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2D Visuals, 3D Effects
aka: Conspicuous CG

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"It seems I've taken a wrong turn into my PlayStation."

"Why's there so much molten lava? Yet so few polygons?"
Shirou in the Fate/stay night fan comic "Wouldja Like Some Making Fuck?" by *veloxiraptor

The high-tech equivalent of Conspicuously Light Patch.

CGI allows you to consistently animate complicated images (like Instant Runes) and moving objects with regularity and ease. It was embraced by many animators because it allows for good animation sequences without totally sacrificing the budget or scheduling for the rest of the scenes in a show. Unfortunately, this means that, when done without a lot of care, it can stand out considerably compared to that of 2D animation. Techniques in digital inking (such as Cel Shading and painting over the models by hand) can alleviate this by blending the CGI with the rest of the animation. As a result, the gradual disappearance of the conspicuousness of this trope can be largely chalked up to the fact that Technology Marches On.

The limitations of early computer rendering technology and an overall lack of experience in the field by most animators led to many of the examples listed, although some can be attributed to studios resorting to CGI just to speed the process up. The ironic problem is that a CG model looks too perfect; it moves too smoothly and creates a 3D effect in an otherwise 2D universe. If done well, the CG models don't stand out (Disney has been using CGI since the 1980s in small amounts, which were hardly noticed). This trope is for when they do.

Sometimes, of course, CG visuals are deliberate. A character may be in deliberately obvious CGI as a stylistic choice, such as the Hydra from Disney's Hercules (since it allowed for more heads) and the flames of Hades' head, and Rule of Cool meant nobody cared. Sometimes it's a form of Painting the Medium to indicate that the thing is fundamentally different. Sometimes it's blended, like in Treasure Planet. But when it's used as a cheap shortcut, it just clashes horribly.

This trope is only for 2D animated works with noticeable CG elements. For when CGI is conspicuous within a live-action work (or for other, practical bad effects), see Special Effect Failure. See also Uncanny Valley, which the CGI can deliberately invoke. Often crops up in games with a Sprite/Polygon Mix.

For when everything is CG, see All-CGI Cartoon. Voluntarily switching between or mixing CG and another animation style is Medium Blending. The inverse of this trope, 2D effects on a 3D cartoon, is Painted CGI.


Examples:

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    Advertising 
  • The Blue Tax commercials are rife with this, with Max always looking out of place with everything else around him. And "everything else" never meshes well with each other either.
  • One of the very earliest examples of 2D/3D blending occurs in this commercial for Joust created by a pre-Dreamworks Pacific Data Images, with Colossal Pictures handling the 2D animation. Blending 2D characters, ostrich aliens and effects with CGI platforms.
  • The Silentnight adverts used this technique in the 2000s. Here are two examples.

