Ass in a Lion Skin

"Have You Seen This Chicken?"

If you are a duck on the make, or a Rascally Rabbit trying to escape the hunters, or just a dog whose owner made it wear a turkey costume◊, you have a good chance of turning into an "ass in a lion skin." This involves one animal (usually a Funny Animal) that attempts to pass as an animal of an entirely different species, not simply of a different style or level of reality — Augie Doggie pretending to be Top Cat, but not Augie Doggie pretending to be Doggie Daddy, Scooby-Doo, Underdog, Pluto, or Rin Tin Tin. Note also that the trope specifically excludes an animal dressed as or imitating a human being (or vice versa).

Though this is mainly an Animation Trope (the Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies series in particular were addicted to it), it also occurs in other fictional contexts. The disguise in question is usually Paper Thin, but is often remarkably successful, to the point that its removal may actually provoke a comedic BSOD — "My God! You're not a fruit bat at all! You're a killer whale!"

The Ass In A Lion Skin has a Real Life counterpart in the phenomenon of "animal mimicry," in which, for example, a harmless milk snake may resemble a deadly coral snake, but in such a case, unlike its fictional counterpart, the mimicry is permanent and (probably) unconscious^note To tell the difference, remember this saying: "Red touches yellow, you're a dead fellow; red touches black, you're OK, Jack."

Compare A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing and Animal Disguise. Contrast with Furry Confusion, which is about the bewilderment caused by differences in two individuals of what are supposed to be the same kind of animal; with I Am Not Weasel, the Inversion of this trope, in which the animal is taken for another species against its wishes; and with most of the entries on the Sliding Scale of Anthropomorphism, which are about animals acting like humans. Not to be confused with a human whose ass is in a lion skin; that's Fur Bikini or Loincloth. When the filmmakers dress up an animal as a cheap way to put a "monster" on screen, that's a Slurpasaur.

The Trope Namer is, of course, the Aesop's Fables of the same name "The Ass in the Lion Skin".

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Examples

Advertising

• The Cadbury Chocolate commercials, featuring clucking rabbits. A later commercial featured other rabbits making other animal noises (ribbits, barks, trumpetings, etc.), while a still later one featured other animals (donkeys, lions, etc.) with rabbit ears, clucking.

Anime & Manga

• In Fairy Tail, the cat-like Frosch grew up thinking they were a frog. After learning they've been under the wrong impression the whole time, they cried for days... then promptly bought a frog suit to make themself feel better. Frosch has been wearing the suit ever since.
• In Great Teacher Onizuka, Urumi disguises a harmless snake as a cobra, and it's mentioned she did the same with crabs, turning them into fake scorpions.
• While Pokémon: The Series are not animals per se, Team Rocket's Meowth often disguises himself as other species of Pokémon. This once backfired when Ash used his Pokédex on him, blowing his cover when it described him as being a Meowth.

Asian Animation

• A variant appears in Season 7 episode 15 of Happy Heroes. A tiger named Fat Tiger runs away from his circus and refuses to accept himself as a tiger, preferring to think of himself as a cat. (He means a house cat, but then that brings up the question of how tigers are already cats to begin with.)
• In the very first episode of Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf, Wolffy the wolf dresses up as a goat and tries to convince the goats in Goat Village that he is one of them. Weslie eventually realizes it's not actually a goat and reveals the trick to the others.

Comic Books

• Angry Birds Comics: Game Play: In A New Bird in the Flock Red disguises himself as a pig and a pig disguises himself as a bird.
• In Snagglepuss's play My Heart is a Kennel of Thieves, from Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles, most of the characters are played by humans in dog noses and ears, which isn't this trope, but the female lead is played by his wife Lila Lion, also wearing a dog nose and ears.
• Maus: The mice (Jews) wear pig masks to pass among the general population of pigs (Poles). As the story is non-fiction, it's understood that the Jews didn't actually do this, but is just the comic's way of depicting their attempts to blend in. Played with in Anja's case, whose pig mask disguise doesn't hold up as well as her husband Vladek's because of her more 'Jewish' characteristics, which in this case is depicted as a relatively longer mouse tail.
• In Tintin - Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, Tintin's dog Snowy disguises himself as a tiger to scare the Russian guards away.

