Guess which bush Amuro pushes aside.
In older cartoons (and some newer ones), it used to be somewhat obvious that an item apparently part of the background would get picked up and used. What
made it obvious was that it was strikingly lighter in color than its stationary surroundings. Alternately, it might have an obvious difference in detail or color saturation -- animated objects in older cartoons tended to be simpler than the backgrounds, which would be painted in greater detail and with more colors. Another telltale sign would be clear black outlines on the object: the three clearly outlined rocks on the cliff would be the ones to tumble.
This was an unintentional artifact from the animation process. Foreground/animated objects were drawn by the main animators separately from the background and matte painters. Because the two processes were done at different times and locations and by different artists, consistent color matching was very difficult. Additionally, the unpainted portions of cels are not perfectly transparent, so the colors on lower cels became more and more muted as additional layers were added to the top of the stack.
Film critic Roger Ebert has called this the "Fudd Flag", after Bugs Bunny's nemesis, who uses it to determine which tree Bugs is hiding behind, which rock he needs to trip over, etc.
Something similar occasionally appears in older live-action productions. In particular, you may see an oddly colored sheen around the characters in shows featuring heavy use of
Chroma Key. In his review of the
"StarWars" prequel trailer
, Mr. Cranky dubbed this slight
Special Effects Failure a "mystical aura."
This also applies to mid-era point-n-click
Adventure Games, when the background would be painted or 3D rendered, while objects would usually be drawn sprites. However, this had a practical use, allowing players to easily locate collectable objects, even small ones.
Examples:
Fudd Flags
- Just about every Looney Tunes or Hanna-Barbera cartoon ever made.
- An episode of Extreme Ghostbusters featuring "The Piper" had this exact trope. When the characters were standing on the pier, one could see the foreground planks in a richer shade of mahogany shortly before they were smashed to pieces.
- The New Adventures of Alvin and the Chipmunks had this all the time, from a door that was shortly going to be opened, to a boulder that was going to fall down on the heroes.
- In the animated feature American Pop, one character is seen playing the piano, and as he moves his arm his sleeve repeatedly flickers to a lighter shade than the rest of his shirt.
- Duck Tales had an instance that was particularly obvious due to the fact that it appeared in the title sequence (about twenty seconds in).
- The video game Serious Sam, interestingly, features these. Behind a lightly colored spot on a wall, you could expect to find a secret by moving to it or shooting at it.
Mystical Auras
- There's a particular bit in the 80s Flash Gordon movie where, as a rocket travels forward entering the Imperial Vortex, this bright, transparent... thing moves behind it. Instead of moving steadily behind the rocket, it sort of jumps whenever the rocket's going to go past it.
- Extremely apparent in some Muppet productions, as Jim Henson liked using Chroma Key a lot in the mid-80's. It gets to the point where you can tell something's up when you see that "mystical aura" around a character.
- In the B Movie Xanadu (not to be confused with the trope,) Sonny gets one as he enters the muses' world, as seen at the bottom of this page.
- This troper recalls a couple of special effects failures on Babylon 5 where you could tell the characters were suddenly in front of a blue screen that someone was going to do something that required a special effect to depict.
Point-And-Click Version
- Final Fantasy VII had the point-and-click-adventure-game example of this trope. Any object, person or thing that could be examined was rendered in rather blocky 3D (mind-blowing at the time, but extremely dated now, ten years on) against the smoother, less-dated pre-rendered backgrounds. In fact, the main character remarks on it once or twice in the Beginners Hall.
- Even more obvious in the PC version, in which the backgrounds are still 320x240 but everything else is in high resolution.
- In the City Of Heroes computer game, items that must be found to complete a mission not only pulse with light, but emit a sound to alert players to their presence, earning them the nickname of "glowies" among players. This falls under the category of Acceptable Breaks From Reality, mind.
- A recent patch to World Of Warcraft added this feature to that game as well. Arguably justified in that the change was made due to player complaints that important items blended with the background too well.
- The game Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines had this, but only if your perception feat was high enough.
- Bioshock has the option to have items you can pick up shimmer like this. Items vital to beating the game are particularly shiny.
- Want to know if a corpse in Playstation-era Resident Evil is just a corpse or if it's going to bits your legs off as you walk past? Just check whether it's rendered like the background or like a character model. Smooth-shaded = dead dead, jagged polygons = zombie.
- Not nearly so easy in the Gamecube remake, however. The increased render capabilities make the zombies blend in a lot better to the remade backgrounds.
- In Super Mario Bros. 3, one level featured enemies who hid in brick blocks; the blocks concealing enemies were easily distinguishable because, due to palette limitations, they didn't shimmer the way that normal blocks did. Naturally, in the Super Mario All Stars remake, there was no such giveaway, due to the SNES' more advanced graphics capabilities.
- Most of the items to be caught (specially as Improvised Weapons) in Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb have some sort of lighting.
Parodies and Aversions
- Animaniacs made fun of this. In one episode, the Warner Brothers (and Sister) were rented out to a Hanna-Barbera-esque company, and placed in a Yogi-Bear-esque cartoon with plenty of these.
- The anime Blue Seed had an omake sequence after one episode which parodied this; one character stops and monologues on the properties of a set of desk drawers, noticing that one is drawn more simply and in a different palette -- therefore it must be the only one that moves, and contains the item he is looking for.
- The Homestar Runner game "Peasant's Quest" subverts the game version. At one point in the game, a conspicuously light candle appears on the screen. If you try to get it, the game says "It seems like you should be able to do that, doesn't it? Sorry. No dice."
- The Animals Of Farthing Wood averted this by having certain objects painted on the animation cels so that the characters could use them without them looking conspicuous beforehand.
- The Simpsons averted this by painting the backgrounds on cels, same as the characters. It succeded most of the time, but there were still tell-tale "Fudd flags" visible at times until the production switched to digital rendering methods.
- Averted in Spirited Away; the art book points out that CG was used to animate the dishes when Chihiro's parents start nudging them around with their pig snouts.
