A woman in comics or cartoons doesn't have ribs like a real actress does. Thus she can easily have a far narrower waist than would be possible with even the strictest of corsets - and usually without even wearing one!
A woman with an
Impossible Hourglass Figure has generous curves, with an impossibly narrow waist as an unproblematic part of how she just happens to look. Thus taking the classic "hourglass figure" beauty ideal
Up to Eleven. She's always designed to be attractive, even in the cases where she's not
Ms. Fanservice or
Hello Nurse: Monsters with insect-like narrow waists does not count, even if the shape reminds of a hourglass.
For more realistic hourglass figures, see instead
Of Corsets Sexy and
Of Corset Hurts.
No Real Life Examples, Please! (it is, after all, impossible). This trope applies only to drawings and animation.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Miss Doublefinger from One Piece.
- Similar to the One Piece example we have several female characters from Fairy Tail and Rave Master. Mashima states that he actually doesn't find it especially appealing and he mainly uses the design to please young male fans.
- The Gender flipped version of America in Axis Powers Hetalia.
- Quite a few of the female characters have this type of figure in Code Geass, most notably Kallen and Milly.
Fashion Design
- This
◊ Stella McCartney dress creates the optical illusion that the wearer has one of these.
Film
- Francesca from Mad Monster Party.
- Jessica Rabbit from Who Framed Roger Rabbit is more one of the more famous and extreme cases of this trope. She was originally designed with more (relatively speaking) realistic proportions◊, but the creators decided that they wanted an unrealistic quality about her sexiness. She's a toon, after all.
- Miss Forcible, in her youth, and the Other Miss Forcible from the film version of Coraline
- Holli Would from Cool World.
- Mrs. Toad From Thumbelina who has huge Non-Mammal Mammaries on top of a near nonexistent waist, and wide hips to match.
- Sita from Sita Sings the Blues.
- Princess Jasmine from Aladdin.
- Four of the muses and Aphrodite, from Hercules, have waists so tiny they could probably wrap one hand around them. Oddly enough, Megara ends up with Hartman Hips, despite being the only female to make use of her womanly charms.
- The evil stepmother Frieda from Happily N'Ever After.
Live Action Television
- An episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia actually deconstructs this trope. Dennis takes up fashion designing, and specifically designs his clothes for someone with an Hourglass figure. Of course, since no one in real life actually has one...
Newspaper Comics
Video Games
Webcomics
Western Animation
- Lindsay from Total Drama Island, in contrast to most of the other females on the show who typically have Hartman Hips. Not too surprisingly, she's also the most attractive female in the cast.
- Hello Nurse from Animaniacs, as seen on the picture above.
- Princess Aura from The New Adventures of Flash Gordon.
- Miss Sara Bellum and Sedusa from The Powerpuff Girls.
- Princess Mandie from The Fairly Odd Parents.
- "Red" (or "Lou") from Tex Avery's cartoons.
- Jez from Jimmy Two-Shoes.
- Virtually every female in the DCAU. Bruce Timm clearly loves him some hourglass curves.
- The entire Winx Club... look at those girls! Is it even possible for waists so skinny to support their boobs and hips?! Supermodels clearly try to get figures like those girls.
- This is a bit more prominent in the comics than the TV show. In the cartoon, their breasts, while still large, are reasonably sized for their figures. In the comics, however, their breasts look like they could fall off at any given moment.
- Kimmy from Sym-Bionic Titan.
- Betty Boop.
- Dennis' mother, Alice Mitchell, from Dennis the Menace US.
- One episode of Samurai Jack featured the Sirens. You know you have a winner when you realize that even their arms are thicker than their waists!
- Princess Kashmir from The Simpsons.
- When Candace from Phineas and Ferb is shown as an adult, her figure has gone from literally pencil-straight to improbable hourglass.
- Panty the Panther from El Arca.