Comic Strips

• The Far Side had one with a polar bear with a Paper-Thin Disguise — a penguin's beak — pretending to be a penguin.
  • Also, the cover of the book collection The Chickens Are Restless depicts a duck with a false chicken comb among the mob of chickens.
    • "Is anyone here a real sheep?"
• This political cartoon◊ by Thomas Nast, in a Shout-Out to Aesop, depicts The New York Herald as an ass in a lion-skin stampeding the "foolish animals" of the press, including The New York Times (unicorn), The New York Tribune (giraffe), and The New York World (owl). A skittish fox, representing the Democratic Party, has edged onto a reform plank near a gaping pit, by which the trumpeting elephant, symbolizing the Republican vote, lumbers. (This is probably one of the original sources, incidentally, of the depiction of the G.O.P. as an elephant; Nast also popularized the Democratic donkey.)
• A Running Gag in Peanuts involved Snoopy imitating other animals, most often a vulture.
• There was a cartoon in the Wall Street Journal or similar paper during a recession, in which the boss of the New York Stock Exchange arranged to have a bear dressed as a bull so he could claim that it was a bull (i.e., rising) market as opposed to a bear (falling) market.

Eastern Animation

• In one Nu, Pogodi! short, the Wolf is thrown out of a TV studio when he tries to sneak in, and keeps re-entering in attempted disguises as other animals (e.g., wearing a black-and-white striped shirt and claiming to be a zebra, or dropping on all fours with a big bowl on his back and claiming to be a tortoise.) None of these work.

Fan Works

• In The Harmony Trap, a Mature Animal Story version of Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew!, Rubberduck is actually an eagle, but he takes the form of a duck in his heroic identity. He also sometimes takes the form of Fastback the speedster turtle, who does not (currently?) exist, since the belief the Zoo Crew has a reptile member helps combat Fantastic Racism.

Film — Animated

• An American Tail: Warren T. Rat (actually a cat himself) dresses as a rat to fool the mice into buying into his protection racket against the cats. Oddly, he starts out freakishly small for a cat to make this work, but when he is revealed to be a cat he scales up to a normal cat size without explanation.
• The Jungle Book: Baloo disguises himself as an ape to try to rescue Mowgli from King Louie.
• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf series:
  • This applies to a plot twist in Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: The Tiger Prowess to one of the characters. For specifics, Counselor Gecko feigns his own species, claiming to be a gecko when he's really a dinosaur. Interestingly, he also pulls this on Lord Japper and Leopold, who are firmly convinced they are a tiger and a leopard respectively when they're actually a house cat and a hyena.
  • The snakes from The Mythical Ark: Adventures in Love & Happiness wear different animal costumes whenever they're out, due to them being an almost-extinct species.
• Robin Hood (1973): Robin, a fox in this version of the legend, disguises himself as "the spindle-legged stork from Devonshire" and as Nutsy, the vulture.
• Rock-A-Doodle: The club that Chanticleer is playing at bans all cats, mice, dogs and birds from attending so that Edmond and his friends can't get in. So what does Edmond and the gang do? They sneak in dressed as penguins. And it works since the announcer told them to "bring your penguin suits (i.e. tuxedos)!" literally.
• In Sing 2, the Moon Theatre puts on a production of Alice in Wonderland, with Rosita and Gunter, both pigs, in costume as the Cheshire Cat and the Caterpillar, respectively.
• In Zootopia there's a gag near the end of the film, where a wolf police officer prepares for an undercover assignment by donning a disturbingly realistic sheep costume.
• Stella the Skunk in Over the Hedge dyes her white stripe black and undergoes a Makeover Montage to disguise herself as a cat.

Film — Live-Action

• In The Muppets' Wizard of Oz, Fozzie Bear plays the Cowardly Lion.