    Anime 
  • In the Adachi and Shimamura anime, Shimamura's fish are CG.
  • AKB0048 uses CGI for the concerts and some dance sequences. The mecha are also CG, as is standard in a Satelight production.
  • Akuma no Riddle uses CGI for the action sequences, and it's very easy to tell where. Banba's hammer in episode 9 is particularly obvious: its head is a polyhedron, perfect for CGI, and the animators take advantage of this almost every time it moves.
  • In the Alice in Borderland OVA, it's easy to spot certain CG elements, like the campfire at the start of episode 2; it may not look 3D, but it moves smoothly and continuously, unlike anything around it.
  • Animal Crossing: The Movie has some CGI during the opening (Kapp'n's cab) and the ending (the UFOs). A small amount compared to some other examples, but it really clashes with the otherwise-beautiful art.
  • Appears in the 2004 animated adaptation of Area 88, where the planes are all rendered as intricately detailed, cel shaded CG models. As the planes themselves are usually shown dogfighting each other, this isn't quite the limitation it would otherwise be in terms of effects, but there are more than a few instances where 2D and CGI mix. This leads to somewhat jarring visual results, most notably when the view zooms in on a pilot in the cockpit. The vivid character models stand out against the often matte rendering textures for the CGI planes.
  • Attack on Titan: The blood splatter and several 3D maneuver gear scenes are done in CG.
    • When the Colossal Titan swipes the top of the Wall in Episode 5, the effect is in very obvious CGI. It eventually becomes full CGI in almost all of its appearances in Season 2.
    • In episode 5, when the soldiers are running and jumping through the city, all the houses are obviously made with CGI.
    • The bell that rings when the Survey Corps rides out is very conspicuously CG.
    • Because of its immense size, Rod Reiss's Titan form is also done in CGI until he reaches Orvud, where he becomes 2D once his Body Horror is revealed to all.
    • It was better when one figures out that most of the CGI was mostly produced by WIT Studio's subsidiary studio Production I.Gnote .
    • Almost all of the Titans shift to completely CGI models in the final season.
  • In Baccano!'s anime adaptation, a good percent of scenes in the halls of the Flying Pussyfoot have incredibly conspicuous CG backgrounds.
  • In Back Arrow, the Briheights are done in CGI.
  • There's actually a lot of CGI used in Bakemonogatari's anime adaptation, but its visual style as a whole is so weird and varied that it's really not that conspicuous.
  • Bakugan uses CGI to animate the eponymous spheres, flocks of pigeons, and even a pudding falling down.
    • Its revival Bakugan: Battle Planet limits it to just the titular beasts in both forms and the visual effects.
  • Bamboo Blade: The first sequence where the Kendo teacher is driving his car is CG to the point where it looks like it came out of something else entirely.
  • In some sequences od BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad where Ryusuke, Koyuki and Taira play their instruments, there is a CG close up of their hands on the fretboards and strumming. These were animated by filming people playing and then rotoscoping the footage to blend it with the show.
  • Beyblade began using conspicuous CGI for the beyblades starting with the second season.
  • In Black Butler, horse-drawn carriages are usually rendered in CGI.
  • Black Lagoon uses CG cars that stick out like a sore thumb.
  • Blue Seed is all traditional, but the title itself (used for the eyecatch) gives us a blatantly rendered mitama bead and an unbelievably crappy rendering of vines and a city in the opening theme.
  • In Bokurano, Zearth and the other Humongous Mecha it fights are 3D animated. Not only does it make it easier to animate the fight scenes, but it fits since the mecha are incomprehensibly advanced pieces of technology from another world.
  • The adaptation of the racing manga series Capeta bluntly uses CG for every single race and other assorted vehicles. It's quite jarring when, during said races, the animation suddenly switches from the CG karts and racers to hand-drawn and back whenever there's any character interaction.
  • One opening of Case Closed has a really obvious CG car...being driven by the 2D Takagi and Sato.
  • CLANNAD uses CGI for the alternative world, and it looks convincingly classic, but still sticks out. This is one of the few cases where the CGI looks like the rest of the anime, only smoother.
  • In Code Geass, CGI is mainly used for the trains in the Tokyo Settlement and for the Ikaruga vessel during R2.
  • Cowboy Bebop has a lot of this throughout, mostly for the hyperspace gates.
    • The planet surface in episode 21 is obvious CG.
    • The "Pierrot le Fou" episode utilizes CG backgrounds during the fight between Spike and Pierrot.
  • Done in Cross Ange for the Para-Mail units, the DRAGONs and the Mana effects to varying degrees of success.
    • Episode 25 has a poorly animated Hilda model in the background of one scene. It'd be excusable, as the characters are usually rendered in CGI for mecha sequences... if it weren't for the model's relative prominence during the scene in question.
    • Inverted for the Visual Novel based on the series. Most of the characters are fully CG models (which fail in their own ways), while others are simple 2D cutouts. This gets pretty ugly when both mediums are actually shown together.
  • The cars in Darker than Black have a nasty habit of sticking out like a bruised pinky.
  • Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba often places its 2D characters in 3D environments to allow for more dynamic camera angles than what would be possible with traditional animation.
  • Den-noh Coil has an inversion — we're able to accept the CG Satchiis because they're computer programs. The weirding out happens when in one of the final episodes, a Satchii is inexplicably hand-drawn.
  • In the various Digimon series, the Ultimate and Mega digivolution transformation sequences of two of however-so-many heroes will have a CGI Transformation Sequence, usually the main hero and The Lancer. All the other characters, without exception, will have traditionally animated digivolutions. It got most ridiculous in Digimon Tamers note  and Digimon Data Squadnote . Digimon Fusion finally brought this usage of the trope to a rest - all fusion and digivolution sequences are traditionally animated - and overall does a better job in avoiding it, with it only noticeably appearing in the first episode.
    • The effect is invoked for the D-Reaper in Tamers and the Spirits in Frontier.
  • Dinosaur King: The dinosaurs when fighting. To say it clashes horribly is an understatement.
  • Used a lot during the battle sequences in Divergence Eve, flipping back and forth between 3D and 2D animation every few seconds. And it is VERY conspicuous, owing to the terrible quality of the CGI.
  • A few Doraemon movies (those which are traditionally animated, that is) uses CG in-between scenes. Usually it's for Medium Blending purposes, like the CG Doraemon on a CG Flying Carpet in the intro of Doraemon: Nobita's Dorabian Nights, but then there's stuff like the Dream Land's entrance from Doraemon: Nobita and the Galaxy Super-express, shots of assorted spaceships in the remake of Doraemon: The Record of Nobita : Spaceblazer, interiors of the Green Planet podium in Doraemon: Nobita and the Green Giant Legend, Captain Silver's island-sized ship and it's forcefield in Doraemon: Nobita's Treasure Island, crowd shots of dinosaurs in Doraemon: Nobita's New Dinosaur, among various others, all which sticks out like a sore thumb when compared with the rest of the scenes.
  • Dragonaut: The Resonance has the real forms of the dragons and some of the mecha. They don't blend in at all with the rest of the 2D environments and characters.
  • Dragon Ball Super uses CGI for most characters' Battle Aura rather than hand drawing it like in the old days. Although most auras blend in quite nicely, some tend to noticeably stick out, such as Jiren's full power form.
  • Duel Masters features CGI effects for the creatures. This being Duel Masters, it's lampshaded by the characters quite often.
  • Seen in the last few (more serious) episodes of Excel♡Saga. Parodied earlier in the episode "Bowling Girls", which animates a scene of a character attacking another character with conspicuously bad CG that stands out because it's so crappy-looking. And it's a Matrix Bullet Time parody, on top of that.
  • Seen in a fairly trippy sequence in Fate/stay night, where Shiro faces down a very badly animated CG dragon.
  • Fate/Zero uses CGI to animate Berserker, intentionally making him as alien-looking and out-of-place as he is described in the novel. CGI is also used for cars, backgrounds, the opening and ending themes, and the next episode preview. In other words, anything that's not an organic creature or humannote . This also is coupled with a wavering quality of either the animation, integration, or both.
  • The Stock Footage of Kaze's Demon Gun from Final Fantasy: Unlimited. It allowed the production to easily change the colors of the bullets according to each summon.
  • Fullmetal Alchemist:
    • In Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, homunculus Envy's true form. It almost makes sense for an Eldritch Abomination to be conspicuously out of sync with reality.
    • The philosopher's stone, as well, is rendered in CGI - it fits for what that thing is and makes it more effective and out of place.
  • Certain scenes in Full Metal Panic!'s anime adaptation use 3D effects. In the Abridged Series, Kurz comments on how cheesy it looks and how he can't wait to switch over to Kyoto Animation.
  • The third Fushigi Yuugi OVA has rather horrific CGI used for the fake Suzaku and Seiryuu dieties; it's made even stranger when the fake Byakko and Genbu deities are traditionally animated.
  • In Future Diary, Deus Ex Machina is always done in CGI. This is likely done intentionally to emphasize how powerful and alien he is.
  • GaoGaiGar uses CG for when the Mirror Coating is applied to the robots, and for the Zonders morphing their bodies. Since CG wasn't used extensively yet at the time, it tends to really look out of place.
  • Used deliberately in GARO: The Animation, to mimic the original Toku. On the other hand, it's much, much more fluid than the usual CG, to the point of making the details on the Makai Knight uniforms look like legitimately real uniforms.
  • Genesis of Aquarion and Koutetsushin Jeeg uses CG for some machines, and occasionally, a character has to interact with a CG environment (Apollo entering a wide shot of Aquarion's cockpit in the first episode, Kenji riding his motorcycle also in the first episode). The characters are then rendered in fairly obvious CG along with whatever they're riding.
  • Ghost in the Shell:
    • Subverted, oddly enough, in the original movie, where all the CG looks perfectly fine, despite how it was one of the earliest uses of mass CG in anime (literally the first time for the studio behind it) and just how experimental and varied it was as a result. As in, they clearly had a lot of fun with.
    • The CG blends in very well in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, notably the robotic Tachikoma. However, the Title Sequence of season 1 is 100% CGI, and looks very different from the rest of the series.
    • On the other hand, the theatrical film Ghost in the Shell Two: Innocence, which is in an Alternate Continuity from the series, uses almost 100% CGI backgrounds. The CGI is quite breathtakingly gorgeous in places, to the extent that it's a shame they had to obscure it with all that crummy cel animation. It's also an interesting, probably unintentional metaphor for some of the elements of the series, the blending of the new and old.
  • Trumping any of the below examples of unconvincing 2D/3D meshing are the helicopters from Golgo 13: The Professional. Of course, those helicopters have a good excuse — they were the first use of CG in the history of animation (even beating out Pixar by a year).
  • Almost anything by Studio GONZO. Really.
    • Gankutsuou takes this as an artistic choice. About the only things that don't look CG are the character's bodies and faces. This helps to humanize them in the context of their gaudy, artificial, futuristic surroundings.
    • Blue Submarine No. 6 was one of the first anime to use CG extensively. It looks less visually jarring than pretty much any other Gonzo series, due to the widespread use of blur filters to simulate DOF and that almost anything that isn't a character is CG.
    • Bayonetta: Bloody Fate is very bad about this. A shot of a CGI piano is seen at the beginning of the film, and several angels, namely Temperantia and Irenic, are in 3D as well. They don't even try to make any of the CGI elements blend in with the 2D animation.
  • In Guardian Fairy Michel, Honeybee and the Black Hammers' base are CGI, but they're cel-shaded so they usually blend in. However, in at least one episode, the inside of the Black Hammers' base is all none-too-subtle CGI.
  • Gundam
    • The Sweetwater colony in Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack was the first time the Gundam franchise used CG, and it stands out.
    • In 1999's ∀ Gundam, it was very conspicuous. That said, it was generally pretty light within the show. The main two examples are a CGI asteroid colony (which looks strange next to all the 2D ships and mobile suits) and the Eye Catch. The Moonlight Butterfly is also computer-animated, but given the nature of the weapon an unsettling out-of-place look isn't unwarranted.
