Art-Style Clash

"Well my dear, I do have the most right angles."

There are works that settle for a cartoony art style for their characters and environments. Others go for an Animesque art style for their characters, and still others prefer a more realistic approach to everything.

Certain works, however... well, they throw in as many different art styles together as they can, in the same work, for the whole work. Sometimes to explain the characters hail from different worlds, so it is a recurring trope in Crossovers. It is highly likely that this work takes place in a World of Weirdness, so don't question why an anthropomorphic animal is petting a non-anthropomorphic animal or why a ten-year old is a Pint-Sized Kid while another one is just slightly smaller than an adult.

This can be seen as a Sub-Trope of Medium Blending. Not to be confused with Art-Style Dissonance (as that trope has the art style not match to the context of the work, while in this trope it doesn't necessarily have to be the case) or Art Shift (which only happens for a certain amount of time or during very specific instances). Compare with Realistic Species, Cartoony Species, Non-Standard Character Design, and Cartoonish Companions.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Many JoJo's Bizarre Adventure materials not drawn by Araki himself opt to depict characters from different parts in their respective art styles, even when characters from different eras are interacting with each other. With the JJBA art style being subject to gradual Art Evolution, the difference is most noticeable when characters from earlier and later parts stand side-by-side. For example, Part 6 Jolyne and Part 3 Jotaro.◊
• Seriously invoked in Pop Team Epic anime, when diverse styles clashes all the time, since the SD original designs of Popuko and Pipimi interacting with normal anime characters to several art clashing like Adobe Flash-like animations, Claymation and even Stylistic Suck (the Bob Epic Team section) between every gag in episodes.

Comic Books

• One of the stylistic themes of Asterios Polyp is how Asterios rigid, blueprint-like architect's way of seeing the world would clash with his artist wife's fluid, etched view of the world. This was visually and tonally represented by having their art styles "split" when they fought, and meld into more beautiful combined art when they loved and understood each other.
• The crossover work The Batman & Scooby-Doo Mysteries distinguishes characters from both works by giving the former thinner lines and subtly more realistic details like facial wrinkles and shading whereas the latter has noticeably thicker lines and flatter, more vibrant coloring.
  • This is taken even further in the issue that mostly takes place during Batman and the Mystery Inc. gang's younger years, in which the latter are drawn in the zany A Pup Named Scooby-Doo art style. The ending of that issue even has an Imagine Spot with a hypothetical alternate origin, which has Bruce Wayne in Detective Comics #33 style getting inspired by the modern-inked Shaggy and Scooby passing through his window.
• Bone drops three cartoon characters, drawn like they're out of old newspaper funnies or Steamboat Willie-era inkblot cartoons, into a Lord of the Rings-style adventure with mostly realistic humans and monsters that look properly monstrous. Compare Thorn, a blonde who looks like she walked out of a 70s Sword and Sorcery book cover, with the titular Bone, or her grandma, who looks like a Disney character.
• Cerebus the Aardvark is full of cartoony animals coexisting with realistic humans.
• Spider-Man: The Spider-Verse event and its sequels is about a Crisis Crossover of all Spider-Men from all continuities in danger and some of them killed by the villain Morlun who can travel between continuities to eradicate every Spider-Man in existence. Here are seen almost every incarnation of the Friendly Neighborhood Hero, but the art style is maintained for the non-standard humanoid ones, including Spider-Ham, Spider-Man J, Mangaverse's Spider-Man and Spider-Monkey, as others.

