No Focus on Humans

When human characters appear alongside other races in a given work, the humans are usually among the major characters. By the same token, some stories include no humans at all. The works that fall under this trope Take a Third Option—humans are present, but there are few of them compared to the rest of the cast. Additionally, the humans are not important characters, assuming they even appear on screen. Usually stories like this take place in a World of Funny Animals, but they can also be set in a world of Robots or Sentient Vehicles. So, as this trope says, there's no focus on humans.

Specific versions for this trope:

• Humans exist and everyone knows about them, but they are very rare in the setting. Other characters might be Funny Animals, fantasy creatures, aliens, etc. (Example: Adventure Time).
• Humans are very common, and may be the dominant species, but only a few appear in the story, which is dominated by animal or fantasy characters (Example: Finding Nemo, Bambi).
• Humans are everywhere, but mostly you might just see their feet or vehicles from the point of view of an animal character. There are only a few human characters that have a speaking role (Example: Oliver & Company).

Compare Token Human, in which there's only one human present in the story, and Xenofiction, which is from the perspective of characters who aren't human and act like it. See also Humans Are Cthulhu, where humans are not treated as characters, but as a terrifying outside force, and Sliding Scale of Animal Cast, in which Level 2 refers to Living Prop humans, Level 3 refers to very few humans added to the animal cast, and Level 4 refers to a human protagonist in an animal cast. Compare and contrast Absent Aliens, in which the aliens are this trope for humans. See also Humans Through Alien Eyes.

Not to Be Confused with Beast Fable, Humanity's Wake and World of Funny Animals for when there are no humans at all.

Contrast Human-Focused Adaptation.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Digimon X-Evolution: Unlike every other entry in the Digimon franchise, no humans appear in this special, with the focus being solely on the Digital Monsters themselves.
• There's one episode of Excel♡Saga that parodied Disney's World of Funny Animals in which Menchi escapes from Excel and joins a group of talking stray dogs, animals being the only focus on the episode.
• Pokémon's Pikachu shorts exclusively focuses on the Pokémon instead of their trainers, and if humans are seen, it's usually from the eye level of the smaller (and cuter) Pokémon (their lower legs and feet) at the beginning or end of the story.

Asian Animation

• While Motu Patlu puts most of its focus on the human characters, its Spin-Off Guddu the Great instead focuses on Guddu the lion (from the movie Motu Patlu: King of Kings) and his animal friends.
• There actually are humans in Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf, but their appearances are very, very, very rare and they usually aren't major characters in any episode (one exception is Santa Claus, who lets the goats ride his sleigh in Pleasant Goat Fun Class: Travel Around the World episode 1). Other than these, all the focus is on the Funny Animals.

Comic Books

• Voyagis focuses on Alien world of Modia, with only human character being Joy, Earth girl who is telephaticaly linked to Sen thanks to Dream Land.

Comic Strips

• Stephen Pastis's Author Avatar is the only human main character in Pearls Before Swine. However, one-shot human characters appear quite often.
• The only human characters in U.S. Acres are a farmer and his daughter who appeared right after Orson fell out of the truck and took him to the farm. They only appeared for four strips, were only seen waist-down or in silhouette, and never appeared again.

European Animation

• Humans apparently do exist in the setting of Booba, but aside from a brief glimpse of their shadows in the first episode, they have made no physical appearance whatsoever.

Fan Works

• The Palaververse: Humans, or something like them, are mentioned to exist in the third chapter of The Tempest:
  Warthog Delegate: Sacred skies, it jabbers on like one of the bipedal apes you find in the Interior forests. All they do is screech and try to show off their advancements in tool-using and theoretical mathematics to you.

