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Ring Around The Collar
He's not wearing pants, either.

Low-budget cartoon characters always wear neckties (if male) or necklaces (if female). Or collars, even if they don't have shirts (see illustration). Or have some outlandish costume that obscures part of their neck.

This is because if a character's standing and talking, it's cheaper to just animate the head while using only one drawing for the body. A collar makes a nice dividing line to let animators do this while making it easy to keep the body parts together.

Hanna-Barbera TV cartoons abused this most egregiously.

The advent of digital animation have rendered this a largely Discredited Trope, used mostly as a tribute to the classics.

Examples

Comic Books
  • Sherman and Megan might look identical if it weren't for Megan's pearl necklace in Shermans Lagoon

Video Games

Western Animation
  • As pictured above, Yogi Bear. Also, his pal Boo Boo wears just a bowtie.
  • All the men in The Flintstones wear collars. The women tend to wear necklaces.
  • Models constructed for stop-motion animation (example: Chicken Run) often have this or some other similar method used to disguise where the head was joined to the body.
  • In the 1970's Hanna-Barbera adaptation of Tom And Jerry, Jerry was fitted with a bow-tie.
  • The Simpsons family are all designed like this. Pearls on a little girl? That's why.
No Knees
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Unmoving Plaid
Richard Woolsey Effect
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Ring Of Power
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