Literature

• Aesop's Fables:
  • "The Ass in the Lion Skin" — The Trope Namer. The ass in question finds a lionskin a hunter discarded and amuses himself by hiding, then charging out at random animals, pretending he's an attacking lion. Of course the fox catches on.
  • "The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing". The wolf used a sheepskin to hide among the flock, planning to kill and eat to his satisfaction once penned with the others for the night. Planning to.
• In Lana Llama's Little Lamb from Animal Antics A to Z there's a wolf who keeps trying to get into the pen where Lana Llama's friend Lucky Lamb plays by dressing himself up as a lamb and offering to read a book or share pie with her. Each time, though Lana stops him from letting the wolf in. Finally, Lana solves the problem by talking about it with her teacher, Alpha Betty. Fortunately, Alpha Betty happens to be a lion, and she gives him a nice long talk about how to be a friendly neighbor, causing him to have a Heel–Face Turn.
• Discworld;
  • In The Truth, there is a reward offered for a specific dog. One of the candidates presented, along with the massive range of dogs of the wrong breed, is a parrot with "DoG" written on it.
  No, sir, I know that's not it. Because it's a parrot, that's why. You've taught it to bark and you've painted "DoG" on the side of it but it's still a parrot.
  • Also, Quoth the raven tries to dress up as a robin in Hogfather.
  • The "DoG" parrot turns up again in The Last Hero.
  • Although it's within-species, Gaspode the terrier mix's emergency makeover as a poodle (also from The Truth) fits this trope in other respects.
• How the Grinch Stole Christmas!: The Grinch dresses his dog, Max, as a reindeer.
• In The Last Battle Puzzle the Donkey is, as a Shout-Out to the Aesop's Fable, put into a lion skin by Shift the Ape so that the poor ass can unwittingly function as the local Antichrist. The costume is so feeble that the only reasons why it works are that the Narnians haven't seen a lion for ages and because Puzzle is forbidden from braying and brought out only at night.
• Happens a couple of times in Redwall. Brome the mouse and Jukka the squirrel both managed to pass for rats, in Jukka's case by shaving her tail and dyeing her fur. The hares Midge Manycoats and Tammo dress up to enter the Rapscallion camp; they end up looking like miscellaneous weird-looking creatures "neither wholly rat, ferret, or stoat, but definitely vermin of some sort", but since they're dressing up as Seers the otherworldly look actually helps. And then there's the otter Mask, who is a master of disguise and can pass as pretty much ANY other creature, thanks in part to the fact he's missing his actual otter tail and uses fake ones.

Live Action TV

• In A.N.T. Farm Cameron enters for a dog show but has no dog. His solution? Strap a stuffed toy dog onto a cat. He wins.
• On season 5 of The Masked Singer (US), the singer in the Snail costume turns out to be Kermit the Frog.
• The Muppet Show
  • On the Cloris Leachman episode, pigs take over the show and fill all the roles. Cloris comes out on stage while "Kermit the Pig" is making an introduction and states her belief that he's not Kermit the Frog, despite being green (not easy for a pig) and having the collar. What changes her mind? "Ribbit!" He didn't even have to hide his ears or snout. Whether she was actually fooled for any length of time is another matter, as revealed in the end, when Kermit and the others made their escape:
    Kermit: Who ever thought that someone would be holding a hog-calling contest next door? It was amazing, it was bizarre...
    Cloris Leachman: It was easy. I'm from Iowa.
  • On the Brooke Shields episode, which is a whole episode adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, the Dormouse is played by Camilla the Chicken.
  • On the Glenda Jackson episode, she first appears carrying a penguin. When she reveals herself to be a pirate captain commandeering the theatre, the penguin turns out to be a Pirate Parrot in a costume.
  • In The Muppets Go To The Movies, Fozzie Bear plays the Cowardly Lion
• In the Whoopi Goldberg episode of Muppets Tonight, various characters try to replace Miss Piggy including Seymour the Elephant and Pepe the King Prawn.
• Sesame Street:
  • A sketch featured William Wegman's dogs dressed as different kinds of animals. "It's Kermit the Dog!"
  • A more recurring incident was with Gladys the Cow, who liked to pretend she was another animal. In one scene, she got some horses to pretend they were cows.
  • The Homeland parody, Homelamb, has the literal Wolf in Sheep's Clothing version. "Baa-rody" is very obviously the Big Bad Wolf infiltrating the sheep organization; "Caa-rrie" is the only one who can see it.