    • The Archangel of Mobile Suit Gundam SEED is usually rendered in 3D, and several other major spaceships from the series and its sequel are 3D too. The only exception to the show's "all mecha are hand-drawn" rule is the BuCues being CG during several action scenes to allow for more movement (just compare the amount of movement during scenes with CG BuCues vs. scenes involving its enhanced and always hand-drawn counterpart the LaGOWE). While cel-shaded so they don't stand out too much, this created an issue for the HD Remaster where the CG sometimes didn't react to the filter used to bump up the resolution of the animation and it is possible to see every pixel that makes up the lines. The PLANTs and certain scenes of Haro in the openings and eyecatches use traditional CG with no cel-shading.
    • Every spaceship in Mobile Suit Gundam 00 is CG, setting a trend for Gundam shows from then on. The ELS from The Movie were also entirely CGI to emphasize how alien they are.
    • Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn was the first non-All-CGI Cartoon Gundam series to use CG frequently for the mecha, with the Unicorn Gundam other mobile suits switching between hand-drawn animation and cel-shaded CG that features smoother movement and greater detail compared to the former. One interesting example is at the end of the Unicorn Gundam's first transformation, where it changes from CGI to hand-drawn in the same shot, and you can see the details on its body change slightly (such as the vents on the face) as the camera pans out.
    • The OVA adaptation of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin has mobile suits be entirely CGI, and said CG is similar to Unicorn's.
    • On top of using CGI for the non-mobile suit mecha, sweeping camera pans and space vehicles, Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury utilizes it in Earth House's Kitschy Local Commercial for GUND-ARM by repurposing the Ariel's rarely-utilized CG model (used only for the aforementioned camera pans) and giving it the Stylistic Suck treatment. Complete with obvious green-screening artifacts.
  • The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya does a pretty good job of blending, but a couple incidents stand out.
    • The gigantic camel cricket in one episode.
    • The reconstruction of the classroom after the Yuki/Asakura battle. Note that this is more-or-less how it's described in the novel.
  • The eponymous Objects and other vehicles in Heavy Object. Oddly, this method is also used for closeups of characters' hands from time to time.
  • Hellsing Ultimate has this issue with many things, from Alucard's various forms, to basic guns and other weaponry.
  • Henkei Shoujo: The Transformation Sequences are animated with 3D models that look drastically different from the rest of the show's visuals.
  • Infinite Stratos manages to avoid this. The 2D and 3D art (latter used for all IS sequences) are quite consistent, with only a few noticeable spots due to the unyielding rigidity of the 3D meshes.
  • While later episodes use cel-shading, the cars in early episodes of Initial D stand out extremely oddly from the background, especially as the frame rate used for the CG is much higher than that of the 2D animation. This gimmick is so well-known, parodies of it often reproduce this exactly, even if the show is otherwise traditionally animated. However, in this case, it's actually somewhat necessary, as the task of drawing realistically animated and detailed race scenes would very likely break the time restraints (not to mention the budget) of a television anime. Doesn't make it any less jarring, though.
  • There are three Minotaurs in one episode of Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? which are quite blatantly CGI. It's easily noticeable since it's a big deal every time a Minotaur shows up beforehand and a normally animated one was on-screen not 10 seconds earlier.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is mostly 2D animated, but has some CGI elements:
    • The openings for the first three parts, as well as the sixth one, are fully CGI.
    • Some of the backgrounds turn into CGI for more complicated panning shots while leaving the characters hand-drawn. Polnareff's first encounter with DIO is a particularly glaring example.
    • Several of the visual effects also look rather CGI-ish, especially in Part 6, Stone Ocean.
  • Due to sharing similar teams with Titan, the trains and the backgrounds they occupy in Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress are rendered with CGI.
  • KamiKatsu: Working for God in a Godless World: Animals that appear are rendered in CGI, which often contrast greatly with the regularly-drawn backgrounds and characters. More often than not, they look like they've stepped out of a Playstation game.
  • For the most part, Kekkaishi is an example of the right way to mix computer graphics and hand-drawn animation. The barriers and Instant Runes are done so well that you could watch the whole series without realizing how they were done. But then you see a car moving and it all goes to hell. Automobile animation is still the kryptonite of CG.
  • The monsters appearing in the film adaptation of King of Thorn are almost always CG-modeled, whilst the main characters are mostly hand-drawn (with some CG added for the action scenes). It's forgivable for the first half hour, but it eventually gets in the way of the drawn animation as the film drags on.
  • Kirby: Right Back at Ya!: Kirby himself is rarely shown any other way, and King Dedede and Escargoon switch between being cel-shaded CG'd and being traditionally animated somewhat frequently. It isn't too noticeable with Kirby, but Dedede and Escargoon almost entirely lose the ability to emote in any way beyond "mouth open/mouth closed", and have blatantly different shading and occasional visible polygons. This sometimes happens with other characters as well, though this gets less frequent as the series goes on. And, of course, various machines and vehicles, as well as various things that are particularly large (the monster transporter, Dedede's tank and car, the Halberd, thousands of marching Waddle Dees, etc.) are almost always CG. The CG is also of a noticeably different frame rate from the rest of the animation at times. According to an interview, this was done to get smoother animation (and more frames of it) without overworking the animators.
    3D is a way to increase the number of frames. If you make a 3D model once, then you are able to make efficient use of that. The work of a 2D animator is awfully difficult. For example, it takes no less than a year to reach the point where you can draw one line properly; it’s that kind of world. But if it’s 3D, because you make a model, you can make movement by just clicking it. Therefore, the animator doesn’t have a hard time with drawing and can instead devote their time to movement [...]
    [...]
    The number of cels per story is about 10,000. Since the average for Japanese TV anime is 3500-4000, this is groundbreaking.
    • Dyna Blade, the giant armor-covered god-bird, is completely CGI in all of her appearances. She is also rendered more realistically than the rest of the CGI, with gradual shading, more muted colors and highlights. Though a bit jarring seeing her with the other CGI and hand-drawn imagery, it does lend her an otherworldly feel.
    • One late episode is about a mother and baby whale. Jarringly, the mother is rendered in CG and the baby isn't.
  • Some of the scenes involving giant or many warships in Last Exile are CG-animated. and while they look pretty good, it's a noticeable change in style.
  • The Lensman anime uses CG for some of the spaceships and the eponymous Lens. This came only a year after the Golgo 13 movie, and was a marked improvement over that attempt.
  • Lost Universe uses CG for some of the scenes involving the spaceships, with fairly good results (though sometimes the frame rate of the CG sequences is very low, giving quite a jarring effect. Other times they're smooth as silk). What's unusual is that the ships are just as often rendered with normal cel-animation, which is... not as cool-looking.
  • The super soak...uh, nameless plastic water cannon in the second episode of Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions!. Kind of a weird case, because the gun barely moves, so it would have been easy to animate without CG; on top of that, an image from a magazine article appears to show a hand-drawn version.
  • Lucky Star has a noticeably low-quality 3D car during a parody of Initial D, both in animation style and dramatic racing action (making this an example of Stylistic Suck).
  • Lupin III:
    • In Return of the Magician, the animators didn't even try to make the CG of Pycal's home or the crystals mesh with the surrounding animation. It could've been a deliberate choice, because the crystals are supposed to come from another world.
    • Used again, in Green vs. Red, for the "Ice Cube" MacGuffin. It stands out a little, but since the rest of the animation in the special is so over the top, not as much as it could have.
    • Seven Days Rhapsody has the Goddess's Teardrop animated in CG; it doesn't even try to blend in and looks ridiclously 3D and shiny compared to the rest of the standard animation.
    • Lupin III: Princess of the Breeze has CG for all of the aircraft.
    • Gravestone of Daisuke Jigen uses CG for crowds and even flags waving in the breeze. The quality of the 2D animation however makes a lot up for that.
    • The Goodbye Partner special utilizes it for closeups of Girl of the Week Alisa Cartright playing piano, making her arms look feakishly long when both mediums are shown together in one shot.
  • Lyrical Nanoha:
  • Lost Logia are usually animated this way, probably to show just how alien they are.
  • Macross has used CG ever since Plus, largely to help flesh out the increasingly complicated transformations of its trademark variable fighters.
    • Macross Plus was, as stated, the first to use CG — the most conspicuous would be the sequences where you see what the YF-21 is inputting to Bowman's brain and the space fold tunnel. Being the first, the CGI is kept minimal, with the mecha themselves still being hand drawn most of the time.
    • Macross 7 uses non-cel shaded CGI in the opening at several points (most noticeable with the zoom-out at the beginning). The show itself has none, and renders everything (including mecha, like Plus before it) through more traditional methods.
    • Macross Zero was the first to use CGI for mecha outright, leading to some very clashing animation.
    • Macross Frontier uses cel-shaded CG for the mecha, spacecraft, and their requisite battle sequences. If they hand-drew the mechas, the transformation sequence of a single episode would probably drain the budget for the whole season...
    • Macross Delta's CGI is a mix between Zero's and Frontier's styles.
  • Makai Senki Disgaea usually only uses CG for magic effects (and the spaceship of Captain Gordon, Defender of Earth!), but the Prinny stadium in episode 8 is quite disturbing. And somehow hypnotic.
  • MÄR: CG effect is used to present several powerful Arms and attacks.
  • March Comes in Like a Lion has this on occasion for certain objects, like a rotating fan in one early episode. Due to the down-to-earth nature of the series and the prominence of traditional Japanese architecture, Studio Shaft's usage of it sticks out more than it normally would.
  • Metropolis (2001) uses CG effects for the ziggurat at any time where it isn't being shown head-on.
  • Episode 9 of Monster Musume has Darling and Miia looking at CG kissing fish at the aquarium.
  • An episode of Naruto has some rather conspicuous CG mountains in the Valley of Clouds and Lightning. This probably has something to do with the fact that a large part of the area is destroyed during the events of the the battle.
    • Hinata's hair during her fight with Pain.
    • Long before that, one technique which Orochimaru uses that makes hundreds of snakes with swords in their mouths is in very conspicuous CG.
    • The Reveal of Tobi's army of one hundred thousand Zetsu is done in CG, as is the scene portraying the fully-grown Shinju.
  • In the Nodame Cantabile anime, CGI is used for most close-ups of instruments being played.
  • Noein uses extensive CG for vehicles, Haruka's house, the ouroboros and the scary machine-monsters sent by Shangri-La.
  • Ōban Star-Racers is sort of an aversion to this. Racing scenes are rendered in cartoon-style 3D, while all other scenes are drawn in a fairly traditional 2D anime style. However, the 3D and 2D animations are made so close in appearance and often mixed in the same scenes so well that it often takes watching an episode twice to spot the difference in many instances.
  • Sailing shots of the Merry/Sunny in One Piece are occasionally in CG after the Skypiea arc, especially noticeable in the openings.
  • The film One Stormy Night uses CGI for the rocky territory in the gorges. It stands out a bit, since the rest of the movie is otherwise animated in a very soft, watercolor-esque storybook style.
  • In The Pet Girl of Sakurasou, the Nyapollon game the Sakura Hall dorm residents develop for the school festival has a lot of this. However, it's justified In-Universe, because they're only high school students, and they're also working on a very rushed time table.
  • Candidate for Goddess uses entirely 3D mecha.
  • Pokémon: The Series:
    • All the movies have made use of CG, with varying amounts of success. Poké Balls began to be animated using CG during the Johto era, and other CG effects began to be used more often in the main series from the start of the Battle Frontier saga.
    • There are times in which certain Pokémon are shown in CGI. In the 11th movie, there is a Mamoswine stampede that makes the Mamoswine look like they are made out of clay. In an early Pokémon the Series: Diamond and Pearl episode, Combee appear in this style, looking really out of place (nevermind that Combee are cartoony insect-like Pokémon). In Pokémon the Series: Black & White, Klink and its evolutions are always in CG, like the Unown swarm in the 3rd movie. Plenty of attacks in the Diamond and Pearl series of the anime also have a tendency to clash with the animation, although Pikachu's entire tail turning into a CG object when using Iron Tail in the Best Wishes seasons is probably more noticeable.