Film - Animated

• Humans in the An American Tail movies basically act as moving scenery, making little to no direct interaction with the mouse characters that make up the main cast.
• Common in the Disney Animated Canon, which are often set in a World of Funny Animals; in the more "realistic" ones, humans exist but have limited roles. Some examples:
  • In Bambi, humans don't appear often but play an important role (prominently Bambi's mother get killed by a human deer hunter).
  • Oliver & Company: The Disney interpretation of Oliver Twist but with cats and dogs in which the focus is on the street animals only in a human world. Only a handful of human characters play important roles in the story.
  • The Jungle Book (1967): Mowgli and the nameless girl (named Shanti in the sequel) he goes with at the end are the only human characters. The live-action version takes it further, with Mowgli as the only human character (both in story and on screen), while other humans are only seen as shadows.
  • In The Great Mouse Detective features anthropomorphic small animals in Victorian London. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson appear in silhouette briefly but otherwise no humans are seen.
• Ice Age: Although the main characters are animals, the main focus of the first movie is returning a human baby to his tribe, who also appear regularly throughout. In all the sequels, you'd be forgiven for thinking humans just don't exist in the franchise's universe.
• Much of the drama in Once Upon a Forest centers on three young Barefoot Cartoon Animals on a hazardous mission to retrieve medicinal herbs. There are incidental humans, but none are named, and none get more than a minute or two of screen time.
• Pixar:
  • Toy Story series only focus on the sentient toys. Human characters are important for how they affect the protagonists, with the most important being Andy (the kid who owns the main character).
  • Finding Nemo is about a clownfish looking for his lost child under the sea as well in the human world. A similar case with its sequel.
  • There is one significant human child in Monsters, Inc., named "Boo" by the protagonists.^note Her real name is apparently Mary, according to the drawings hanging in her room. Thing is, Boo forms a huge part of the plot, which is how to return her to her bedroom in secret, without the monsters' contagion team finding out. Boo is too prominent to be an incidental character.
  • In the prequel of above, Monsters University, there's hardly any human characters in it. Mike and Scully are at college, and have yet to use the closet portals into the human world. The only thing human-ish in their universe is the practice dummy. Then again, humans are acknowledged to exist, it's just that only a few make an appearance.
  • The Good Dinosaur takes place on an Earth that missed the KT-Extinction event and thus, Dinosaurs evolved into sentient life, on the level with late 19-20th century humans by the time of the story proper. While humans do exist, they are more feral and are treated like pests by the Dinosaurs. The whole thing sets up an unusual A Boy and His X where the Boy is in fact a Dinosaur and the X is a human boy.
  • Inside Out is a sort of example; the human girl, Riley, actually does get some focus, but Word of God has quipped that she's not the protagonist, she's the setting.
  • Subverted in WALL•E—the first half is set on Earth after humans have left, but they play an important (though still secondary) role in the second half.

Literature

• Isaac Asimov:
  • "Homo Sol": The entire story is told from an alien viewpoint, mostly in the Third Person narration following Tan Porus around as the galactic government establishes First Contact with the Solarians (humans from Earth's solar system).
  • "The Imaginary": This story inverts Absent Aliens, as humans from Earth are completely missing from the tale (except for a short mention to provide some context for the setting for people who hadn't read Homo Sol). Instead, the story continues from Tan Porus's experiments with the Beta Draconis IV squids.
  • "The Hazing": Like the original story, "Homo Sol", this story starts from the alien perspective, but stops following the aliens when they kidnap all ten college transfers, fresh from Earth. The idea is to give the newly inducted species a bit of a hazing...
• In Bambi, the only humans shown are the hunters, a boy in the sequel, and the person that reared Gobo after he was injured as a fawn.
• Books of the Raksura is set on a Constructed World with a huge range of intelligent species; most characters are Rubber-Forehead Aliens or Humanoid Aliens, but some are more unusual. The story focuses on the Raksura, who can shapeshift between a scaled, sometimes winged form and a more human-looking one. If any of the miscellaneous "groundling" peoples are human, it's never specified.
• The Cold Moons focuses on badgers fleeing from a mass genocide. Humans appear only as antagonists who are poisoning the badgers.
• Firstborn is from the POV of a magpie living amongst wolves. Humans are shown but very few talk and Maggie doesn't even know their names.
• In Survivor Dogs, all humans have evacuated the area due to an earthquake and were forced to leave their dogs. The dogs must survive on their own in the wilderness. The only humans depicted are either dead or ominous people who test radioactive substances on the dogs.
• Tailchaser's Song is from the POV of a feral kitten as he goes on an adventure to figure out the cat disappearances in his area. Humans (or "Big Ones" as they're called) are few and far between and are little more than background scenery. Cats see them as their servants.
• In Varjak Paw, humans are referenced but they don't appear outside of the gentleman. The characters are all cats.
• Warrior Cats focuses on Clans of feral cats. They almost never see humans or their vehicles unless patrolling the borders of/leaving their territory, and they mainly appear as hazards to be avoided. Only in the graphic novels do any of them get speaking roles, but even then they're minor, and it's because the reader is seeing a bit wider view than the main character's viewpoint, unlike in the actual books.
• Richard Adams' book Watership Down has its focus mainly on a troop of rabbits that journey far afield seeking a new home. There are several humans in the story, but few are named, and they tend to be more plot devices than characters. Much of the drama centers on the hazards rabbits face traveling overland, and the dystopian warrens they encounter in their travels, such as Efrafa.
• Wings of Fire: Humans are referred to as "scavengers" (due to knights scavenging off of dragons treasures) and they are an endangered species that only pop up a few times. The dragons see them as dumb, weak prey animals and they're given quite a few Family Unfriendly Deaths. However, Dragonslayer averted this by being in the point-of-view of three human characters.