Myths & Legends

• One version of the Trope Namer goes as follows: An Ass, having put on a Lion's skin, amused himself by terrifying all the foolish animals. At last, coming upon a Fox, he tried to frighten him also, but the Fox no sooner heard the sound of his voice than he exclaimed, "I might possibly have been frightened myself, if I had not heard your bray." The moral of the story is often quoted as "Clothes may disguise a fool, but his words will give him away."
• Another fable (the Trope Namer for A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing) has a wolf trying to infiltrate a flock of sheep (in order to eat them) by wearing a sheepskin. This plan ends up biting the wolf in the ass, though. In some versions, he gets caught when he tries to bleat like a sheep but ends up howling instead. In other versions, the disguise works too well, and the farmer decides to kill a sheep for food and settles on the wolf.

New Media

• In 30-Second Bunnies Theatre rabbits re-enact popular films. Thus, a film like Jurassic Park will feature a T. rex wearing bunny ears.

Radio

• A John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme sketch features a literal wolf in sheep's clothing ... only in this case the wolf rapidly Became the Mask, and has been part of the flock for years. Eventually the real sheep tell him they knew all along, because it's not actually a very good disguise, but once they realised he wasn't going to eat them they decided not to make a fuss. They'd be more comfortable if he dropped the disguise, in fact, given that he's wearing the skin of one of their relatives.

Toys

• Purr-Tenders, a strange toyline about a group of cats who realized they were the only animals who weren't getting adopted from a pet shop, so they disguised themselves as other animals (i.e. dogs, parrots, mice...) in order to get adopted.
• There's a range of Winnie the Pooh cuddly toys with the characters dressed as different animals — Pooh in a bee costume and Eeyore as a butterfly, for example.
  • There're even a few where everyone who isn't Tigger, is dressed up as Tigger. Presumably, this is to coincide with The Tigger Movie.

Webcomics

• In Kevin & Kell many characters have used make up, costumes, and/or parts of other characters to disguise themselves as members of other species. For starters, Corrie had gone a long while disguised as a wolf named Dale^note Although she would later learn that she is half-wolf. Kell has disguised herself as a rabbit and shortly after as a feline. George Fennec spent a small while disguising as a rabbit despite disliking rabbits since he was always been confused as one his whole life. And at least three non-rabbits spent Easter disguised as the Easter bunny.
  • And this occasionally pops up as Halloween costumes for kids. Kell noted one time that a child was using a...less-than-fresh pelt. (In fact, this is eventually where Corrie's "Dale" pelt went: into Coney's dress-up box.)
  • One storyline ends with a group of jackals being tricked into and then trapped in the Rabbit Warrens, where they have the option of either dressing up as and pretending to be rabbits in the hope they can find their way out, or spurn the disguises and probably be torn apart by virtue of the fact they are outnumbered hundreds to one. The final panel reveals at least one jackal got so "into character" that he wound up an old man, happily married to an equally elderly rabbit lady, father of countless litters... and with her still oblivious to the truth of her husband's species.
  • A storyline in which Beige University put on a production of The Lion King cast Rudy (a wolf) as Simba, Fiona (a fox) as Nala, Greta (a snake) as Zabu, and Miranda (a rabbit) as one of the hyenas.
• In the Little Tales Anthropomorphic Animal Adaptation of The Man Who Was Thursday, the Marquis de St. Eustache is an elephant. When Symes pulls his nose off (as in the book), it's revealed that Inspector Ratcliffe is a boar.
• The Perry Bible Fellowship: Bloodily deconstructed with literal wolves in sheep's clothing here.
• One of the main characters in Mike Witmer's Pinkerton is Steve, the guinea pig trying to pass himself off as a moose (complete with glued-on fork-and-spoon antlers).