Films — Animation

• Once Upon a Studio: Each of the more than 500 Disney characters, from Oswald the Lucky Rabbit to Asha, are rendered exactly as they appeared in their respective films, be they hand-drawn or computer-generated, and they all interact with each other in a live-action setting.
• Spider-Man: Spider-Verse:
  • Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse uses different artstyles for characters from alternate dimensions; Peter and Miles use an American comic book style, Gwen has something in between that and a pop-art album cover, Noir uses a black-and-white angular artstyle, Peni is heavily anime-inspired, Spider-Ham looks like he came out of a Looney Tunes cartoon, and Miguel O'Hara visits the 1967's Spider-Man universe in The Stinger and adopts its art style.
  • Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse uses an even wider range of artstyles, with significant parts of the movie being set in Gwen's pastel-colored universe, as well as introducing Spider-Man India (whose universe resembles Indrajal Comics) and Spider-Punk (who resembles a living photo collage, like a punk album cover, that constantly changes color and form). Other briefly-seen universes include one done entirely in parchment like a Leonardo da Vinci sketch, one that's Built with LEGO akin to The LEGO Movie, and even the live-action setting of Sony's Spider-Man Universe.
• Wreck-It Ralph takes place within the world of video games from different eras, genres and companies, both real and invented for the movie. So while the character designs fall within the traditional Disney aesthetics, there is a marked difference between the blocky Nicelanders from Fix-It Felix, the more realistically proportioned Space Marines in Hero's Duty, and the Animesque racers from Sugar Rush.

Music

• Queen's music video of "Innuendo" features rotoscoped footage of band members with each of them having different animation style. It also has claymation and usage of historical stock footage, sometimes multiple of them together.

