Chekhovs Gunman / Animated Films

Chekhov's Gunmen in animated movies.

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• One of the first characters to appear during 10+2 The Big Secret is the postman, a bird, who at the beginning of the movie delivers a letter to Professor Aristotle informing him that his niece Milessima will be staying at/attending his school starting the next day. The postman shows up again near the end of the movie, and ends up helping save the day by flying Infinity back to the school and then helping him reach the corrupted Book of Virtues so he can close it.

• During the scene where the explorers are travelling to Atlantis via an ancient highway through several underwater caves in Atlantis: The Lost Empire, several masked warriors can be seen running away from their trucks as they approach. One of the warriors looks at the passing trucks before she runs off into the caves. This warrior is actually the film's heroine, Kida.
• Early in The Bad Guys (2022), among the thieves mentioned to have tried and failed to steal the Golden Dolphin is the Crimson Paw, the only one to never have been identified or caught, but also disappeared and never stole anything again. Much later, the Crimson Paw reappears to break the gang out of jail after they're arrested for a crime they didn't commit. She's really Diane Foxington, the newly elected Governor of California who renounced her criminal career to become a force for good.
• Beauty and the Beast:
  • Out of the named servants, Chip's the one with the least focus and importance to the plot...that is until the climax where he frees Maurice and Belle from their cellar. Had that not happened, the Beast would have died to Gaston before the curse could be broken.
  • There’s also two very minor examples: the enchanted oven, who later scares away the villagers from the castle, and the feather duster, who later ends up distracting Lumiere and allowing Belle to escape her room.
• The bird from A Bug's Life. She is first seen attacking Flik and the circus bugs on the way back to the anthill, but she doesn't return again until the end of the film where she actually comes back to kill Hopper.
• Coco: Héctor's first appearance seems to be a one-off bit demonstrating the rule that people can't cross back into the land of the living unless there is an ofrenda for them to visit. Then Miguel crosses paths again with him later, and he eventually turns out to be very important to the plot, as does the reason why his photo is not in any ofrenda.
• The cat in the film adaptation of Coraline is a character briefly seen early on, before he becomes Coraline's companion in the Other World.
• Marigold Girl from Epic (2013) is briefly shown attending the event the Queen is part of and who ends up becoming the new queen at the end of the movie.
• In Happy Heroes: The Stones, Superman X, who is integral to aiding the Supermen in stopping the missiles at the end of the film, is the kid Happy S. told that anyone, even without superpowers, can be a superhero.
• In Hoodwinked!, there are two.
  • First is Boingo, the white rabbit who Flippers observes crossing through all four of the original suspects' stories:
    • Boingo first appears as a minor character when Red Puckett runs into him during her bike ride early in the morning. He confides to her having lost his job to the mysterious Goodie Bandit. A few scenes later, he is shown to be Red's cable car attendant, and is the only person on board when Red falls out.
    • When the Wolf and Twitchy are contemplating their next move after Red escapes from them, Boingo appears quite conveniently, to suggest a shortcut the Wolf and Twitchy can take to go to Granny's place. Specifically, he suggests a shortcut that involves going through a flooded cave and nearly getting blown up in a coal mine, "not to mention he wrote the directions on an Easter Egg, which is very hard to read."
    • Boingo happens to be the first passerby to show up after Kirk finds that his truck has been looted. This scene appears to be placed in between his two encounters with Red, given that he's holding the carrot crumpet she gave him during the bike scene.
    • Lastly, he shows up asking Granny for her autograph prior to the ski race.
    • When Flippers makes the reveal, all four of the characters' encounters with Boingo are shown Once More, with Clarity: in Red's encounter, we see that Red fell not because of the doors malfunctioning, but because Boingo used his ear to depress a release lever. In Kirk's encounter, we see him lurking in the bushes as Kirk discovers the damage to his truck. In Granny's encounter, we see Boingo passing a to-do list off to one of the ski team members right before he asks her for her autograph.
  • In Red's story, when Red is coming to her senses after being pushed out of the cable car, Twitchy makes a three-second cameo as the squirrel who emits a camera flash from his mouth that blinds her for a second.
• The Incredibles:
  • Near the beginning, if you look very closely at the crowd attending Bob/Mr. Incredible and Helen/Elastigirl's wedding, you can see several superheroes such as Gazerbeam, Dynaguy, and Stratogale among the crowd. Those superheroes are later revealed by Edna Mode to have been killed by either the Omnidroid or by some cape-related accident.
  • There's Buddy aka IncrediBoy, a big fan of Mr. Incredible who the hero shuns: he grows up to become Syndrome.
  • Edna herself, the costume designer for the heroes, is also at the wedding.
  • Bob's future case officer Rick Dicker is present at the wedding sitting next to Edna.
• The wolf in the The Rugrats Movie is first properly seen when Spike pulls Angelica away from it. It later reappears in the climax on the bridge, about eat the Babies before Spike intervenes.
• Master Thundering Rhino first appears in the Kung Fu Panda Christmas Special as a guest at the Winter Festival, where he gets a few lines and is even mentioned by name. He goes on to play a significant (albeit brief) role in Kung Fu Panda 2.
• From The LEGO Movie, we have The Man Upstairs. He's brought up early on in the movie, and we later discover that he is the Greater-Scope Villain for everything in the movie as he is the father of Finn and the inspiration for Lord Business.
• In Lady and the Tramp, the Rat appears seemingly at random in the beginning. By the climax, it's the last thing on anybody's mind, until it reappears to do harm to the baby!