Western Animation

• In A Charlie Brown Christmas, Snoopy is tapped to perform the parts of all the animals in the Christmas play, including a sheep, a cow, and a penguin. (He gratuitously adds a vulture.)
  • The vulture may be a reference to a series of strips where Snoopy pretended to be a vulture. He eventually gave up when he decided it wasn't creeping people out enough to be fun any more.
• It happens in a number of Classic Disney Shorts:
  • In "The Fox Chase" (1928), Oswald The Lucky Rabbit flushes a skunk out of a log. Oswald and his hounds flee into the distance — and then we see that the "skunk" is really a fox in disguise.
  • In "The Moose Hunters" (1937), Goofy and Donald disguise themselves as a cute lady moose doing a peek-a-boo dance in order to lure a male moose to his doom. Too bad they attract two males...
  • In "The Three Little Pigs" (1933), Zeke the Wolf disguises himself in a sheepskin, becoming a literal Wolf In Sheep's Clothing.
  • In "The Golden Eggs" (1941), Donald disguises himself as a chicken to get some eggs from a rooster.
• Danger Mouse relaunch:
  • In the episode "Hail Hydrant!", the villainess Red Fox, who appears to be a red fox, is actually Jeopardy Mouse, attempting to infiltrate Hydrant.
  • In the episode "Agent 58", DM and Penfold attend the annual CrimiCon, pretending to be crime fans cosplaying as Baron Greenback and Panda Minion. In addition, Agent 58 himself is a mimic octopus who can shapeshift into various forms including DM, Penfold, Stiletto and a llama guard. (Agent 58 is based on Agent 57 in the original series, who technically isn't an example because we're never told what his real form is.)
• Dora the Explorer: Swiper has sometimes disguised himself as different animals (like a rabbit, duck, camel, polar bear, horse, etc.) in order to steal a random object from Dora and Boots. He is usually given away either due to his tail sticking out of the costume, or the animal he is passing himself off as not being native to the rainforest, where the series takes place.
• In the half-hour animated television special based on the Garfield comic strip, "Here Comes Garfield", Garfield and Odie are captured by the local dogcatcher and thrown into a dark and dreary cell with the other inmates. Among the delinquents is Weird Lonnie, a dog who tried to impersonate a moose (at least his head looks like a moose). Even after the escape attempt, Weird Lonnie's true face is never revealed.
• Billy of Grim Adventures fame once entered Irwin in a dog show. He'd been infected with lycanthropy, and his werewolf form made for a passable wolfhound—a term that is confusingly used both to describe dogs bred to hunt wolves, and dogs that are part-wolf.
• An episode of The Lion Guard has the title Guard playing the original Lion Guard in a theater play. However, since the original Guard consisted of five lions, all the non-lions of the current Guard have to dress up as lions (in fact, a major conflict involves the costume and makeup artist Makini running out of yellow paint because of this!).
• In The Little Drummer Boy, Baba the lamb pretends to be a lion, a frog, and a hog; Joshua the camel pretends to be an alligator and an elephant; and Samson the donkey pretends to be a caribou.
• Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies:
  • "Bedevilled Rabbit": Bugs pretends to be a monkey and a Tasmanian she-devil to escape the Tasmanian Devil.
  • "Dog Pounded": Sylvester the Cat dresses in a dog suit in an attempt to cross the city dog pound and eat Tweety. Near the end of the same short, Sylvester paints a white stripe down his back, managing to purloin Tweety. The stunt works (a little too well, as Pepe LePew appears out of nowhere and starts hitting on him in standard Pepe fashion).
  • "Double or Mutton": Sam the sheepdog disguises himself as a sheep stolen by Ralph the wolf (who is disguised as Little Bo Peep, no less!)
  • "Duck! Rabbit! Duck!": Bugs pretends to be a duck; Daffy pretends (briefly) to be an elk and a fiddler crab.
  • "Duck Soup to Nuts": Daffy tries (and fails) to convince Porky that he's a fish. When that doesn't work, Daffy manages to trick Porky into trying to prove that he's an eagle.