    • In a late Pokémon the Series: Black & White episode, Jessie and James partecipate to a Pokémon Sumo competition with Meowth wearing a Golem costume, which is blatantly cel-shaded CG as shown by the way the head wobbles.
    • The titular Pokémon in Spell of the Unown are animated this way, which helps to accentuate their eerie, otherworldly nature.
  • The Pop Team Epic anime adaptation uses CG for many segments. The Japon Mignon ones and the one where Popuko feeds the birds are the most obvious ones, but are not the only ones. However, this often just adds to the Mind Screw nature of the series.
  • Pretty Cure:
  • Princess Principal integrates its CG well in close-up effect shots involving only one or two characters, but the more complex the staging, the easier it is to spot the CG. You can't miss it in episode 2 when Princess re-enters the ballroom (about 15 minutes in).
  • Puella Magi Madoka Magica: The train tracks at the beginning of episode 9 are rather obviously a flat CG surface.
  • The manga Pugyuru plays this for laughs when a primitive wireframe Cheko-chan shows up. Mizore explains to the alarmed main character that she just has a low polygon count today.
  • Very prominent in Puni Puni☆Poemi; the Death Star-ripoff spaceship comes to mind, but given that they mix live-action along with this and traditional animation, this is probably intentional.
  • Both seasons of Rage of Bahamut: Genesis use extensive CG for larger monsters such as the titular dragon Bahamut, but also soldiers in armour and objects. Although anime sometimes uses a little CGI for crowds of people in the background, the CGI here is often displayed in full view, sometimes with CGI soldiers standing next to those animated in 2D.
  • Rail Wars! uses this for a few train and building shots, at least in the first episode.
  • Rainbow Magic: Return to Rainspell Island. This British produced Anime film uses CGI for the Snowmen and various shots of the Fairies from a distance.
  • Rebuild of Evangelion utilizes CG for a few of the angels, with Ramiel and Sahaqiel being the most obvious examples. This trope was probably intended, though; the CG just makes them look all the more alien compared to the rest of the world.
  • Re:CREATORS has some examples that make sense and some that don't. The giant mechas suddenly appearing in the real world shouldn't exist in reality, and thus it makes sense that they stand out so much from their surroundings. However the effect is ruined when perfectly normal cars and military vehicles are rendered in CG too.
  • In Requiem from the Darkness, The leaves of the willow tree in episode 2 look obviously computer generated.
  • Revolutionary Girl Utena has the (now) terrible cel-shaded CG for the lengthy stair sequence seen in almost every episode. Also the floating castle projection.
  • Sailor Moon:
    • Each of the movies includes an exterior shot of the Big Bad's base rendered in CG. Even with a grainy filter added to make it blend in, it's still very noticeable.
    • The CGI Idiosyncratic Wipes that DiC added into their dub. It looks terrible next to the first season's (not all that great) traditional cel animation.
  • In Sailor Moon Crystal, though Cel Shaded, the 3D animation used for team shots during the opening and for the heroine's Transformation Sequence in the first two seasons stands out sharply from the traditional animation, which has a deliberately manga-oriented, Noodle People aesthetic.
  • In the first Saiyuki anime there's quite a bit. The most baffling one would be the orange paper plane.
  • Sgt. Frog: Keroro's ceiling fan. Pretty much any episode heavily featuring Keroro's childhood will have said scenes completely in CGI, especially in later seasons. This also includes movie shorts.
  • The teacups in the Love Theme Park in episode 18 of SHUFFLE! stand out quite notably.
  • The heart's eggs, X eggs, and mystery eggs from Shugo Chara!.
  • The 2008 film The Sky Crawlers features photorealistic-looking CGI airplanes and other items, to the point where it is absolutely distracting and makes you wonder why these bits weren't traditionally animated.
  • Slayers: The Next and Try seasons have small bits of CGI incorporated into their openings (the titles for both, an explosion for Next, and a map of the world in Try), but the seasons themselves are all traditionally animated. However, in Revolution and Evolution-R, well-made but horribly noticeable CG is done for some of the spells, water, hallways, and a slew of out-of-place 3D objects for the opening songs.
    • Before Revolution and Evolution-R was Slayers Premium. Unlike the former, Premium was made when CGI in general, let alone combined with 2D artwork, was still stodgy, yet it's thrown in for a third of the film. The octopi's palace sticks out, as do the octopi's jars, the ocean, and the monster's signature spell.
  • Sol Bianca: The Legacy is almost nothing but—to the point of panning over CG-animated backgrounds with the pan at a noticeably lower framerate.
  • In the 2008 adaptation of the anime Someday's Dreamers ~Summer Skies~, the backgrounds are so realistic that they might as well be photographs. Unfortunately, they contrast sharply with the much less detailed character designs, accentuating the lower quality of the moving animation.
  • In Sonic X, most of the explosions and Sonic's spin dash form are rendered in not-so-subtle CGI.
  • Played with in SSSS.GRIDMAN, as Gridman and the Kaiju are computer generated in-universe. The contrast is used for deliberate effect when the final battle, taking place between a pair of "real" characters, switches to fully 2D animation.
  • Stellvia of the Universe uses CG for exterior shots of the spacecraft. Usually, these shots don't have any 2D elements at all.
  • Studio Ghibli films produced since 1994 have CGI effects in some scenes. While their films are known for their highly detailed backgrounds and fluid animation, they also contain some clear CGI sequences that are many times smoother and more detailed than the 2D backgrounds in the rest of the films. The CGI is often not even cel-shaded. It's usually used for "side-scrolling" scenes, but (thankfully) never for characters. Tropes Are Tools as the CGI effects are often used to great effect in a way that cannot be done as well with traditional hand-drawn animation. Great care is also usually put to making sure the CGI is not that obvious, and that it does not look out-of-place with the rest of the 2D film. And most of the time, Ghibli still paints the textures for the 3D backgrounds by hand, similar to Walt Disney Animation Studios' Deep Canvas technology.
    • Averted in Ponyo. This movie was done with traditional cel animation. In fact, Studio Ghibli shut down their computer animation division before Ponyo was released.
  • Super Robot Wars: Original Generation: Divine Wars uses CG for all of the mecha, and some of the ships. The Inspector likewise uses CG for some of the ships.
  • It shows up in the second episode of Tears to Tiara - the horde of revived skeletons are all CG.
  • In Tegami Bachi: Letter Bee, the Gaichuu — large, mechanical insects — are obviously CG. Even with the Steampunk/Cyberpunk feel of the series, it can still be a bit hard to accept.
  • Avoided successfully with Tekkonkinkreet's 3D CGI through Studio 4°C's fusion of 2D and 3D elements. 3D-rendered environmental work incorporated hand-painted textures consistent with static backgrounds, while 3D-modelled vehicles and other mechanical contraptions are appropriately rendered in cartoon shading (when moving) or traced (when static) to match the stylistically simplistic and irregularly-lined character design. This animation formula would later resurface in Mutafukaz, an Ankama—Studio 4°C co-production.
  • The Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki OVA (the third OVA season, basically) has some of this. The scene where Ryo-Ohki is fighting the Kuramitsu spaceship, for example, looks like a cutscene from an early CD-based videogame.
  • The Anti-Spirals' Mugann mechs from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann are the only thing in the series always depicted in CG, which deliberately adds to just how alien they are.
  • Texhnolyze makes use of CG effects when showing Ichise's Texhnolyze arm and leg before they're attached.
  • It happens quite a bit in Tiger & Bunny (most of the suits are CG after all), but these bananas are an especially bad example.
  • Toward the Terra: Small spacecraft in atmospheric flight are rendered in very obvious and jarring CGI.
  • Cel-shaded versions of the robots are used in Transformers: Energon and Transformers: Cybertron, except in places in Energon where fine movements and great detail were required, which is when they went with normal animation. Human characters are animated normally, effectively "hiding" the CG artifacts as affectations of mechanical lifeforms, but this results in the robot characters' chronic inability to facially emote.
    • Cybertron foregoes the cel-shading entirely, making it all the more obvious. Though the animation (especially facially) itself is vastly improved by comparison.
    • Before that, Transformers: Robots in Disguise also utilized CG animation for several shots of the robots during the Japanese opening. While less jarring over there thanks to being very little in the way of interaction between the two mediums, the toy-like accuracy put on the 3D models makes the battle between Optimus and Megatron look very stiff compared to the rest of the sequence. The dub also adds some overlays that clearly don't fit with the animation it's attached to.
  • Vandread actually has all scenes of mecha as 100% CG and all scenes with humans cel-shaded. This means that the jarring disconnect of 3D CG and 2D characters interacting is very successfully avoided.
  • Wangan Midnight blends 2D animation with 3D CG for the cars, but the CG quality is on par with Initial D: Fourth Stage, with both shows being produced by the same studio.
  • The World God Only Knows intentionally uses this trope at several points, usually to designate some obviously magical effect (like Instant Runes or the capture of Loose Souls). It's sometimes also used to show when Keima plays a game that isn't as sophisticated (or, in one case during the first season, just plain buggy).
Whisper: This is only happening because we had the villain trapped, so she had to turn into a CGI monster to make the movie more exciting!
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!:
    • One episode has the realistic guns on one of Bandit Keith's monsters replaced with futuristic lasers for the English dub. However, the lasers are done in CGI, which jar dramatically with the monster's hand-drawn body.
    • The backs and fronts of the detailed playing cards are all CGI.
    • The dice used in Dungeon Dice Monsters, too, in the dub.
    • When the Nesbitt of the Big Five destroys one of Tristan's monsters, his Machine King's arm has a ridiculous amount of CG.
    • Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions uses it quite well, given its budget, but invokes this and Uncanny Valley for Aigami's unusual Cubic monsters.
    • Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds:
      • The stark contrast in between the Conspicuous CG Riding Duel segments and the rest of the series.
      • The monsters tend to somehow be more two-dimensional in the CGI than in the handmade drawings.
      • The fifth opening makes it even ridiculous when, at the beginning, we see the six dragons of the main characters: Stardust Dragon, Red Demon's Dragon, Black Feather Dragon and Black Rose Dragon are CGI, but Ancient Fairy Dragon and Power Tool Dragon are animated in 2D.
    • Season 0 tends to utilize this more frequently.
    • The CGI swimsuits put on Alexis/Asuka and her friends in the 4Kids version of Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, to give the impression they're not in a onsen but in a pool. A pool with steam all around, apparently...
    • The crappy CGI shirt that was used to cover Yami's collarbone and shoulders.
    • Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL:
      • A few giant vehicles and objects are rendered with CG, but it's mostly used for animating big, powerful duel monsters, which are often hand-drawn when still, or when 2D elements (such as the humanoid characters) are in the frame. But considering Xyz monsters are supposed to be extra-dimensional, and many of them look fairly creepy or bizarre already (such as Heraldry Crest and the Xyz Gimmick Puppets), the somewhat jarring look of their extravagant motion sometimes works.
    • Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V
      • Yuya and his Odd-Eyes Pendulum Dragon are done in CG when they go in for a finishing move. The first few times are quite jarring because of how Off-Model Yuya is, but later episodes fix this somewhat. Notably, Yuya and Odd-Eyes are the only ones to be CG; Shun is not depicted in CG when he rides his Raidraptor monsters. The four Dimension Dragons and their evolutions (including Supreme King Z-ARC), Jack's Scarlight Red Dragon Archfiend, and Reiji's Armageddon monsters are the only other examples of this trope.
    • Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS:
      • The code Talkers, Firewall Dragon, and many of Varis's powerful dragonsnote , are all in CGI.
  • Happens in the various Zoids anime series as well, with varying degrees of success. Oddly, the least successful and most jarring integration occurred in the last series, Zoids: Genesis. Generally forgivable as the CG Zoids and animated humans are rarely in the same non-cockpit shot. Given the size difference between them, the Zoids are usually in the background when humans are at the fore, or vice versa. And the Zoids looked cool.
  • Zombie Land Saga: CGI models are sometimes used during the girls' idol dances. They become cleaner and resemble the 2D art much more as time goes on.