• If you look very closely when Simba runs up to wake Mufasa near the beginning of The Lion King (1994), you can see Nala sleeping with her mother Sarafina for a few seconds.
• Minions shows a boy observing a Freeze Ray at Villain-Con. Both the Freeze Ray and the boy show up at the end of the film to freeze the Overkills solid and steal the crown, where the boy is revealed to be a young Gru.
• The dragon incense burner from Mulan turns out to be Mushu.
• My Little Pony: Equestria Girls:
  • In My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Rainbow Rocks, DJ PON-3, whose headphones protected her from the Dazzlings' hypnotizing siren song, is the one who frees the Hu-Mane Six after they are locked in the basement by Trixie, and she converts her car into a mobile sound system for the final battle.
  • In the first film, Pinkie Pie hinted at the existence of a human Alternate Self to Twilight Sparkle, which is confirmed in The Stinger of Rainbow Rocks, and fully debuts in third film, Friendship Games.
• Oogie Boogie, the main villain of The Nightmare Before Christmas, actually first appears as a singing face on the Moon during the song "This is Halloween."
• Doctor "The Shadow Man" Facilier, the villain of The Princess and the Frog, is first seen as a customer at the restaurant Tiana is working at as a waitress. He can also be seen a couple times in Down in New Orleans, the song that plays while Tiana is on her way to work.
• Ratatouille: The health inspector, whose presence is ironically foreshadowed by Skinner:
  Skinner: Do you know what would happen if anyone knew we had a rat in our kitchen? They'd close us down. Our reputation is hanging by a thread as it is. Take it away from here. Far away. Kill it. Dispose of it. Go!
• In Shrek the Third, Shrek needs to find Arthur, and in his search, he has reached a football-alike field, to find out a brave, strong, handsome warrior riding a horse, attacking with a lance a poor excuse of a man. You have found the one and only King Arthur, showing off his supreme skills with a lance against a faceless, dull boy... oh, wait, it's the other way around. The handsome warrior is Lancelot, and the target is Arthur.
• Mother Gothel from Tangled, according to the film's prologue, is shown briefly observing the newly grown flower, before being revisited and revealed as the villain when the soldiers go to retrieve the same flower, leading into Rapunzel's birth and her abduction by Gothel.
• Just right before the Big-Lipped Alligator Moment from Tom and Jerry: The Movie, Puggsy gets captured by a pair of dogcatchers. Those two are later revealed to be working for none other than Doctor Applecheeks.
• Toy Story:
  • RC in the first film. Woody's using him to knock Buzz behind the dresser winds up leading to Buzz falling out the window, and then later on, RC becomes a major factor in the climax (as Woody uses him to save Buzz, and then both use him to catch back up to the moving van).
  • When you're watching the third film, remember the cute little girl playing with a monkey who has cymbals, because she'll be coming back, as will the monkey with cymbals. The former is Bonnie, who briefly takes Woody home with her and inspires him to make Andy bring all his toys to her at the end. The latter serves as the equivalent of a security guard during the night at Sunnyside, alerting Lotso and his minions to any escaping toys, with part of Woody's plan requiring the monkey to be locked away.
• Turning Red:
  • Stacy Frick briefly appears when Mei (in her red panda form) runs into her in the bathroom. She later reappears during Mei's dodgeball game, where she connects the dots and realizes that Mei was the red panda she saw two days before. The reveal that she actually finds Mei's red panda form adorable gives Mei and her friends the idea to exploit its cuteness for money.
  • Mr. Gao is first seen playing chess at the beginning of the movie, and later on, he watches with awe as Mei leaps over his house in her red panda form. He's not important until the night of the blood moon, when he leads the ritual to try sealing away Mei's panda spirit.
• Wreck-It Ralph:
  • An interesting variation. In the beginning of the movie, M. Bison warns Ralph of "going turbo", making one think that it was a Shout-Out to his own games and how they had the "Turbo" title slapped on. When Q*bert warns Felix that Ralph ran into Hero's Duty, the Nicelanders panic, making it think that "going turbo" means "game hopping". When Felix and Calhoun end up in Sugar Rush, he tells her the tale of Turbo, a video game hero whose Attention Whore attitude caused him to invade another game and cause it and his game to be unplugged, thus making "going turbo" mean "going Turbo." Then, during the climatic race between Vanellope and King Candy, we learn the man's true identity, Candy was a disguised Turbo....
  • When Ralph gets his medal from Hero's Duty he gets attacked by a Cy-Bug and the two of them end up getting into a shuttle that takes them to Sugar Rush, where Ralph assumes the Cy-Bug died when it fell into a taffy swamp. Later, it turns out to be alive and also having made a huge colony of eggs, which later cause a Sugar Apocalypse and transform Turbo / Candy into one.
  • In the sequel, Yesss, the algorithm and head of Buzzztube, plays up this role near the movie's climax to get all the Ralph clones to the Antivirus District.
• In Yellow Submarine, Jeremy Hillary Boob Ph.D is introduced very conspicuously, complete with a character-introduction song. He then plays no role except light comic relief, and is kidnapped shortly after his introduction. In the end, he defeats the Blue Meanies once and for all, causing their leader to pull a Heel–Face Turn by... making flowers grow all over his body.
• Zootopia
  • Duke Weaselton is apparently nothing but a common thief when Judy first encounters him, but turns out to be a supplier of the Night Howlers for the antagonists, whom Judy and Nick later have Mr. Big interrogate for information on who he was selling them to.
  • While chasing Weaselton, Judy saves the life of Fru-Fru, a young female shrew. She turns out to be the daughter of Mr. Big, placing the mobster in Judy's debt. This comes in handy for the aforementioned interrogation of Duke Weaselton.

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