  • "False Hare": A father-and-son pair of wolves disguise themselves (badly) as rabbits and try to trick Bugs Bunny into a series of death-traps disguised as the initiation to a "rabbit club". Bugs sees right through the ruse, but plays along to troll the papa wolf. After one failed attempt too many, the papa wolf decides to start a "rooster club", prompting a cameo by Foghorn Leghorn.
  • "For Scentimental Reasons": As in a number of other Warner Bros. shorts, a black cat (later christened Penelope Pussycat) disguises herself as a skunk to frighten away her persecutors; this, of course, backfires spectacularly when it attracts Abhorrent Admirer Pepe le Pew.
    • Some version of this trope is pretty much de rigueur for any Pepe le Pew cartoon. It's usually unintentional: a female black cat inadvertently gets a stripe of paint/whitewash/bleach or something; cue Pepe catching sight of her (though the tables are turned in "For Scentimental Reasons" itself, when Pepe is immersed in blue paint, and the female cat, who caught has a bad (and disfiguring) cold and can't smell anything, observes his now-apparent muscularity and starts pursuing him!
  • "Foxy By Proxy": Bugs disguises himself as a fox to mislead a pack of hounds.
  • "Muzzle Tough": Sylvester does this again, but this time as a female dog to lure Hector away from guarding Tweety. His costume is so convincing, it even fools the dog catcher!
  • "Rabbit Fire": Bugs pretends to be a duck; Daffy pretends to be a rabbit and a dog.
  • "Sheep in the Deep": Ralph the Wolf and Sam the Sheepdog disguise themselves as sheep and as each other.
  • "Tom Turk and Daffy": Tom dresses Daffy as a turkey to divert Porky Pig from himself.
  • "You Were Never Duckier": Daffy dresses as a chicken to win a poultry contest; Henery Hawk and his father dress as a duck and a chicken to do the same.
  • "Fowl Weather": When spying on Tweety on Granny's farm, Sylvester dons a rubber goat mask and hides behind a fence to obscure his body, yet Tweety knows he's not really a goat. Later in the same short, Sylvester disguises himself (poorly, by means of a rubber glove and some feathers) as a chicken, which doesn't fool a large burly rooster one bit.
  • "Ready.. Set.. Zoom!": Wile E. Coyote's last attempt to catch the Road Runner involves himself putting on an Acme-brand female roadrunner costume in order to trick his target. Instead, he ends up attracting a horde of identical-looking coyotes that chase him off into the distance while the real Road Runner once again escapes unscathed.
  • "Roughly Squeaking": Hubie and Bertie convince a cat he's actually a lion and put on the disguise. They also convince him that lions hunt moose and disguised a dog as a moose.
  • "I Got Plenty of Mutton": This World War Two-era short involves a male wolf disguising full-body as a sexy shapely ewe, to lure the sheepdog-like ram protecting the flock away from the rest of the sheep. The plan doesn't fully go well as he hoped, but the attracting bit works a bit too well.
  • Not an intentional disguise, but related: there are several cartoons in which Sylvester believes a young kangaroo to be a giant mouse. In his defense, the "kangaroo" is usually drawn like a oversized version of the mouse that will inevitably also appear in the show. On the other hand, it's kind of stupid of him to assume he can defeat it because it's a "mouse" while ignoring the fact that the "giant" part means it's as big as he is (or, in the cases where the Mom Kangaroo also shows up, significantly larger than he is).
    • He wouldn't even try if it weren't for his son.
  • In "Weasel While You Work", Foghorn Leghorn traps Dawg in a corset making him look like a seal and gives him to the weasel to cook.
• In the DePatie-Freleng Misterjaw cartoon "Show Biz Shark", the eponymous shark disguises himself as a porpoise to sneak into show business.
• In the second act of the Mr. Bogus episode "Hipster Tripster", Bogus disguises himself as a mouse (done by shaping his nose in the shape of a mouse snout and stretching his ears in the shape of mouse ears) in order to scare off an elephant at the zoo as a tactic to help himself to the elephant's peanut cache.
• In Olive, the Other Reindeer, Olive the dog is constantly trying to convince people she's a reindeer. No one believes her.