    Asian Animation 
  • The characters' transformation and attack sequences in Flower Angel are mostly animated in 3D with the exception of occasional 2D scenes starting in Season 3, while the rest of the show is still animated in 2D.
  • Certain objects and scenes in the otherwise 2D-animated Happy Heroes are animated in 3D CGI, such as when the army of ships from planet Gray make an attack on planet Xing Xing in Season 2 episode 2.
  • One episode of Our Friend Xiong Xiao Mi is about Xiao Mi and Zhi Peng discovering a tadpole in a puddle. Said tadpole is pretty obviously animated in CGI.

    Comics & Manga 
  • Ayakashi Triangle: Matsuri's pinwheel has a fairly complicated design drawn using a 3D model. For informal sketches, the artist simplifies it to be completely flat. The anime uses CG when the pinwheel spins, but otherwise draws it as flat, resembling a manji.
  • 2000 AD's Durham Red was produced using a combination of CG and painted artwork, but to poor effect in many episodes, where the murky color choices means the CG looks almost unidentifiable and the characters are jarringly painted on.
  • All over the place in Marvel Max's US War Machine. It's especially jarring considering how raw and sketchy the rest of the art looks.
  • A couple of examples from manga: Ken Akamatsu is extremely fond of using computer-rendered backgrounds for his series, and hand-drawing individual characters. This results in a white area just beyond the characters in question in every scene with a CG background, so you can always tell what was rendered and what was hand-drawn. This can be seen in both Love Hina and Negima! Magister Negi Magi.
  • The full-color re-edition of the manga Space Adventure Cobra makes heavy use of CG imagery for backgrounds, vehicles and monsters. Those updated elements are the work of the original author, Buichi Terasawa, and are certainly gorgeous — going easily into Scenery Porn. But they also stand out rather sharply with the original 2D-art.
  • Used deliberately during Superman's "Y2K" arc, for Braniac 13. In the first issue, some of the transformed buildings were also 3D models, though this was dropped in later issues. Each issue was drawn by a different art team, making B13's unchanging appearance even creepier.
  • Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface uses CG for several things, such as vehicles, robots, furniture, backgrounds, and the visual representation of cyberspace. GITS 1.5: Human-Error Processor uses CG to a much lesser extent, mainly for the cityscape backgrounds in color pages.
  • The "War That Time Forgot" story in the New 52's G.I. Combat uses CG to consistently draw firearms, and it's glaringly obvious.
  • CG is used on several Pk2 (the sequel to Paperinik New Adventures) covers, and to show the melted cars and glass caused by sonic weapons. It's very noticeable.
  • The Donald Duck story "Donald Duck and the Saurusmania" features an extended Dream Sequence of Donald Duck interacting with crude CG dinosaurs.
  • Zeta Gundam: Define consists of hand-drawn characters cut-and-pasted into an entirely computer-rendered environment.