Video Games

• Animal Crossing: The Player Character is the only human in a town full of Funny Animals. They are all Super-Deformed (Especially in games prior to New Leaf), and yet the television items that can be bought show other human characters with a slightly realistic appearence and proportions, and non-anthropomorphic animals too. Same thing goes to the art pieces you can get (paintings and sculptures), which are all real life works. The bugs, fish and sea creatures that can be caught are also worth talking about, especially in New Horizons as not only do they have a more realistic approach to them when compared to the villagers and other NPCs, but they are also prone to Furry Confusion in the case of frogs and octopuses. Some items that can be obtained are the Hamster Cage and the Bird Cage, which come with a non-antropomorphic hamster and bird respectively, which you can potentially gift to your hamster and bird villagers.
• Citizen Sleeper uses this to distinguish the human and robot characters from the AIs. The humans are drawn and designed in a grungy, cyberpunk manner with black outlines, while all the AIs are in clean, all black and white with white edges.
• The cover art for Custer's Revenge has a cartoony George Custer raping a lifelike Native American woman.
• Deltarune plays this for laughs. The whole game is styled like an SNES game, but occasionally you get some photorealistic special effects (albeit compressed to match the game's apparent resolution), like the explosion when Lancer first appears, or the carton of milk that's a modified stock photo from Alarmy.
• Not the game itself, but the player's guide for EarthBound features photographic B-Roll alongside the game's screenshots and clay figures. There are even headlines that feature all three of them on the same page.
• Fate/Grand Order has many different illustrators of the characters, and while some of the illustrators stay close to the art style of the game's art director Takashi Takeuchi, others have styles that stray heavily from it. Some of the more obvious examples include Riyo's Super-Deformed style, Motomurabito's rough and sketch-like style, Take's toony style, and Shou Tajima's minimalist and watercolor-like style.
• Hammer Brother is infamous in the Mario fandom for Rocket Rush, which has a clash between 8-bit Super Mario Bros. foregrounds with ultra-realistic Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble! backgrounds.
• Hyrule Warriors
  • Additional costumes for Link, Zelda, and Ganondorf based on The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time are taken from the 3DS remake of that game, making them stand out as distinctly low-poly compared to the Wii U-native graphics of the rest of the game.
  • An Invoked example, the Lethal Joke Weapon upgrade for most characters is an "8-bit" design made of voxels based on sprites from the NES The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.
  • Come the Updated Re-release of Hyrule Warriors Legends for the Nintendo 3DS, characters, battlefields and enemies from The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker are introduced, all of which have a cartoony design and contrast with the more Animesque looking characters already present in the original Wii U game (And Toon Zelda from The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks was added later on as DLC). All of this is better appreciated in Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition thanks to the more powerful graphics of the Nintendo Switch.
• Kingdom Hearts is set in a universe that crosses over the worlds of Disney and Final Fantasy, both of which have vastly different art styles due to the different genre of both franchises. To say nothing of the variations of art styles between each fandom, with characters like Donald Duck and Goofy running around to save the Disney Princesses, and then meeting the photorealistic cast of the Pirates of the Caribbean.
• Kuukiyomi has lots of random characters appearing in the same universe, such as: cartoonish and round-headed ones like "You", the player protagonist from the series^note including the female version of "You" from the third game, middle-aged men, B.B.'s dance teacher, who has Funny Afro hair, and "bald" bystanders; semi-animesque ones like "You"'s girlfriend C-Ko, Idol Singer B.B., and other female extras; fully animesque ones like a Playboy Bunny girl action figure and Z.Z. the Virtuber; oval-headed ones like the rock band member trio, etc.; both regular animals and anthropomorphic animals; even a number of semi-realistic ones like cowboys, the troubled woman from the third game or even a realistically scary Oni (But only his legs).
  • Hammer Bro himself uses 8-bit SMB1 style graphics, and yet often finds himself in levels with 16-bit graphics.
• Pikmin: Compare the cute titular species and the playable Captains to some of the bizarre alien wildlife they can encounter. The Bulborbs are probably an exception since their simple looking eyes make them look less like animals, and more like creatures that can exist in the same world as Pikmin.
• Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney puts the cartoonishly drawn protagonists of Layton alongside the anime-inspired Ace Attorney protagonists. The supporting cast is also a mix of both styles.
• Sonic the Hedgehog: In most of the earlier 3D Sonic games, we see human characters who look pretty normal compared to the stylized anthropomorphic characters like Sonic himself. Dr. Eggman is also highly stylized, while most other human characters aren't... even when they're his relatives.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) is the most infamous example because of that game's more advanced graphics at the time. The game went out of its way to make all environments and humans as realistic as possible, even tweaking Eggman's design. The game also features an Interspecies Romance between the cartoony Funny Animal Sonic and the realistic-looking human princess Elise, highlighting the clash of styles.
  • Shadow the Hedgehog's art direction is all over the place. Eggman's short, stubby, and brightly colored Egg Pawns clash quite a bit with the less colorful, more realistically rendered G.U.N. soldiers and Black Arms aliens, and the game also heavily features weapons of varying degrees of realism, which tend to be so out of scale with Shadow's character model that they clip through him and the scenery when he carries them.
  • Sonic Unleashed downplays this by giving all of the humans more Pixar-like designs, causing them to clash with designs from other games rather than their own title.
• Super Mario Odyssey, while having a cartoony art-syle for the most part, has some instances of this. First of all, take a look at this picture of Mario next to a New Donker◊. Pauline, the mayor of New Donk City, is also rather cartoony compared to the rest of the city, which has a more realistic approach to it. There is also a very realistic T-Rex that appears as an enemy in certain sections of the game. And finally there's the Lord of Lighting, the Ruined Dragon in the Ruined Kingdom which looks like is more likely to be from something like Dark Souls rather than a Mario game!
• An Optional Boss in Super Mario RPG is Culex. In the Japanese version, Culex mentions that he's a flat, two-dimensional being. He's perplexed why Mario and friends, whose sprites are pre-rendered 3D models, are three-dimensional. Culex himself is a traditional 2D sprite that look's straight out a classic Final Fantasy, and is the only character in the entire game drawn like this. The remake makes the clash even more noticeable; Mario and friends are 3D models made with polygons, while Culex is still a 2D sprite. That being said, once the post-game rematch against Culex rolls around, Culex has finally gotten a 3D model to match, though he reverts back to his 2D sprite after being defeated.
• This is inevitable in a franchise like Super Smash Bros. due to it being a huge crossover of different Nintendo and other Third party games. It continued to grow and grow as the series went on and added more fighters, and it's gotten to the point where it is not weird to see the Anime looking Pit fighting against the blocky looking Steve in a cartoony stage from Animal Crossing.
• The Japan-only fighting game Touki Denshou: Angel Eyes feature eight female protagonists, three of which are rendered in Killer Instinct style 3D, while the other five characters are hand-drawn in the style of Darkstalkers. The PS1 port features unlockable hand-drawn models for the three 3D rendered characters.
• Undertale: Photoshop Flowey is an Eldritch Abomination who only looks like a mess of parts, using a mess of artstyles not used or seen anywhere else before. The boss doesn't even look like it even belongs in this game (or any game, really) with only the character's face reminding what game you're playing.
• WarioWare: Get It Together! has each microgame represented in a unique art style, as is typical for the series. However, the player characters always stay in the same CGI, chibiesque art style.