Video Games

• Mega Man:
  • In Mega Man, aside from the two doctors who built the series' robots, humans are almost never seen. Since Mega Man's duty is to stop the latest attack from Wily's robots, it makes sense. Wily and Light aside, the only other humans who've made physical appearances in the Classic series come from Mega Man 4, with Dr. Cossack and his daughter Kalinka, and Mega Man 11, where a few humans make appearances as background characters in flashbacks.
  • In the Sequel Series Mega Man X, Dr. Cain is the only human seen onscreen. Compared with the Classic games however, humans are frequently referenced and implied to be dying out due to the numerous rebellions by Sigma and Reploids (advanced robots capable of free thought) going Maverick (Reploids gone insane due to an error in their programming or simply declared as threats to society). Ironic in that it's the Maverick Hunter's prime mission to protect what remains of the human population and X and Zero fight for this goal, but their society is never seen.
  • Mega Man Zero: Ciel is a prominent character, arguably co-protagonist with Zero himself, humans still aren't shown despite the resistance fighting against Fantastic Racism by the city of Neo-Arcadia for Reploid equality. The third game introduces Big Bad Dr. Wile, a Omnicidal Maniac bent on destroying humans and Reploids alike. It's not until the fourth and final installment that said city is shown to be the last human settlement on Earth. Unsurprisingly, the humans just want to be left alone.
• Onmyoji: It is known that humans and Youkai coexist in the same society, but there are exactly four named humans in this game.
• Primordia (2012) focuses exclusively on robots, with no humans period. Humanity is an important part of the backstory and setting, but is seemingly long-extinct by the time of the story; the closest you ever come to meeting one is stumbling upon a skeleton in an old abandoned base. A supplementary short story reveals humans aren’t actually extinct yet... but only one appears in any capacity, it’s made clear her community is the very last bastion of mankind, and it’s also clear that they’re on their last legs and will probably be dead soon anyways, with robotkind none the wiser.
• In the Sonic the Hedgehog series, aside from Doctor Eggman himself who is a villainous version of the Token Human, the classic titles featured no humans whatsoever, to the point where it was unclear for a while if the cast inhabited our world at all. Starting with Sonic Adventure, characters were explicitly shown to live around cities with plenty of walking, talking human beings, but even then very few contribute in any meaningful way. Maria and Gerald Robotnik are vital to the plot as characters, but only show up in flashbacks, Princess Elise and Professor Pickles only make appearances in their own games and never again, and otherwise interaction between the Funny Animal cast and humans is strictly limited to incidental NPC dialogue in the handful of games that offer hub worlds. Shadow the Hedgehog broke away from the trend with the President, his assistant, and several GUN members having more than a few speaking lines, as well as the aforementioned princess and a few others in Sonic the Hedgehog (2006).