    Fan Works 

    Films — Animation 
  • 3D CGI makes the ship chase in Asterix in America, an otherwise cel-animated film, look like part of a video game. The opening sequence is also done in CGI.
  • Batman & Mr. Freeze: SubZero occasionally uses CGI for the Batplane and cars on the freeway during a chase scene.
  • Batman: Mask of the Phantasm has fully CGI opening credits before cutting to the hand-drawn backdrops the series was better known for.
  • Every vehicle and some of the backgrounds in Batman: Under the Red Hood are rendered in CG.
  • An oddity considering that it's completely CGI, but the opening scene of BIONICLE: The Legend Reborn relies heavily on a blend of simplistic 3D models and 2D graphics, with the island Mata Nui and the surrounding sea being digital paintings (a genuine island model is briefly used when the island crumbles), while the actual Mata Nui standing in the very flat-looking sea is all 3D.
  • The Breadwinner is mostly animated in 2D, but the transport are animated in cel-shaded 3D.
  • Chicken Run uses CG for rain and for a giant explosion. The rain looks pretty good, but the explosion is noticeably a computer effect.
  • The cars, other vehicles, balloons and some jungle and building shots in Curious George (2006) look noticeable compared to the 2D animation of the rest of the movie.
  • Disney's forays into mixing CG and traditional animation:
    • The short film "Destino", first started in the 1950s, is almost entirely CG, despite being a 2D animated film. Specifically, only the characters are 2D cels, while all the backgrounds are CG. And it's not seamless, cel-shaded CG either. It's realistic CG with soft lighting. The CG is noticeable next to the 12 seconds of original 50s animation, which was done entirely by hand.
    • In a way, Fantasia is likely the Ur-Example. The snowflakes at the very end of the "Nutcracker" segment were filmed in live-action with the animated sprites composited on top of them, evoking the same kind of contrast, thus providing a case of 2D Visuals, Live-Action Effects.
    • The Black Cauldron is not only the first animated Disney movie to get a PG rating, but also the first to use CGI props.
    • Two more early examples from Disney include the interior of Big Ben in The Great Mouse Detective and all the moving vehicles, subway tunnel and the Brooklyn Bridge in Oliver & Company.
    • The Little Mermaid has a one-minute scene where Ariel runs down the stairs that is CG.
    • Noticeable in The Rescuers Down Under, where New York City is rendered entirely in CGI. Other parts of the film where CGI is used include the main villain's tractor and a scene where a large CG globe is used.
    • The ballroom scene in Beauty and the Beast is rendered in 3D while the 2D-animated Belle and Beast dance to the eponymous song.
    • Aladdin is the first Disney film to have characters done in CG, namely the living entrance to the Cave of Wonders and the Magic Carpet. The latter started out as hand-drawn animation, which was used as a guide for a CG model, over which an elaborate carpet pattern was applied; hand drawing the pattern would have been prohibitively time consuming and expensive. Aladdin: The Series uses a simplified design for the carpet.
    • Pocahontas has Grandmother Willow, whose face is animated with CG.
    • In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, they use CGI to render large crowds.
    • Hercules: in earlier works, the Hydra had been drawn with three, six, or nine heads; with good CGI Disney managed 21 heads, but attempted to hide it with cel-shading. In contrast, the flames on Hades' head are CGI, but this is a style choice and no effort is made to hide it.
    • The Hun attack from Mulan. It's also partially based on the wildebeest stampede from The Lion King (1994).
    • Many of the moving objects designed to look like background elements in Tarzan are clearly 3D.
    • The CGI is noticeable with the Ulysses submarine, the Leviathan, and the Drill Tank from Atlantis: The Lost Empire.
    • Perfecting a deliberate blend between the two mediums was the whole point of Treasure Planet, although the Space Whales notably stand out. All technology is CGI while the characters are traditionally animated. Long John Silver's cybernetic implants and B.E.N. were CG with Cel Shading to match the hand-drawn characters; the latter was animated so convincingly many have assumed he was hand drawn.
    • The Jungle Book 2 shows examples of this with the puppets in the opening sequence, the doors in the village, a cart, a log, some camera movements and the tiger stone head above the fire in some old ruins.
    • Ralph Breaks the Internet reverses this by having background appearances of Humphrey the Bear and Ranger Woodlow in the "Oh My Disney" sequence in 2D animation while everything else is CGI like the rest of the film.
  • Dragon Hill makes quite some use of CGI; sometimes it looks decent mixed with the traditional animation, and sometimes it is out of place. The sequel even more so, considering how it was made on a low budget.
  • Most of the Dragonlance animated movie is done in traditional 2D animation; however, the dragons and several other monsters are rendered in 3D CG. The interaction between the two is particularly jarring.
  • Some of DreamWorks Animation's traditionally animated films noticeably used thisnote , largely because they don't just stick to backgrounds:
    • Eris's monster minions in Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas look out of place in the otherwise 2D-animated movie. Although given that they're all Animalistic Abominations...
    • The Road to El Dorado also has 3D-animated elements, the most obvious being the "To Xibalba" sequence (all gold in the movie is CG) and the barrels being lifted onto the ship. While a special program was written to make all gold look golden and not just yellow, making it a style choice, the barrels aren't cel-shaded.
    • While The Prince of Egypt mostly averts this, it's noticeable with the ship and baby Moses' basket towards the beginning of the movie. Also seen with the shrine to the Pharaoh, the chariots and the backgrounds as the move, and the plague of frogs.
  • Faeries (1999) uses mostly traditional animation, but has a few sequences (flying over Faerieland, the Shapeshifter's final form) that are CGI.
  • The Fearless Four starts as a typical traditionally animated movie for its time, but as the movie goes on it becomes a CGI movie with traditionally animated characters.
  • Heavy Metal 2000: The Chamber of Immortality at the end of the movie is clearly not rendered with the same 2D animation used in the rest of the film, nor is Odin when he unmasks himself and walks into the Chamber.
  • In The Iron Giant, the animators went out of their way to program slight line irregularities into the rendering of the eponymous character with fantastic-looking results.
  • Jetsons: The Movie has it in any shot of the Orbiting-Ore Asteroid, the buildings, or the cars.
  • While the majority of Klaus is hand-drawn on tablet with computer-aided lighting and texturing, certain objects and characters like Jesper's wagon and some of the reindeer are 3D models, lit the same way as the 2D characters to blend in seamlessly.
  • The Land Before Time sequels starting with film VII. The sixth entry is not exempt either, but in that case, there is no interaction between the CG and hand-drawn characters.
  • Done consciously on Osmosis Jones. Drix is a cel-shaded CGI character in a traditionally-animated film, to convey the fact that he's not an organic cell like the other characters, but a manufactured medicine. The animators directly refer to him as the world's equivalent of RoboCop. Other 3D elements in the film include Frank's Subconscious as well as the inside of his mouth, the pill that Drix arrives in, all close up shots of Shane's eyelashes, eyeball, eyelids, and surrounding areas, and other odds and ends like the cars the cells drive.
  • The Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf Film Series mixes CG into the traditional animation. For example, the panda family in The Mythical Ark: Adventures in Love & Happiness and the dragons in Mission Incredible Adventures On The Dragons Trail are animated in CGI.
  • Quest for Camelot has 2D animation for most of the movie... except for the giant troll, which is rendered in 3D reminiscent of ReBoot. Some scenes are also rendered in CGI, such as the Round Table room, and the Stonehenge-ish circle with the stone where Excalibur came from.
  • In The Return of Hanuman, the volcano monster is the only thing made with CGI.
  • Played for Laughs in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut with fire-effects early in the film. When Terrence lights himself on fire by igniting a fart at the end of Asses of Fire, the flames are animated using the orange and red paper cut-outs, but when Kenny tries this, his flames are actual fire CG'd into the cartoon. The joke of course is that everything Terrence and Phillip related is always Stylistic Suck compared to the actual show. The "Hell Isn't Good" musical sequence sees Kenny's decent to there and the demons that grab at him rendered in a more traditional 3D style compared to Kenny's flat cutout appearance.
  • Starchaser: The Legend of Orin, a rip-off of Star Wars from the mid-1980s, is one of the first animated films to incorporate CG and traditional animation.
  • The Thief and the Cobbler subverts it. There are elaborately shaded roses, scenes moving in 3D and a lot details in the climax which all look like they required computer animation - but were all entirely drawn by hand!
  • Titan A.E. mostly uses 3D for ships and environments and 2D for characters, playing to the strengths of both mediums without (for the most part) trying to disguise either as the other. In the case of the Drej, this was likely deliberate to accentuate their alienness.
  • Top Cat: The Movie has the characters (in Flash animation) on CGI scenery, as well as the scene at the beginning where T.C. clings to the bottom of a helicopter taking off.
  • In Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, CG is used when the rabbits are floating about in the Bun-Vac (also a wholly CG element). It stands out more, as it is CG shown against stop-motion clay animation. The bunnies themselves are deliberately animated to look like claymation, but they float smoothly around in the air tunnel and that gives away the fact that they're CG.
  • While the first two Werner movies are animated in a cartoonish way, Volles Rooäää!!! uses CGI during the opening. Unlike, for example, the almost squishy bikes in the Beinhart! opening, Werner's Satte Literschüssel stands out during the CGI scenes.

    Music Videos 
  • The music video for YOASOBI's "Halzion" has a scene where the girl is a featureless 3D model, which fits with the song's theme of computers.