Web Animation

• This is a large part of the appeal of re-animated projects—many different independent animators come together and collaborate to create all-new animation for an existing cartoon or animated film, showing off their creativity and much of the humor coming from sudden artistic changes. One moment you could be looking at sprite-based animation, then Flash-style with flat colors, then stop-motion, then a different type of flat-colored 2D art, and so on, to say nothing of deliberate jokes included.
• Animator vs. Animation has cartoonish stick figures on a computer. Also, they explore things from Minecraft and have come face-to-face with Mario and visited Pokemon HeartGold. And in the fourth episode of the AvA Shorts, we get to see a beautifully drawn cliffside while six stick figures fight with each other. And sometimes we get live action moments. Animator vs Animation 6 prominently features a group of mercenaries consisting of four stickmen, each with a wildly different art style.
• Railways of Crotoonia is a Massive Multiplayer Crossover of various franchises about sentient trains and other vehicles. While it’s all in CGI characters are animated as close to their source material as possible. Thomas & Friends are treated like the models of the earlier seasons, (static facial expressions and movement limited to eyes and going foreword and backward on the track) characters from Chuggington have lip sic and freely bob up and down on their wheels, while engines from 2D animated productions (like Casey Jr.) tend to be more exaggerated with a rubber hose like style.
• SMG4 relies on this, mixing various 3D models (and some 2D sprites) from many different sources. Sometimes, a character can even shift its art style to another in the same scene! (especially when it's for a joke)
• Sonic for Hire is a Massive Multiplayer Crossover where every video game setting ever accompany the same universe. The series uses 2D sprites where the characters are drawn to resemble the art style of their respective games. For example, Sonic himself is drawn to resemble his 16-bit sprite from his first couple games, but he frequently interacts with settings and/or characters from either simplistic 8-bit games like Duck Hunt or highly detailed/semi-realistic games like Mortal Kombat. The series also occasionally places the characters into 3D games like Mass Effect 3 and Gears of War, though in both cases, they're just simply edited into preexisting footage.
• The Walten Files does this with its characters. While older ones (like Felix or Jack) are portrayed through old photos, younger characters (like Sophie or Jenny) have cartoony portraits.

Webcomics

• Homestuck: The comic's flash animations, particularly later and longer ones such as [S]Cascade, had contributions from many artists and so the art style of the same character can vary quite a bit within the same animation, from the comic's standard Puni Plush Thick-Line Animation to the Noodle People "Hero Mode" to more detailed and realistic, fanart-like depictions.
• One-Punch Man is a mix-up of multiple genres akin to a Fantasy Kitchen Sink, and so character designs vary wildly depending on what they are lampooning. The main character Saitama is often drawn with almost a Peanuts simplicity to his face, while his costume looks like a third-rate Superman knock-off. In contrast Genos is a Bishōnen and quintessential anime Cyborg.
• Strange Tales of the DA Multiverse is a crossover between different webcomics hosted on DeviantArt, including Tales to Behold (a superhero comic), Burst Lion (a Magical Girl comic starring a Cat Girl), and Mega Mutt (a Funny Animal comic.) This can sometimes result in jarring contrasts, particularly with Mega Mutt, who has a cartoon dog's head on a traditional superhero body.