Web Animation

• Battle for Dream Island: It is mentioned that humans exist in Goiky, but we have yet to see one.
  • David and Dora may be exceptions, but it is unknown whether they are actually humans or if they are something else.
• Wolf Song: The Movie: humans only ever get mentioned twice in the film and have only an indirect role in the plot, staying entirely off screen the entire time. Instead the focus is shoved on the wolves and the adventures and struggles they face, and let’s just say, humans aren’t their biggest concern here…

Web Original

• The Chilean Edutainment Show Mi Perro Chocolo^note My Chocolo Dog is basically a Farm of Funny Animals which few presence of humans there. In the first version, there's the little girl with her family (father, mother and a little baby, the former even appearing in one song), but in the 2015 version, there's only Lila as the only human present (assumed it's the same girl from previous version, even when the design is completely different) and friend of the other animals. And in one song, there's Martin, another child as Lila, that only appears in that song.
• Technically, The World of Vicki Fox is Lions and Tigers and Humans... Oh, My!, but it's a very mild case. Humans exist in Vicki's world, but they don't show up often and have almost no bearing on the plot, leading to this trope. On the Sliding Scale of Animal Cast, the strip is a Level 3. Also, none of the human characters have reappeared since the strip's hiatus ended in 2017.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time: For most of the show's run, Finn is the only human known to exist on the Land of Ooo (thus why he's often referred as "Finn the Human"). Eventually, a few human characters appear, such as Susan Strong and Finn's father Martin, and one major character, Ice King is revealed to have been human once. The "Islands" mini-series reveals that humans are still alive in a group of distant islands separated from the rest of Ooo.
• In Blaze and the Monster Machines, there's AJ, the driver and friend of Blaze, and Gabby, the Wrench Wench of Axle City. Those two are the only humans (and specifically children) that appear in a world full of Sentient Vehicles where all creatures are depicted as monster trucks (animals included).
• Care Bears: Unlock the Magic: The show takes place in the Silver Lining, an area adjacent to the Care Bears' home of Care-A-Lot. As such, no humans are seen, although preparations for Easter are mentioned in one episode.
• The Exodite is a 3D animated series set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Quite refreshingly for an otherwise human-centric franchise, this series follows Lako'ma, a T'au Shas'vre Stealthsuit squad commander, in her hunt for the titular Exodite on a hotly-contested world. The Imperium appears as enemy forces and are not really given much focus.
• My Little Pony: Only in My Little Pony 'n Friends and My Little Pony TV Specials from G1, in which Megan and friends are the only humans; all the other generations are made of World of Funny Animals.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: Humans are not present on the series (with the exceptions of Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy), but the garbage they throw to the sea is already part of this submarine world. Humans appear in The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, where SpongeBob and Patrick Star go to the surface and then they found Mitch Buchannon. The Sequel The Sponge Bob Movie Sponge Out Of Water features more humans, including one as the Big Bad.
• Star Trek: Prodigy takes place in the Star Trek universe, where humans exist, but the events of this series happen far from human-occupied space and the closest thing to a human in the main cast is a holographic simulation of Kathryn Janeway.
• 3-2-1 Penguins! focuses mainly on the eponymous penguins and the various aliens whom they assist.
• Tom and Jerry: We only ever see the legs of a housemaid, and Tom is "just" a cat while she's present.
• Transformers: While many iterations of the franchise have featured human friends and allies, there are some exceptions:
  • Beast Machines: The series takes place entirely on the Transformers' home planet of Cybertron, with humans not even being mentioned at all.
  • Transformers: Cyberverse: Barring Flashback scenes, the entirety of season one (and much of season two) takes place on Earth. Despite this, barely any humans actually appear.
• TUGS focuses on Sentient Vehicles; all we ever see of the humans are megaphones.
• Ronald-Ann was the only human who had a speaking role in A Wish for Wings that Work.

Multiple Media

• My Little Pony: Humans are minimal in G1. They appear in books, comics, and animated adaptations but are rarely given characteristic and are mostly Audience Surrogates. By the G2 reboot, humans were removed from the franchise. It stayed this way until G4's High School AU My Little Pony: Equestria Girls. But even then that in a separate dimension and the human characters never really interact with a straight pony that isn't turned into a human (or a dog in Spike's case) when an Equestrian comes into the human world.
• Star Wars usually has at least one human protagonist, but a few exceptions have appeared:
  • Starfighter: Crossbones was originally supposed to have only alien characters; two humans ultimately made it in as minor characters.
  • "Lair of Grievous", an episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, focuses on Kit Fisto, his former apprentice Nahdar Vebb and (obviously) Grievous, who belong to three distinct alien species. Dooku, a human, is a minor character.
• "Bad Luck Jack" is a Youtube short revolving around characters from the Web Comic Zoophobia. The comic's sole human character, Cameron, is neither seen nor mentioned in the short.

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