    Pinball 
  • Heist!: The cutscene at the start of Willie Burnett's recruitment mode depicts Mr. Big's car in cel-shaded CGI, whereas everything else is shown in limited 2D animation.

    Video Games 
  • Dandara's True Final Boss, Tormenta is a three-dimensional Eldritch Abomination that stands out like a sore thumb compared to the rest of the game, as it's a 2D Metroidvania.
  • 1997 point-and-click adventure game Jack Orlando has everything hand-drawn except for few CGI cars. When they are parked, they blend in pretty well, but they often stick out in motion.
  • Dragon Quest:
    • Dragon Quest VII normally looks like a slightly upgraded Dragon Quest VI with the enemies animating when taking an action. However; many of the backgrounds look out of place, and several of the spells resemble this, Ultra Hit especially.
    • Dragon Quest IX: in the overworld, most NPCs are 2D sprites, while plot-relevant characters are 3D models. Made more obvious with Erinn, Patty and Sellma, who actually switch back and forth between the two graphic styles if they're relevant to the plot or just NPCs you talk to for multiplayer stuff.
  • The anime sequences of the Sega Saturn and PlayStation remakes of Lunar: The Silver Star and Lunar: Eternal Blue have this. The standouts are the boat from the famous "Wind's Nocturne" song sequence (which is jarring because it's hand drawn in the shots before the song starts) in Silver Star Story, and the hall leading to Lucia's sleeping chamber on the Blue Star in Eternal Blue.
  • Grim Fandango uses 3D models for the characters, and 2D backgrounds designed to look 3D. It might not have been quite obvious back then, but it's clearly obvious in today's age.
  • Full Throttle whenever Ben mounts on his bike, he has a very jarring transition from a 2D hand-drawn animated sprite to a 3D model. The effect noticeably reduced on the Full Throttle Remastered release however.
  • Alone in the Dark (1992) and its sequels manage to mostly avert this trope by using pre-rendered 3D scenes as backgrounds combined with real-time polygonal foreground characters and an intelligent masking system that makes sure they integrate with the environment more or less seamlessly. The often creative use of camera angles helps the illusion.
  • Dr. Neurosis' room in Brain Dead 13. Everything, except him, Lance and Fritz is in CG.
  • Mostly averted in Ōkami, a game designed to look like Japanese paintings. In both movement and still imagery, the game looks like an actual painting, but pixelation in some of the textures can be seen if one looks closer.
  • Halo inverts this in the Terminals of Halo 4 and Halo: Anniversary. Objects that have a model in the game have a model in those cutscenes, but everything else is 2-D Flash animated. It's really noticeable, thus, that Jul 'Mdama is free to pace around the room while his bridge crew repetitively tilts up and down.
  • Humongous Entertainment rarely used CG in their games, but when they did, it's really noticeable.
    • Putt-Putt Enters the Race uses a CG racetrack.
    • SPY Fox in Hold the Mustard uses CG for the main vehicle used in the game. In still images it blends in pretty well, since it's cel-shaded. In motion, though, it moves so smoothly without changing appearance that it's pretty blatant it's just a 3D model.
    • Backyard Sports used CG model characters beginning with Backyard Baseball 2001 during the aerial views. Unfortunately, they forgot to make the crowds CG too, not to mention the kids become hand-drawn again in the closeups, such as with batting or doing penalty kicks.
  • Played with in Stay Tooned!. The city and apartment building in the opening is entirely CGI, but when Toons break out of your television, the building gets completely "tooned" into hand-drawn graphics, even changing a live-action resident in the hallway. Though some CGI items show up for laughs here and there.
  • Averted to the highest degree in Guilty Gear Xrd. Despite having 3D models instead of 2D sprites, Arc System Works went to great lengths to make them look like traditional 2D sprite work, to the point of using limited frames of animation without any noticeable tweening. Of course, the effect is so good that the game just about plays the trope straight with the backgrounds, which can look somewhat conspicuously 3D compared to the characters.
  • Shadowrun Returns: Characters and effects are rendered in 3D animation "on-the-fly" as opposed to using pre-rendered sprites like Fallout. The backgrounds are standard 2D artwork. The advantage here is there is no need to store animation frames for all the possible weapon/armour/implant combos in all the required actions and poses. It also allows implants to be represented easily by re-texturing parts of the character.
  • In The Adventures of Lomax, although the game is almost entirely in 2D, there are a few elements that are, for some reason, made in 3D, and due to their low level of detail it's rather noticeable. The most egregious examples are obstacles that attempt to use 3D perspective, usually only creating confusion about whether they're currently in a position where they can hit you or not.
  • Shows up rather painfully in the FMV intros of both Persona 2 games. The only hand-animated parts of the FMVs are the characters, which wouldn't be so bad, but a horribly-rendered Apollo (Tatsuya's ultimate Persona) appears at the end of both. In Eternal Punishment's opening, the rest of the cast's Personas appear, and they're all traditionally animated, along with the creepy looking 3D Apollo. The intro videos for their remakes on the PSP avert this entirely.
    • Tartarus in the FMVs of Persona 3 is CG'd, although it actually looks less conspicuous than it does in the movie adaptation that came out a few years later. This can be blamed that the FMV cutscenes for the game are very Off-Model and rather poor, so more focus is drawn to that.
  • King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride has a prerendered dragon made of untextured polygons, a standout in the mostly cel-animated cast. The Spinventory is also prerendered 3D, of course.
  • Space Quest VI: Roger Wilco in the Spinal Frontier has cutscenes made almost entirely of CGI graphics, while the gameplay screens are primarily cel-shaded.
  • A lot of Sakura Wars media, including many of the games and OVAs as well as Sakura Wars: The Movie, have CG mecha and some CG backgrounds.
  • Eternal Darkness has a couple moments where, instead of fully rendering out a scene, the game will instead use a texture map to depict something that won't be seen past a certain cutscene. The biggest example is right in the introduction, when Alex is brought to identify the corpse of her grandfather Edward; both the view of his corpse and the close-up of his family ring are extremely obvious texture maps.
  • Bik uses retro 8-bit animation for much of the game, but space cutscenes are rendered in 3D.
  • The Android port of Flight changed some things like the paper plane and the cranes into 3D models, but the backgrounds and almost everything else is still 2D.
  • The Taiwanese video game Richman 8 has their characters in 2D (which is called "paper doll" by players) in 3D backgrounds.

    Web Animation 
  • The entirety of BIGTOP BURGER is animated in Blender, which allows for both 2D and 3D animation. The entire show's 2D and 3D visuals are integrated pretty well than most examples — barring cases where the 3D effects are Played for Laughs, such as when Penny exhales letters that turn into a tiny, floating three-dimensional Steve. Or Steve's "juul" being a default Blender cylinder.
  • CliffSide: The art is mostly 2D, but some elements of the animation, such as the guns and some of the background props, are rendered in 3D CGI.
  • Gobblety Tobblety: Most of the art is 2D, but the chair that Patty kicks out the window is animated in 3D CGI.
  • Isabelle Ruins Everything: In the crowd shot of the Mayor walking through the barricade to Town Hall, the villagers are 3D models.
  • in Lackadaisy, the Lackadaisy Speakeasy's doors in the Bookends, its stage in the opening, and the cars and guns used by the Lackadaisy and Marigold gang members are CGI features in an otherwise consciously Retraux hand-drawn universe.
  • The later seasons (8 and up) of Red vs. Blue occasionally fall victim to this trope. Animation is used for scenes that aren't possible with the limitations of the Halo game engine. While it typically blends very smoothly, with the animation closely matching Halo 3's style, there are a few points where it's just... off. Obviously any time something is done on-screen that can't be done in-game, the CG is noticeable, but a few scenes are even more noticeable. One particularly noticeable one is the very first CG scene, when Wash is run over by the Warthog. Another is the climatic battle at the end of season 10, where due to the enormous number of Texbots in the background, the shots simply look wrong in comparison to the machinima segments.

    Such problems were resolved (more or less) in seasons 9 and 10 by having the prequel segments be entirely CG, removing the need to match game lighting and models. And some turned out pretty fantastic, too, like the space battle and the crashing ship in season 10—a lot of people have compared them to real videogame cutscenes!
  • Stupid Kids: The series does this a lot whenever the characters drive vehicles.
  • Super Mario Bros. Z has this trope in Episode 8 with Bowser's Omega Doomship. But it's Justified; Alvin-Earthworm said that if he used a fully-rendered Doomship, the file size would've gone too high, even after Tom Fulp raised the file-size limit for all users on the site JUST to accomodate him!
  • The CGI Palz! episodes of Two More Eggs parodies this concept, making it look like an old cartoon from the early 90's using outdated CGI.

    Webcomics 
  • Backgrounds in El Goonish Shive are rendered in Google Sketchup for consistency's sake. Dan has used the software to render other things in-comic too, such as the weird abomination Skreevos in the Magickal Gatherings card game.
  • The Arkentools in Erfworld are rendered images superimposed on the drawn art. In this case, it's a deliberate effect intended to make them stand out by looking a bit "otherworldly". In a similar vein, the use of digital brushes is very conspicuous in the scenes with masses of bats.
  • In It's Walky!, this is done deliberately, to highlight how alien the CG-rendered Martian technology is compared to the hand-drawn rest of the world.
  • The Martian technology of A Miracle of Science manages to convey this impression, despite everything being laboriously hand-drawn. Again, it's to convey a sense of otherworldliness. This was possibly inspired by the similar use of CG to identify "Martian Technology" towards the end of It's Walky.
  • Platypus Comix sometimes utilizes CG backgrounds.
  • Rusty and Co. has an elder god rendered in CG at the end of level 6, once again to accentuate to fact it's an Eldritch Abomination.
  • Wapsi Square: When the kids discover access to the roof at Gryphon School, the roof backgrounds and setting versus the hand-drawn characters, especially when rendered in colour..