Western Animation

• 12 oz. Mouse Season 3 is this. While the first two seasons were know for their trademark art style, Season 3 introduces new characters like Aria and Professor Wilx, who are way much better drawn that the main cast.
• The Amazing World of Gumball is one of the best examples of this trope. The mash-up of differently animated characters is huge (2D Animation, CGI, Stop-Motion, Live Action etc.) and the backgrounds themselves are real photographs.
• Centaurworld: The protagonist Horse comes from a gritty animesque world with a more angular style, while the titular world she ends up in is filled with more soft, rounded, and cartoony-looking characters drawn in a thin-line style. Halfway through the series, Horse transforms into the more cartoony style of Centaurworld, which sends her into angst.
• Chowder is a similar example to Amazing World of Gumball but a bit more downplayed. Along with the show's occasional Medium Blending, a character that doesn't look like they belong with the rest of the world at all would be introduced from time to time.
  Panini: "But I don't like Carson! He's too realistic looking!"
• Having a Cast of Expies, Drawn Together has many characters with different art styles in a single cartoon. Secondary, Background, and One Shot characters increase the amount further.
• Kappa Mikey: Characters who are meant to be native to Japan are drawn in an anime style, while characters originating from America are drawn in a cartoony style.
• The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack: Most of the main characters are noticeably more cartoony compared to the more realistically drawn extras. Bubbie for example, is a whale that looks simple and easy to draw, and she's also a big contrast compared to the monstrous (and sometimes terrifying) sea creatures they encounter in the ocean.
• The crossover aspect of Pibby is hammered home by the many disparate art styles used for each dimension in the trailer. Pibby has a brightly-colored and simple design (befitting the protagonist of a show for preschoolers), the superhero characters are all more detailed and live in a world with painted backgrounds, and one scene depicts the main trio in a black-and-white setting with noticeable film grain.
• Robot Chicken has this happening a lot, since all of their characters are action figures, dolls and the like. Some look realistic, some look cartoony, etc. It gets even more pronounced in some of their specials where multiple different figures from the same overall franchise are used next to each other — ie. the various DC Comics heroes and villains. The Archie Comics special also has a case of this — the majority of those characters appear much like they have in the comics, just translated into plastic...which creates a rather jarring contrast with the usual hyper-realistic figures used when Du Jour shows up (primarily since most of Du Jour are people who also work on Robot Chicken and are just modifications of the figures used to represent themselves in past skits).
• South Park has fallen into this as a result of Art Evolution.
  • Adult characters that debuted in early seasons are much more likely to have a cartoony and simplistic appearance than those who debuted in later seasons (Really, just compare Principal Victoria to PC Principal). The earlier character designs were not meant to be seen from very complex angles, which makes for a notable contrast in animation when seen next to more natural and expressive modern character designs. On the other hand, the base character design for kid characters has remained the same throught the series and very rarely has a kid introduced in more recent seasons looked any different than others clothes, hair and headwear aside. Not only that, but the more detailed environments of later seasons also contrast with most of the characters that were designed in the show's early years, and the more complex and detailed animals from later seasons contrast with the cartoony animals with Sphere Black Dot Pupils eyes from the earlier seasons (Just compare the very cartoonish Mr. Kitty with the semi realistic Lemmiwinks).
  • Additionally there are some random characters, mostly Canadians, with even more simplistic character designs with the top of their head disconnected from the rest of their body to simulate them talking. Canada itself also has a more simplistic and blocky appearance than the rest of the world, even in later seasons when the budget of the show improved. Depending on the episode certain celebrities are depicted with modified photographs of their heads and given animation.
• Despite being a sequel to the later Transformers: Robots in Disguise (2015) and Transformers: Prime has little to do with one another artistically (Prime had very angular and detailed designs for its cast with extremely muted colors, while RID made use of heavy Cel Shading, bright colors and a lot of Tron Lines) with the Hand Wave that most characters had gained new bodies after Prime ended. This became a problem though when Soundwave was reintroduced still in his Prime body. Which now looked extremely out of place next to other characters.

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