Buildings. Bridges. Tugboats. The Statue of Liberty. Everything!
When inanimate objects dance about, often to the beat or rhythm of the music.
How much stuff dances can vary. Sometimes only small objects, such as furniture, bushes, trees, or street lights dance. But then there are other times when larger objects such as buildings dance. And then there are rare examples where everything, including the very ground itself, moves and dances, often up and down.
Subtrope of Animate Inanimate Object. Compare Music Soothes the Savage Beast.
Examples:
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Advertising
- Aired in the UK, this advert
for Radio 1's Big Weekend in Preston 2007 has a miniature model of a park where the concerts are taking place. Then the whole thing literally starts bouncing up and down to the music, making the miniature figures of the people bounce. Now imagine that happening in real life...
- This old Fiat Grande Punto advert from 2007, also aired in the UK, had a colourful city where every building bounces up and down to the music like bars on an equaliser. We even get to see what happens to the people inside two of them.
Anime and Manga
- In one scene of the Tamagotchi! season 1 intro, the buildings dance to the show's opening song.
- One Piece manages to play this trope for horror and for laughs at the same time whenever Big Mom sings. Big Mom has the Soul-Soul Fruit, which allows her to Animate Inanimate Objects by transferring life force from people to anything she wishes. The result is hilariously out-of-place musical numbers in which the furniture, food, flowers and trees, and even a localized Sun join in on the dancing, with some pretty macabre implications on how Big Mom was able to make this happen in the first place.
Asian Animation
- Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: The background trees dance in the Joys of Seasons opening.
Films — Animation
- The ending to Tokyo Godfathers, with the dancing buildings.
- "Be Our Guest" from Beauty and the Beast features dancing plates and candles. Justified as they where part of the castle staff who was turned into household objects as part of the Beast's curse.
- At the end of the "Baia" sequence in The Three Caballeros, the entire city, even the moon as well, is bouncing to the music.
- In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, when Eddie Valiant enters Toontown, all the trees are singing and dancing to "Smile, Darn Ya, Smile", as well as the sun itself.
- In Knick Knack, the various knickknacks alongside the "Sunny Miami" girl are dancing.
- In Shrek 2, the Fairy Godmother brings Fiona's furniture to life and makes them dance in her musical number.
Live-Action TV
- The title sequence to Flight of the Conchords features various household items bopping in time with the theme music. In the second season, this expands to include New York landmarks such as the Brooklyn Bridge.
Theme Parks
- In "it's a small world" at the Disney Theme Parks, even several giant chess pieces and some cacti dance along to the infamous song.
Video Games
- Super Mario Bros.:
- Super Mario Bros. 3 has dancing hills on the World 1 map.
- In the New Super Mario Bros. games, all enemies do some sort of action whenever the "bah!" noise plays. While some are harmless like Dry Bones' heads spinning around, some can be beneficial (Pokeys temporarily turn into oranges, which Yoshis can then eat all at once) and some can really mess up your timing (Goombas hop, Koopas pause their walk).
- In Audiosurf, the road the player is traveling down sometimes bumps and bounces to the beat. This varies depending on the song the player is playing, though; plenty of songs produce a relatively smooth track. Background elements such as towers pulse, spin, and change color.
- Pointed out in one of the loading screen tips: "Your ship is having fun too. Have you noticed that your ship changes color and pulses according to the music?"
- Samba de Amigo has dancing backgrounds depending on how well the player is doing.
- Def Jam: Icon also varies depending on the stage and how intense the fighting is.
- In Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch, there's a Game Mod called "Chaos Generator" that provides three crazy effects randomly chosen during a match. One effect, appropriately called "Jelly World", causes every floor in the level to sway up and down.
- Then there's "Chaos Generator Upgraded", which moves the floors and ceilings up and down violently, which even causes players and items to bounce about.
- Rock Band Blitz features buildings in the background that bump to the music.
- Pajama Sam in No Need to Hide When It's Dark Outside: There's the kitchen where all the utensils do a song and dance when clicked. There's also a room where all the furniture dances, unless they notice Sam has entered, at which point they pretend to be normal furniture. One of the possible locations of Sam's mask is under the couch when it stops dancing, so Sam has to find a way to enter without being noticed.
- True to their origins, the 2-D platforming sections in Epic Mickey, which are based on the iconic animated shorts, will often have dancing scenery. Most often, this is to be used as moving platforms (like the coconut trees in "Jungle Drums"), though they will sometimes steer Mickey into trouble (like the trolley in "Trolley Troubles," which has obstacle and enemy placement to match the trolley's movements).
- In Lunistice, food items in Level Ate dance to the beat of music.
Web Original
- The dancing trees and bushes in the nightmare "Under the Rainbow" posted on the Nightmare Project.
- Pretty much everything dances to the beat in Mystery Skulls Animated.
Western Animation
- Frequently happens in Phineas and Ferb.
- "Perry Lays an Egg" has the Platy-posterior dancing during "Mother Nature".
- "The Secret of Success" does it with the All Terrain vehicle in "We're Talkin' All Terrain".
- "Moon Farm" has ice cream cones dancing during "Lunar Taste Sensation".
- One of Doofenschmirtz's -inators does this in the episode "Out of Toon". The boys built an animation studio which got hit with the ray from same.
- Parodied in the "Colorama" segment of the Futurama Three Shorts episode "Reincarnation". As the segment in question is based on the works of Max and Dave Fleischer, everyone and everything dances except for Farnsworth and a telescope he is looking through. When Leela looks through the telescope, he adjusts it "to [her] eye level" so it dances as well.
- The flowers in the House of Mouse short "Li'l Bad Wolf."
- The 1992 closing credits sequence from Sesame Street.
- The SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Truth or Square" features a scene done in the style of a 1920's cartoon, with SpongeBob's house, the Krusty Krab, the furniture inside both, and even the flower clouds singing and dancing to SpongeBob's song.
- Lampshaded in the Animaniacs episode "The Girl with the Googily Goop", which is done in the style of Max and Dave Fleischer.
Dot: Oooo, creepy. Everything's alive!
- One episode of Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers features Professor Nimnul threatening to destroy the city with a machine connected to a phonograph that causes whatever record it plays to manifest itself (for example, playing the sound of a tornado will cause a tornado to appear). He gloats that he'll have the entire city in his sway! But when the Rangers swap his record of destructive noises for a jazz record, instead of the city being under his sway it just starts...swaying. As in, instead of being destroyed, all the buildings in the city are grooving to the beat!
- In one The Simpsons episode, there is a couch gag where the furniture dances.
