baby sloth Sunny. She not only moves, but talks, eats, and even burps incredibly slowly.

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