    Western Animation 
  • The British series Albie is animated mostly in 2D, but uses cel-shaded 3D animation for the animals that the titular boy encounters in an ambiguously fantastical way.
  • The Dreamworks animated mini-series Invasion: America did this often, including all the space shots, all the shots featuring flying ships or aircraft, all the scenes in the underground base, all the scenes on the surface of the moon and the meteor launcher and meteor attacks.
  • Big City Greens began using this since mid-Season 3, starting with the camera rotating to reveal the country house for sale in "Dirt Jar". 3D was also used for the tractor in "Farmer Remy" and several of the Kludge's driving and turning animations in "Long Goodbye".
  • Used extensively (and expensively) in Futurama, especially for spaceships.
    • It's more prevalent in the earlier seasons, especially when used on Bender. For someone who's a robot, these are the only instances in which he actually... looks robotic.
    • The 3D camera movement effects make it especially noticeable.
    • Averted at some points, where even the crew doing the commentary have trouble distinguishing what's CGI and what's hand-drawn.
  • CG is very common within American animation nowadays, no doubt due to the budget saving potential. The Simpsons, American Dad!, and Family Guy all use it for mechanical things like cars; lately Family Guy uses it often for live-action-like tracking shots; see the 9th season episode "And Then There Were Fewer."
    • Speaking of which, it's used a lot in The Simpsons Movie.
    • The Family Guy episode "One if by Clam, Two if by Sea" has a TRON lightcycle sequence done mostly in 3D, like the movie. The reproduction of The A-Team's opening sequence in another episode uses it for vehicle shots. And most of the space battles in the Star Wars spoofs. After it was Un-Cancelled, all vehicles use CG rather than traditional animation. Same with the moving backgrounds when it is shown inside a vehicle, rendering a Wraparound Background in three-dimensional CGI.
      • The Simpsons surprisingly still averts that; in many cases there are often still flat drawings and animation of vehicles used, along with traditional flat moving backgrounds for shots inside vehicles being driven.
  • The 1999 King of the Hill episode "A Beer Can Named Desire" features a single shot where the Hills' vehicle is shown as a CGI model as it pulls into the Louisiana Superdome's parking lot.
  • Batman: The Animated Series suffers the same effect, right down to the kinda Art Deco architecture. Particularly conspicuous in the opening titles for Mask of the Phantasm, when the camera actually noclips through buildings.
  • Used for some of the vehicles in The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes. It's especially noticeable for the Avengers Quintet.
  • Justice League:
    • The league's Space Plane the Javelin and the latter duplicates thereof are entirely CG, which are very jarring.
    • In Unlimited episode "The Doomsday Sanction", there is a much reviled Special Effect Failure of the Batplane racing to intercept a Nuke over the ocean — all in low-grade CG.
    • "Dark Heart" contains some truly terrible CGI helicopters.
    • In "Fearful Symmetry", a CG surgical robot attacks Supergirl. The claw is supposed to grab her arm, but it's about half a second behind her arm movement. You can tell the editors cried a lot over that scene.
    • One of the most jarring CGI vehicles is the Spy Smasher's plane in a black and white Cold Open flashback meant to be reminiscent of a 1940s adventure serial.
  • The Critic used it in the pilot episode during a Beauty and the Beast parody, "Beauty and King Dork," where Jay Sherman imagines he and Valerie dancing in a CGI ballroom ala the movie, though here, it was intentionally done to resemble the movie's famous ballroom sequence.
  • "Out to Launch", the first "outer space" episode of Phineas and Ferb features this in spades. Dr. Doofenshmirtz's giant robot in particular will switch between traditional cel animation and 3D animation between cuts.
    • "The Chronicles of Meap", for Meap's spaceship and for Balloony/Collin (the latter of which is intentionally in the Uncanny Valley)
    • The Christmas Episode, for Santa's sleigh.
    • "Cheer Up Candace", for the Mix-and-Mingler Machine and for when everyone is ejected there (a particularly egregious example)
    • In fact, in later episodes, CG is used extensively for moving vehicles and other such things.
    • "The Beak" superhero costume the boys make.
  • Winx Club uses CG for, say, school buildings and vehicles. In the second season, most of the scenery is CG-rendered, often very poorly, not to speak of many lame light effects used for magic attacks. Or just see the effect of the rocks falling in the water, in the last episode of that season, and cringe. Or, worst still, some painful CG hair on a masked motorcycle rider. Thankfully, the third season toned down this excess of CG, and many backgrounds look much better.
  • Besides the Medium Blending of 3D Cyberspace vs. the "real world" in Code Lyoko, in the 2D animated parts they often use CG to animate mostly doors swinging open and closed (but also for some other less noticeable items). Ironically enough, in the first season it blends well, but as the seasons progress it gets more and more obvious.
  • The Doctor Who animated special "The Infinite Quest" is mostly flash animated, but pretty much all the spaceship models are animated using painfully obvious CGI.
  • In Avatar: The Last Airbender, art directors at first attempted drawing the Fire Nation tanks by hand, but the design turned out to be so complex that CG had to be brought in.
    • Later designs for the evil flotilla of zeppelins in the finale are also largely CG. Unfortunately, in some wide shots, the CG suffers from an obvious low frame rate as compared to both the hand-drawn characters in the shot and the moving background paintings, causing them to visibly jump back and forth as the scene zooms out.
    • Aang chasing the Hei Bai into the forest has the one time CG is used for a human character, namely Aang.
    • The turning portions of the doors in the Air Temples (the ones that "unlock" via airbending) are obviously CG.
  • In Sequel Series The Legend of Korra it's much more common, used for Satomobiles, Aang's statue in Republic City, Yue Bay, the police zeppelins, airbending training gates, and the boat Korra travels on. Fortunately, the CG is very good and actually blends pretty well with the hand-drawn animation, so, while noticeable, the effect is not jarring.
    • CG is also used for people multiple times, but generally briefly or in the background (see the driver for the coach Mako and Asami ride in "The Voice in the Night" and Asami and Korra during part of the car race in "The Aftermath").
  • Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends spoofs this in "One False Movie": After Eduardo refuses to be in Bloo's movie, Bloo says that they'll use CG to put him in later. Sure enough, we later see the movie, and it contains a Conspicuous CG Eduardo.
  • The Star Wars: Clone Wars miniseries uses CG extensively for the space ships. The Definite Article Clone Wars series just up and goes into All-CGI Cartoon territory.
  • Spider-Man: The Animated Series frequently uses CG for cityscape backgrounds, and it shows horribly. It was pretty cool back in 1994, though.
  • The vehicles in Xyber 9: New Dawn are poorly done CGI and did not age well at all.
  • The Spectacular Spider-Man
    • The series has highly simplified, bright, flat character and background designs, so when fully CGI black helicopters show up, it's rather jarring.
    • The worst example is a large Christmas tree in the second season episode "Reinforcement". It topples over after being set on fire and somehow manages to clip through the 2D background elements in the same scene, while moving extremely unconvincingly for an object of its size.
  • Young Justice (2010) sometimes does this with vehicles. However, like the Korra example above, it's usually done well enough that it isn't particularly jarring.
  • Avengers Assemble continues this trend, albeit much more obviously. Especially with vehicles and buildings.
  • The BattleTech animated series used CGI when the mech pilots turned on "Enhanced Vison" for battle scenes. It's stylized with wireframe terrain and outlines around the mechs, but the jump between the two is extremely jarring and its usage is inconsistent; the rare conventionally animated battles are (relatively) decently animated.
  • The French animated series Space Strikers, one of the first animated series to use CGI, uses it for spaceships.
  • Iron Man: The Animated Series has this for the eponymous character's transformation sequence in the first season, with the same background regardless of where Tony currently is. The second season replaces it with a better-animated 2D sequence.
  • If you watch an early episode of South Park concurrently with a later one, the CG used for the later episode can be jarring in how obvious it is. Interestingly, every episode except for the original pilot ("Jesus vs. Santa") and "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" is entirely CG animated with 3D software!
    • There's also the episode that re-uses footage from the first episode. Now that's a sticky situation!
    • South Park, in its first two seasons, also had a tendency to use "Conspicuous Live-Action Footage": this is because the computers Trey Parker and Matt Stone used didn't yet have the horsepower to render certain scenes in real time, so they would sometimes superimpose animated characters and props over live-action video clips. A good example of this is in "Mecha Streisand." There's a scene in the episode where Chef is driving through the mountains with Leonard Maltin. The characters and their car are superimposed over a live-action video of the Rocky Mountains.
    • The "Cthulhu Trilogy" of episodes has the eponymous Eldritch Abomination and the other creatures rendered in CG, with a very heavy but intentional contrast with the paper cut-out style of the other characters, to show how utterly alien they are.
    • In a lot of the later episodes, even the background shots of the suburbs and the town are very clearly 3D.
    • All inner body shots in "I Should Have Never Gone Ziplining" are 3D.
    • One iteration of the opening (first seen in "Let Go, Let Gov") has the characters (still rendered in their flat, construction paper style) in a fully photoreal, cardboard-looking environment. Which is both impressive and jarring at the same time.
  • Class of the Titans uses CGI in its second season to animate cars in a transition sequence. It shows... badly.
  • Dora the Explorer began using CGI effects for its final two seasons' Art Evolution, usually on vehicles. The Map and Backpack segments are also rendered in CGI.
  • Invader Zim, mostly for space sequences and the like.
    • According to the commentary on the DVDs, the CG was so expensive that the mere addition of walnuts to the "Room With A Moose" episode blew a severe part of the budget. However, this may be an exaggeration. Not only that, but they didn't even ask for CG walnuts; they just got them.
    • Not to mention the very CG "Nano-Zim," an episode where nearly all the scenes taking place inside Dib's body are CG, complete with fighting CG nanobot mechs. This episode seems to be the most well-known example of using up so much of the budget.
  • Ben 10: Alien Force has several instances of this. Kevin's car gets swapped for CGI on several occasions, as well as the Rust Bucket, which had already received this treatment late into the previous Ben 10.
  • Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century uses painfully obvious CGI to animate the futuristic city whenever there are no characters shown.
  • Batman: The Brave and the Bold uses Conspicuous CG for automobiles and planes, though it still looks better than what's used in Justice League. The 2D drawing style being close to circa-1970 comics style could be part of what makes it Conspicuous, as then anything 3D stands out as being Conspicuously Modern.
  • Kim Possible Movie: So the Drama has a robot toy army attack Ron Stoppable. Whilst they may both have been computer animated, the robot toys appear to be created with a different animation or CGI effect to the rest of the show.
  • A crossover episode of Lilo & Stitch: The Series where they meet Jake Long and his friends at a skateboard competition. The prize is a new fancy skateboard that rotates in its glass case. It's CGI.
  • Bounty Hamster uses cel-shaded CGI for spaceships and other detailed objects which are required to move very fast.
  • Many elements in Silver Surfer: The Animated Series, but especially Galactus. Hungorto, his Captain Ersatz in Duck Dodgers, is also in CG, possibly as a reference to this.
  • The little-known banned British program Popetown has static backgrounds that are obviously CG, in stark contrast to the flat, low-tech character designs (which are a notch below The Simpsons). Also features Idiosyncratic Wipes that aren't really wipes (think 3rd Rock from the Sun or That '70s Show), consisting of a helicopter shot jumping from one building to another.
  • The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! cartoon has painfully, glaringly obvious, conspicuous CG. But then, given the source material, it's probably intentional.
  • The Fairly OddParents!:
    • Most of Abra-Catastrophe! was done this way, as was the TV world in Channel Chasers.
    • An early season one episode has a Matrix parody, as does Wishology, covered below. Both times the CGI is so blatant it had to have been intentional.
    • Wishology features a lot of CGI, particularly the Eliminators. It's a little jarring to some, as the Eliminators almost look like they're from a completely different show.
    • The parental block from "Sleep Over And Over".
  • The airships in The Secret Saturdays are this, but it somehow seems to fit with the show.
  • In Codename: Kids Next Door, Sector V's treehouse when it turns into a rampaging tree monster chasing Nigel and Lizzie in the episode "Operation: G.I.R.L.F.R.I.E.N.D."
  • Metajets has racing planes that are quite blatantly CG compared to the rest of the animesque style.
  • Oggy and the Cockroaches has some of this in its earlier seasons, but by Season 4 it is rarely even used.
  • Any Direct-To-Video Scooby-Doo has this.
    • In Goblin King for instance, a 2D Scooby and Shaggy fly through a completely CG background.
    • The intro to Aloha, where the CGI dolphins swimming amongst hand-drawn fish look almost painful.
    • The Mystery Machine and most other vehicles from Scooby-Doo! Abracadabra-Doo onward are rendered out using CGI. This is also carried over to the recent TV series.
    • Averted with Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island (1998) and Scooby-Doo! and the Witch's Ghost (1999), the only DTV movies in the series to be entirely animated with traditional hand-painted cels.
  • In Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, most non-human motion tends to involve CGI, especially moving cars.
  • Pops up every now and again in some Henry and June shorts on KaBlam!.
  • In Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures, the backgrounds of some of their outdoor adventures (especially cloudy skies or northern lights) tend to stand out from the regular 2D animation, mostly in season 1.
  • Courage the Cowardly Dog:
    • The show is notable in its use of this trope for horror. Some of the most terrifying characters in the show are modeled with CG.
    • The best known example is the "Perfect Trumpet Thingy" from "Perfect" (considered the scariest thing on the show and is the page picture of the Courage the Cowardly Dog Nightmare Fuel page).
  • A small handful of SpongeBob SquarePants episodes use CG scenery, usually blending it with the 2-D pretty well. At times, it sticks out:
    • "Jellyfish Jam"; the first episode to use CG, for a panning shot from SpongeBob's house to Squidward's house.
    • "The Fry Cook Games"; the exterior shots of the Fast Food Coliseum are CGI, allowing the camera to move but unfortunately not hiding itself very well.
    • "No Free Rides"; several times through the entire boat-stealing sequence, the ground below is CG, most notably when the street signs are shown moving towards the screen.
    • "The Sponge Who Could Fly"; the "lost episode" begins with SpongeBob walking in place while CG ground scrolls beneath him, passing an occasional 2D rock or coral.
    • "The Best Day Ever"; during the opening number, SpongeBob is running along the sides of his pineapple house. Not only is it 3D, it appears to be a perfect sphere.
    • "Sandy, SpongeBob, and the Worm" - the scene where Spongebob and Sandy are running from the worm uses very obvious CG on the coral/trees.
    • "Atlantis SquarePantis": the inside of the bus that takes the gang to Atlantis is rendered in CG.
    • "House Fancy": the House Fancy TV show opening is done in CG.
    • "The Monster Who Came to Bikini Bottom": the scene where the monster smashes people's houses uses obvious 3D models of SpongeBob's pineapple and Patrick's rock.
    • "Mooncation": the moon landscape is rendered entirely in CG.
    • "Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy IV": It has SpongeBob slowly denting into the metal wall rendered in CG from the outside, before it switches to the standard 2-D painted background of the hole in the metal wall.
    • "Lighthouse Louie" has a Cutaway Gag involving a CG toaster swinging in front of a backdrop of SpongeBob's kitchen.
    • Characters are often shown walking on pixelated, awkward-looking "road balls" of sand or pavement, done in CG. "Big Pink Loser", "Missing Identity", "Krabby Land", and "Life Insurance" are good examples.
  • Sunny Day: Anything that isn't a character is rendered in CGI.
  • An odd example appears in Beast Wars. In each season, characters like Optimus, Megatron and Cheetor change alongside the technology, while other characters like Rhinox, Inferno, Waspinator and Blackarachnia (until her upgrade) did not. This makes their jagged shapes and low-resolution textures look out of place compared to the others.
    • Beast Machines utilizes a different, much more simplified design style, which makes all the Flashbacks to Beast Wars and the occasionally reappearing old designs stand out. They actually re-textured the main cast's beast modes for the pilot episode, so while their buildup looks outdated, their textures match the new style.
    • Transformers: Prime has a bizarre inversion in the episode "Rebellion", where in a couple of scenes, Alpha Trion is depicted as a hand-painted image while Prime himself is his usual CG model.
    • While the robots and their alt forms in Transformers: Rescue Bots are generally 2D (via Flash), they occasionally switch over to blatantly obvious 3D starting in season 2.
    • Transformers: Robots in Disguise manages to invert this trope. The majority of the show is 3D CGI, but some parts of it, particularly some of the backgrounds, are 2D. The premiere episode even features a bluebird that is very obviously 2D.
  • T.U.F.F. Puppy uses CGI liberally for things such as machines, a few vehicles and the like. The CG is cel-shaded, however. The episode "Puff Puppy" uses this trope intentionally by having characters change to traditional CGI after jumping into a vortex.
  • Harvey Girls Forever has CGI sparkles in some episodes such as "Citizen Cape".
  • G.I. Joe: Renegades uses CGI for vehicles and Bio-Vipers. The rogue Bio Viper in "The Anomaly" is a REALLY nasty example of this trope in action, as is the Coyote.
  • In Chloe's Closet, although Chloe's room and certain scenes are normal, a lot of the environments when Chloe and her friends are imagining are CGI, using normal 3D shading instead of the style the characters use (which is closer to cel-shaded).
  • Cartoon Network commercials used to have the characters superimposed on CGI scenery. And it works rather nicely!
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • The show surprisingly uses CGI to animate the Timberwolves in the episode "Spike at Your Service". While there may be an off-chance that this was used intentionally to make them look strange, it's nonetheless quite jarring since they last appeared in "Family Appreciation Day" Flash-animated like everything else and the animators had already proven they could pull off convincing 3D effects without CGI before.
    • The hallway Applejack and Rainbow Dash run through in "Castle Mane-ia".
    • The giant spinning wheel in "Wonderbolts Academy".
  • Chowder uses a lot of Medium Blending, mostly Stop Motion and puppets, so the one time it uses CG is jarring — and is meant to be. The baby minotaur in "The Deadly Maze" is considered terrifying in-universe.
  • Archer: Sterling Archer has once a car chase into the streets of a CGI Paris where white buildings extend to the infinite horizon. He also goes aboard a CGI spaceship in another mission.
  • In Poet Anderson: The Dream Walker, the characters are 2D animated in Flash while vehicles and more elaborate settings and vehicles are 3D animated in Blender.
  • The protagonists of Ratz use flying machines that leave twin trails of CGI smoke.
  • Gravity Falls:
    • Most of the vehicles in the series (i.e. Stan's car, the golf cart) are 3D models.
    • The giant Gideon robot in "Gideon Rises" is rendered with CGI, which makes its animation more stiff and exaggerated than the rest of the cast.
    • Used on Waddles' cart in "Little Gift Shop of Horrors".
    • Specific objects are prone to being rendered in 3D as well, such as the dice in "Dungeons, Dungeons and More Dungeons", and Stan's fake bomb in "The Stanchurian Candidate".
  • Mighty Ducks: The Animated Series introduced quite obvious CGI (especially the vehicle Stock Footage) to unexpecting viewers who were used to Disney's 2D cel animation.
  • Splashing water on Total Drama Presents: The Ridonculous Race is very obviously 3D CG in contrast to the very flat style of animation usually used. The taxi cabs in the finale are also clearly CG-shaded when facing the camera, as opposed to other episodes, where they're as 2D as the surrounding environment.
  • The CGI for NASCAR Racers mixes cel-shaded cars and realistic-looking (for 1999) backgrounds for its racing scenes, to rather jarring effect. The scenes that take place in the simulator are given a more appropriate cel-shaded look.
  • In the final Peanuts special, He's a Bully, Charlie Brown, CGI was used on the school bus for one shot. Not sure how Sparky would've felt about that.
  • Green Eggs and Ham: Used for the panning background shots and many of the vehicles.
  • A sequence in the Milo Murphy's Law episode "Party Of Peril" has the kids riding go-karts. Some parts, particularly the beginning of the song, make it blantantly clear that CGI models are being used in many shots.
  • Molly of Denali noticeably uses 3D CGI for large mechanical objects like Layla's bush plane, Walter's truck, and (in the episode "King Run") the king salmon-catching fish wheel.
  • Let's Go Luna!: In "London Frog", one shot of Big Ben is rendered in CGI.
  • The Patrick Star Show: "Mid-Season Finale" contains an aerial battle using the houses of Patrick and Grandma Tentacles. The houses are done in very noticeable bad CG.


Alternative Title(s): Conspicuous CG

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Yoyle mountain roads

An obstacle course which both FreeSmart and W.O.A.H. Bunch cross to get to the Yoyle tower, the real summit of the mountain.

How well does it match the trope?

4.54 (13 votes)

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