Basic Trope: A room or building looks of a perfectly normal size on the outside, but appears abnormally large when you step inside.
- Straight: Alice opens the door to a portaloo and steps into a large hall.
- Exaggerated:
- The hall has a portaloo standing in the middle which leads to a huge cathedral. Inside the cathedral is a copy of the portaloo, which contains the hall from before, which contains the portaloo... this goes on forever.
- Alice opens the door to a portaloo and steps inside an entire city which goes on for miles.
- Downplayed:
- Alice opens the door to a portaloo and steps into a wardrobe.
- The Portaloo's inner and outer dimensions exactly match despite the walls appearing to have thickness. It is just enough to fit a closed copy of another one of identical size and close the door.
- Justified:
- It is actually a portal to another universe where everything is bigger.
- Or, depending on the setting, A Wizard Did It.
- The Building is an Elaborate Underground Base with only a fraction of it sticking above ground.
- Elaborate technology warps spacetime inside the portaloo.
- Inverted: Alice enters a large warehouse and ends up in a tiny privy.
- Subverted:
- It seems to be bigger on the inside at first, but it is later shown that it was all a trick of the light.
- Alice is showed opening the door to the portaloo and in the next scene she is inside a large hall. It turns out the hall is not actually inside the portaloo.
- Alice walks into a portaloo and ends up inside a large hall — in a building that's been there all along. The portaloo is just the only visible part of the building; the rest of it is hidden by an Invisibility Cloak.
- Double Subverted:
- The trick of the light was that the portaloo is actually a lot smaller.
- Alice is showed opening the door to the portaloo and in the next scene she is inside a large hall. It turns out the hall is not actually inside the portaloo. It's in a phone box.
- The portaloo is of normal size inside. It's also the entrance to a rabbit chute into an Elaborate Underground Base.
- Parodied: Alice steps into the portaloo and ends up in a huge golden mansion. She heads off to look for the toilets.
- Zig Zagged: The portaloo is actually a huge building deliberately made to look smaller, but the inside is still abnormally huge, but occasionally its interior takes the size and shape of a portaloo anyway, except that when you leave the exit turns out to be a large gateway that fades back to portaloo shape when you blink again.
- Averted: Alice opens the door to the portaloo and steps into a portaloo.
- Enforced:
- The editor REALLY has a thing for bigger-on-the-inside spacecraft and wanted to slip in a reference to one.
- The production doesn't have a big enough budget to both build the interior of the spaceship set and a life-size exterior model, so they justify the exterior looking like a porta-loo in-story with the ship having an advanced cloaking system and the ability to manipulate space-time.
- Lampshaded:
- Alice comments "Why are these places always bigger than they look?"
- "How did you fit that in there?"
- Invoked: The owner of the portaloo deliberately makes the interior bigger than normal in order to have room for his concert hall.
- Exploited: Alice uses the portaloo to hide because the portaloo is the last place they'd look in.
- Defied: Alice refuses to enter the portaloo, "I'll walk in there and it'll be the size of a planet and I'll gasp in astonishment and question my own sanity. I'm not going."
- Discussed: "This isn't a sci-fi film! In the REAL world portaloos are small, cramped and uncomfortable!"
- Conversed: "Quick! Head for the portaloo! If we're lucky it'll lead to a huge mansion we can hide in!"
- Deconstructed: The unusual geometry causes crippling problems due to real physics making it quite uncomfortable. The mansion is a few acres with only a single usually closed door for ventilation and effectively perfect air, moisture, and temperature tight walls everywhere except for where the 'outer walls' correspond to plastic outer walls. Around the door is powerfully drafty and everywhere else is incredibly stuffy.
- Played for Drama: A wooded vacant lot is actually an elaborate jungle that people get lost in and never return.
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