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"See, the apple's not giant! It's just in the foreground!""
Now concentrate this time, Dougal. These (holds up model cows) are small, but the ones out there (points outside) are far away.
Depth Perception is the mechanism by which we figure out, from the pattern of light and colors hitting our eyes, the relative distances at which different objects are. There are subtle cues by which we usually can tell the difference between something that is small and near and something that is large and far away, even if they occupy comparable regions in the visual field. You should have noticed the red link: Depth Perception is not a trope. After all, there is nothing particularly tropeworthy about a normal perceptual ability humans enjoy.
Depth Deception is what happens when Depth Perception goes wrong. And naturally, it is a trope.
Sometimes, often due to uncommon conditions such as viewing through a telescope, camera or other similar optical device, people can get confused and mistake something small and close (such as an insect) for something far and huge (such as an Attacking 50 Foot Whatever ). Or vice versa. For reasons closely related to the Rule Of Funny, this happens more often in fiction than in Real Life, though Truth In Television cases are not unheard of.
Compare Thats No Moon, when a large object is mistaken for an equally large but more mundane object. See also Perspective Magic, where this can be used to manipulate reality.
When it's used intentionally as a camera technique— one of the oldest special effects on record in fact— it's called Forced Perspective.
Examples:
Anime
- In an episode of Pokemon, what Team Rocket thought was Ash's Pikachu wandering towards them turned out to be a gigantic robotic Pikachu that was approaching from farther away. "It's Big-achu!"
Comic Books
- In the Tintin book The Shooting Star there is a spider crawling across a telescope lens, which Tintin notices at first rather than the huge blazing meteorite behind it.
Literature
- Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Sphinx is about a man seeing a terrifying monster walking on the hill outside the cottage where he's staying. It turns out at the end that it was an insect crawling on a spider web very close to his face.
- GK Chesterton references the trope in the Father Brown story "The Song of the Flying Fish": "A thing can sometimes be too close to be seen, as, for instance, a man cannot see himself. There was a man who had a fly in his eye when he looked through the telescope, and he discovered that there was a most incredible dragon in the moon."
- A short story about a monstrous dragon on a distant mountain. But in actuality, the dragon always appeared to be the same size no matter how far away the viewer was, so when the protagonist climbed the mountain he found the dragon to be much smaller.
Film
- Used as a gag in the movie Top Secret!. A ringing phone seems to be really close to the camera, until a man picks up the three-foot receiver.
- The scene evokes classic Hitchcock, who was a fan of this trope but for less comedic reasons.
Live Action TV
- The episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer “Fear, Itself” had Gachnar the Fear Demon...who was ten inches tall.
- As the quote suggest, Dougal from Father Ted apparently can't tell the difference between small toy cows and real ones which are far away.
- Tom Baker's Doctor Who explained that the Clown Car Base, aka Tardis, works by neatly subverting this trope. Two identical boxes are put side-by-side to show they're the same size. Move one farther away. Which one's bigger? Well, neither, they're still the same size. But what if you could make it so that the relative dimensions in space were actual?
- In a more recent episode, Donna Noble sees a wasp hovering just outside the window, only it turns out to be a huge wasp far away but approaching very fast.
- Some of the Adult Swim Ad Bumpers feature "fake miniature" photography, described below in Real Life.
- Phoenix Nights featured bouncer Max squinting at an approaching group of dwarfs and asking the immortal question, "How far away are they?"
Video Games
- In Kingdom Of Loathing, before the Observatory was destroyed, it was possible to look through the telescope and discover "a giant space mosquito".
- Several Giant Moos (no, that's not a typo) in Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil appear in the background as regular-sized Moos until they jump into your path.
- In Super Mario 64, the room where you can enter Tiny Huge Island is a t-junction with a painting at the end of each hall, all of which appear to be the same size when you first enter: the one in the center is normal-sized and non-functional, the one on the left is actually slightly smaller than usual, and the one on the right is gigantic. The two paintings that actually warp Mario are also set in hallways that use forced perspective, meaning that until you start walking toward one, the images all look the same size.
- A few of the off-path rooms in LEGO Star Wars II appear "correct" from certain angles, but are revealed to be skewed when you actually walk into them. For instance, the very first Protocol droid door in the very first level; a few gimmick objects are included to help sell the illusion.
- One dungeon in Nocturne has several fake hallways that are actually painted walls. You will often reach a junction where you need to choose between the real hallway and a wall. If you choose the wall you are booted to the beginning.
Web Animation
- The Homestar Runner episode from which the page quote is taken. Marzipan is just explaining an art technique, but when a giant Bubs turns up immediately after, she says the same thing about his foot.
- Nina Paley's Fetch does this repeatedly.
Webcomics
Western Animation
- In The Simpsons episode "Deep Space Homer", reporter Kent Brockman makes TV contact with a space mission just in the moment an ant set loose in the spaceship floats by the camera lens. Brockman's reporting jumps to the conclusion that a master race of giant ants has conquered the spacecraft and is about to invade Earth. He then pauses, looks at camera, and delivers the immortal line: “And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.”.
- In the episode where the Simpsons act out folk tales, Homer as the giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan runs towards Marge, who thinks he's just a normal-sized man until he gets near enough for her to see his true scale.
- In the episode where Homer joins the Army, he escapes during wargames. As he's lying in bed with Marge, he looks out the window and comments on the helicopter in the distance... except it's a spy drone the size of an RC toy, and it's right in his window.
- In an episode of Alvin And The Chipmunks, a bug on the lens of Simon's telescope caused them to think there was an alien invasion on its way to Earth.
- In an episode of The Pink Panther, the Panther plays a trick on his human foil (who is an astronomer this time) with a puppet show at the end of his telescope that convinces the guy he has discovered aliens on the moon.
- The Little Mermaid: Scuttle sees Ariel through a spyglass from the wrong end, and shouts to her as if she were far away, even though she is actually a few inches in front of him. When she moves the spyglass away, Scuttle exclaims, "Whoa, what a swim!"
- In Bill Plympton's first feature film, The Tune, as the main character approaches the town of Flooby Nooby, he notices that the trees seem to get smaller as he approaches them. The mayor explains that perspective is an illusion: things really do get bigger when one gets nearer as a defense mechanism. But at Flooby Nooby, everyone is so relaxed that the opposite is true.
- In the Donald Duck war short "Home Defense", Donald's nephews are able to convince him that they're being attacked...by parachuting gingerbread men. Later in the short, a bee does a similar (but unintentional) dupe job.
- In the opening of the Futurama episode "Fear of a Bot Planet", Fry comments on how the size of space puts everything in perspective. They then hit a planet like a bug on a windshield.
- In the Re Boot episode where Hexadecimal gets her hands on an art program, perspective gets worse the farther you go into Lost Angles. Her "cat" Scuzzy gets in on the fun by appearing normal-sized at a distance and HUGE close up; when he's frightened by the heroes he runs away to become tiny.
Newspaper Comics
- In a Fox Trot strip, Jason makes a snow sculpture that despite being about an adult person's size, when seen from the front looks like a towering snowman giant getting ready to stomp. Jason remarks that "Forced Perspective [see above] is an underrated art form."
Real Life
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