Volumetric Mouth

"AAUGH!" indeed.

"Drawing Calvin is easy! You just make a big mouth and add some hair!"

— Hobbes, Calvin and Hobbes

Mouths come in various sizes. Some can be large, while others can be small. And then there are these.

This trope is for when a character shouts so loud, their mouth takes up the entirety of their face, presumably to imitate the effect of a Skyward Scream. A variant exists in which the mouth is viewed from the side.

This is usually used in print and animation.

Sometimes, mouth size and volume are related (i.e. a character speaking softly is indicated by a small mouth).

A character with No Indoor Voice often talks like this. Often coupled with Suddenly Shouting, Big "NO!", Big "YES!" or Say My Name. Compare Demon Head, in which the entire head expands.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Goku was animated like this in Dragon Ball Z when Vegeta in his Oozaru form was breaking his bones while screaming in pain.
• One Piece often has this happen whenever a character yells due to the art style.
• Pretty Cure:
  • In Delicious Party♡Pretty Cure: Ran gets one while screaming about the lack of food.
  • In Futari wa Pretty Cure MaX Heart, Hikari Kujou does this when she shouts her transformation phrase to become Shiny Luminous.
  • KiraKira★Pretty Cure à la Mode: Cure Whip gets one while escaping from Diable's darkness.
  • In one episode of Maho Girls Pretty Cure!, Mirai gets a giant mouth while crying.
  • In the first Pretty Cure All Stars movie, Cure Peach gets one of these during the final battle against Fusion.
• Chirin does this as a lamb in Ringing Bell when he cries after realizing his mother was killed by the wolf when he broke into the barn.
• Nobuko Saeki of Shugo Chara! has her very wide mouth open constantly.
• Zoids: Wild: Overbyte and Demise have giant mouths to begin with, but their Wild/Dark Blasts allow them to open even further. Overbyte's goes all the way down to its stomach with its ribs becoming new teeth. Demise's only opens up to the end of his neck, but produces a powerful drill weapon.

Asian Animation

• Lamput: At the beginning of "Thief", when the thief steals Ms. Lipstick's purse, she screams and her mouth covers her entire face.
• In Simple Samosa, characters' mouths will occasionally open so wide that they cover the entirety of their faces. It often happens when a character screams, for example.

Comic Books

• Gaston Lagaffe on occasion. One panel has Fantasio tell him he should put both hands in front of his mouth when yawning, due to this trope.
• The Smurfs are sometimes drawn with these type of mouths.

Comic Strips

• Peanuts: Characters were often drawn in this way, especially when shouting "AAUGHH!", such as here.
• Calvin and Hobbes also has it sometimes. Eventually lampshaded by Hobbes providing the above quote.
• Garfield uses the side-view variant often.
• Loud Howard from Dilbert constantly does this.
• Heart of the City uses this visual as well, albeit more often with laughing than shouting.
• Frazz, in which the title character looks like - but isn't - an adult Calvin Spiff also uses it a lot.
• Marvin has one when he cries. His mouth opens very wide to bawl, complete with tears and speech balloon to top it off.

Fan Works

• Collectively grouped under the tag AAUGH! on Derpibooru.

Films — Animation

• My Little Pony: The Movie (1986): The "I'll Go It Alone" song ends with Baby Lickety Split and Spike singing with mouths wide open.
• A variant, or perhaps a subtrope, is when the bell of a horn (or megaphone, or loudspeaker) expands (sometimes with the neck stretching) as it makes sound. A really unusual Stop Motion Animation version shows up in The Nightmare Before Christmas with the loudspeaker of the Mayor's car.
• In Turning Red, when Mei yells at her mother for the first time as a panda, her mouth takes up half her face.

Films — Live-Action

• The Dark Crystal: Fizzgig has a mouth as big as his body when fully yelling.

Literature

• Dream Park: In The Barsoom Project, an apparent prisoner in the Fimbulwinter Game reveals itself to be a zombie-like menace by opening its mouth insanely wide.

Live-Action TV

• Used in the original V (1983) miniseries, when one of the human-disguised Visitors opens her mouth wide enough to swallow a live guinea pig.

Music Videos

• The music video for "TMZ" by "Weird Al" Yankovic does this several times.

Pinballs

• Shown by a guy on the playfield of Earthshaker!, as he's being sprayed by a fire hydrant.
• The Loopy Martians in Big Bang Bar are modeled like this, in order to hold locked pinballs in their mouths.

Puppet Shows

• Fizgig, Kira's pet from The Dark Crystal, has a mouth the size of his body when fully yelling.
• When Donkey Hodie opens her mouth wide while looking up to the sky, this happens, likely due to the size of her nose. It also happens to Purple Panda, to a lesser extent, for the same reason.