• In the Phineas and Ferb episode "Got Game?", Perry the Platypus dresses up as a dog (i.e., he wears an earband and fake tail) to infiltrate a pet shop where Dr. Doofenshmirtz has been shopping, and ends up being bought by the doctor, who is unaware of Perry's disguise.
• The Ren & Stimpy Show:
  • "Dog Tags": At the end, Stimpy consoles Ren (who's been snubbed by his fellow dogs) by letting him dress up as a cat and hang out with Stimpy and his cat buddies.
  • "Fire Dogs": Ren paints himself and Stimpy as Dalmatians in order to get jobs at a firehouse.
  • "Monkey See, Monkey Don't": Ren and Stimpy dress as monkeys. Later in the episode, Stimpy disguises himself as a hippopotamus and Ren disguises himself as a tickbird.
• In the Rocko's Modern Life episode "An Elk For Heffer", Heffer needs to bring an elk home to his family as a Rite of Passage. So he goes to the most logical place to find an elk: The Elks Club. Only, he can't get in, being a steer and all. So he takes branches and ties them to his horns to create antlers. Oddly enough, it works.
  Heffer: I am an elk. I have antlers!
  Bouncer: (shrugs) You want a prize?
• In an episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle, Bullwinkle was in hiding and he hid out on a mink farm. When the criminal went to the mink farm, the moose hid in a mink pen and pretended to be a mink by squeaking and hopping on all fours.
• Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!:
  • In the episode "Jeepers, It's the Creeper," a baby chick labors under the delusion that it is a dog after imprinting on Scooby.
  • The episode "Never Ape an Ape Man" also has the Ape Man disguise himself with a Scooby-Doo mask to put on a Mirror Routine with the real Scooby.
• One episode of Slacker Cats had Buckley, a house cat, disguising himself as a full-grown tiger by painting himself the correct colours so he could feel brave enough to fight rats. Then the zoo caught him...
• In the Tex Avery cartoon "Little 'Tinker," near the end B.O. Skunk tries to woo a female by painting his fur like a fox. The girl fox he meets turns out to actually be another skunk in disguise after they fall into a creek and their paint washes off. Cue heartwarming as they kiss.
  • "The Counterfeit Cat": A cat rips the ears off a dog to deceive the bulldog who's guarding the canary he's after.
• Tom and Jerry:
  • "The Brothers Carry-Mouse-Off": Tom disguises himself as a female mouse, complete with eyelashes, pink bow, and perfume, because of course, nothing's sexier than your equivalent of the 50-foot woman. It works... too well. He attracts every male mouse in the vicinity. Rather than take advantage of the feast at his feet, he runs off when they start fighting each other. Just when he's safe from that, he finds that his zipper's stuck... and he's being noticed by cats now.
  • "Jerry and Jumbo": A baby elephant paints himself to look like a giant Jerry just to mess with Tom. Poor Tom goes completely over the edge when the elephant's mother gets in on the act.
  • "Jerry's Nephew": Jerry disguises himself as a baby chick to smuggle his nephew Dinky out of a hen-house.
  • "Little Runaway": To capture an escaped baby seal, Tom disguises himself as a seal. He is then mistaken for the escaped seal and captured.
  • "Puttin' on the Dog": Tom disguises himself as a dog to catch Jerry in a dog pound, by simply wearing a hollow dog head from a statue as if it were a mask.
  • "Flirty Birdy" has Tom donning probably one of the most paper-thin disguises imaginable. When an eagle steals Jerry from Tom's hands, Tom disguises himself as a female bird to woo the eagle into handing the mouse over. Said disguise consists of lipstick, a party horn for a beak, a skirt, and a few feathers strapped to his rear. Regardless, the eagle is instantly lovestruck.
• In the Wallace & Gromit short "The Wrong Trousers'', the notorious rooster bank robber Feathers McGraw is really a penguin with a red rubber glove on his head (whence the page image).
• In The Year Without a Santa Claus, Vixen pretends to be a dog, even to the point of chasing a cat.

Real Life

• The mimic octopus is able to impersonate a wide variety of different marine animals.

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