Video Games

• Normal-sized characters in the NES version of Double Dragon sport one of these whenever they take a punch or fall off a ledge, as a side-effect of their sprites being given the chibi treatment.
• In Monster World IV, Asha does this whenever she yawns when the player doesn't touch the controller for a long time.
• Pokémon uses this with Zubat's and Golbat's sprites, to convey screeching.
  • There's also Generation III's Loudred and Exploud.
• Rhythm Heaven: The choir boys from Glee Club.
• In the 2D Sonic The Hedgehog games, Sonic does this if one dies by drowning. The same sprite is used when you die from anything in Sonic Spinball.
  • In Sonic Adventure, Sonic's mouth stretches out hilariously when he says, "You're gonna crash! AAAAAAH!" and, "WHOA! A Chaos Emerald!" Even more so in the Dreamcast version.
• From Jet Set Radio, we give you Professor K.◊
• Baby Mario in Yoshi's Island, whenever he's stuck in the bubble and crying.
• Several GMod videos do this.
• In Rayman Origins, whenever the characters get injured, their mouths will be huge. This even happens in the intro, when Rayman realizes he is holding the old man skeleton's skull in his hand, and he (as well as everyone else) start screaming. "WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"

Web Animation

• Awesome Series: Egoraptor is known for this.
• Homestar Runner: In the Strong Bad Email "japanese cartoon", Strong Bad describes himself as having a volumetric mouth if he were a Japanese cartoon character:
  Strong Bad: Then there's my mouth. Real tiny when it's closed; ridiculously huge when it's open.
• Goodness gracious, GoAnimate's infamous Evil Boris has this. To put into perspective just how absurd it gets, his mouth is almost quadruple the size of the normal mouth size, while his head is unchanged. Even when he isn't doing anything but idling. This leaks into Special Effects Failure as the mouth even leaks straight off his face at some points, or when he shouts, which is... Very, very often.

Web Comics

• Brawl in the Family: Adeleine does this at the end of "Doppelgangers."
• Zoophobia did this a few times, such as Cameron's scream.
• Pops up now and then in Paranatural, which has some of the most excessive facial expressions in webcomics. Here, for example, Max gets a really huge mouth while he's yelling at Hijack for his "true power of violence" line.

Web Original

• This is the entire premise of the Pop Cat meme, where a cat is photoshopped to have an enormous mouth while making an incongruous popping sound. The actual cat in the picture is an entirely normal feline named Oatmeal.
• SCP Foundation: SCP-096's mouth is 4 times the size of a regular human's mouth... and looking at it will result in you getting killed by the creature that it's attached to.

Western Animation

• A variation pops up periodically in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, where the characters are shown with a Volumetric Mouth when loudly cheering or singing. Noticeable examples include the end of the duet between Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy in "May the Best Pet Win", the chorus of "Smile Smile Smile" from "A Friend in Deed", and Apple Bloom's belches from "Sisterhooves Social".
• Pops in from time to time in Animaniacs. Usually with Yakko, Wakko, and Dot.
• A classic Tex Avery MGM short with Red and Wolfie couples this with Vocal Dissonance, Big "NO!" and Suddenly Shouting.
• Felix the Cat has Vavoom, which predates Peanuts by a few years.
• Loud Kiddington from Histeria! talks this way, like Howard.
• In the Family Guy episode "Ready, Willing and Disabled", this is done with Stewie as a parody of Peanuts.
  • In "Papa Has a Rollin' Son", when Joe starts to cry, Peter says he'll start crying. Then he cries this way, saying, "I cry like Snoopy!"
• In My Life as a Teenage Robot when someone screams or yells, their mouths will fill up their face. This frequently happens with Jenny.
• Expect to see this in Teen Titans (2003) whenever people are arguing.
• In the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog episode "Grounder the Genius", Robotnik's mouth briefly becomes as large as his body when Grounder hurts his foot.

• Happens very frequently to The Powerpuff Girls, usually when they are screaming, crying, or whatever. In "The Powerpuff Girls Rule!" special, this is an Overused Running Gag throughout the episode.
• Just like in the comics, the Peanuts animated specials use this often, especially when saying "AAUGHH!"
• This is probably the most well-known example in Tom and Jerry (from Fine Feathered Friend, 1942)
• Rugrats: This happens frequently when the babies cry, but is most noticeable with Angelica, who can go from having a small Cheeky Mouth to a gaping maw at the drop of a hat.
• The Ren & Stimpy Show: Stimpy tends to have this whenever he cries, especially in The Littlest Giant and the infamous "Son of Stimpy" episode.
• The title character of Courage the Cowardly Dog has a Running Gag of letting out a huge scream when something scares him enough, usually with his mouth open so wide you can see his entire top and bottom rows of teeth — complete with a hole in the middle of one of them. Here's a compilation of some of those screams.
• Various characters of Codename: Kids Next Door are frequent users of this trope.

Real Life

• Some fishes have mouths that can open several times wider than their heads, thanks to jointed jawbones and expandable cheek- and throat-pouches. The gulper eel and sarcastic fringehead are extreme examples. The basking shark is best known for possessing a gigantic mouth for sifting through the water for plankton.
• Snakes are famous for being able to pull this off. This is due to their specialized jaw bones that are hinged and flexible, allowing them to stretch out their mouths wide enough to swallow particularly big meals.
• Baleen whales, especially Rorquals like the Blue Whale, have massive mouths even for creatures of their size, and open up to nearly 90 degrees. This allows them to gulp up volumes of prey-heavy seawater larger than their own bodies, after which they tighten up their jaw, forcing the water out, then swallow the krill and small fish remaining.
• Allosaurus has quite the wide mouth on par of having a double-hinged jaw, with new research suggesting it would be able to open 79 degrees at maximum. Scientists believe with this wide gape it would be able to slam its upper jaw on its prey like a hatchet. Tyrannosaurus rex is no slouch in the gape factor either, being able to open its mouth at 63 degrees.
• The presumed-extinct thylacine (a dog-like marsupial predator from Australia) is thought to have been able to open its jaws up to 80 degrees.

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