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Eddy: You idiot! Does Rolf look like Double-Dee?
Ed: ...Maybe with a hat.
In Real Life, different people have different faces — barring identical twins or rare look-alikes.
Not so in cartoons ◊.
Impossibly Cool Clothes or unusual hairstyles can create an extremely powerful framing effect, meaning the rest of the character's design may be quite simple as a shortcut. The unfortunate result may be a fundamentally homogenized artstyle, further exacerbated if the designs are simplified further for characters who must be easy to animate in large groups. Naturally this runs the risk of looking somewhat cheap, especially if the cast gets very large. This can be compensated with color redesigns, or sticking a character habitually into one outfit. Theoretically, the chance of a character's outfit being unique should seemingly go up with this trope as another means of distinction. Likewise totally homogeneous outfits would seem to encourage other variation.
This ignores the typical cause: a lazy (or just inexperienced) artist. A character's 'unique' appearance is still not actually allowed to vary in a realistic manner, unless that is a specific "mode" or tonal shift for them. At that point, it also may cause a shift to empathizing a different aspect. As Asians culturally focus on eye and face shape to identify faces to a larger degree than those in other places and eye shapes are extremely easy to change on the fly, anime typically uses a large amount of variation on eyes rather than faces.
Female characters seem especially susceptible to this, due the emphasis on the character's stylised and stereotyped attractiveness/cuteness further limiting any unusual variation.
It should be noted that this is not◊ a modern phenomenon.
When applied in excess to secondary characters, it can become Faceless Masses. The Videogame version of this trope is You ALL Look Familiar.
The opposite of this trope is a Cast Of Snowflakes, where even the most incidental characters designs tend to be unique and well-defined. Sounds like but is unrelated to Same Face Different Name, which is about creators going by different monikers.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
Comic Books
- Archie Comics is relatively well-known for this, as a common story involves Betty or Veronica merely placing on a wig to imitate the other, leaving every other character completely fooled. In fact, the only female characters in Archie Comics not to have the same body and face type are either older women, the rare 'super-attractive' types such as Cheryl Blossom or Melody, who possess larger busts and more curves, or the Gonks like Big Ethel.
- Much of the cast of Scott Pilgrim restyle or dye their hair throughout the series — a very bad move considering Bryan Lee O'Malley can draw approximately 2 faces ('standard' and 'long', with optional female characteristics for the latter if you're lucky), and uses the same one for all recurring characters. Freckles are employed twice... and fail to distinguish the two identical blondes to which they're applied. This leads to interminable stretches of "Aren't those two together anymore? Who is that? Isn't she in America? I thought he was with them"...
- Jack Kirby's women are famous for being only distinguishable by their hairstyles. His other characters, on the other hand, are so varied and diverse that it almost makes up for it.
- This is an improvement on how he drew people in the early Fantastic Four (and other comics of the time)—one letters column admitted his eight basic types bore an unofficial nickname, "Kirby's Kast of Kharacters."
- "Finder" by Carla Speed Mac Neil does this on purpose, in a civilization composed almost entirely of clans that intentionally inbreed to look like each other.
- John Byrne (of Fantastic Four, The Man of Steel) is known for having his male faces look pretty much the same, while his female characters all have the same face. This is especially noticeable when his Batman and Superman are on the same page: the two of them are twins who happen to wear different costumes.
- The semi-internet-famous meme 'Tony Stark Is Everyone' is basically the masterpiece of this trope. Turns out that without his distinctive mustache, Tony Stark becomes Bruce Wayne. Adding glasses made him Clark Kent. From there, the permutations are endless.
- Female characters in general seem to suffer the most from this trope in comic books. The older the comic, the more likely it is that all female characters have the same face, just with different hairstyles, and sometimes, with a little luck, a slightly different body type.
- During the Silver Age of comics, Superman would run into lookalikes often - from his Kandorian cousin to a movie actor- who were so similar to him that they could (and did) pass for him. Of course this was an intentional plot point. I guess Supes is supposed to have "one of those faces" which helps to explain his Clark Kenting - somewhat.
- Tom Grummett's characters tend to all have the same face. This makes it awkward when drawing characters who are romantically involved, such as Superboy and Wonder Girl, or Mach-IV and Songbird.
- Mark Bagley is a major offender, especially in Ultimate Spider Man. He is often forgiven for this because he is an inhumanly fast penciller - in an era where comic fans are used to delays, Bagley has a habit of getting issues out early.
- Elf Quest was a rare subversion. Wendy Pini kept a concordance of the shapes of eyes, facial structure, etc., so that her elves definitely weren't the same faces with different (extremely elaborate) hairdos. Although elves are all slender and have bodies that are considered attractive in this culture, there was a lot of variation in that shapeliness, on the men and especially the women.
Film
- Lampshaded in the DVD commentary of The Incredibles, in which all of the background and minor characters are "played" by the same, slightly-altered CGI model (dubbed "Universal Man"). Yes, even the female characters.
- Disney used several iconic dance scenes, from at least three different movies, over again in "Robin Hood". Along with some other scenes. Deja vu, much?
- How is that even possible? Wouldn't you have to redraw the whole scenes anyway? Why even bother copying if you have to do that much work in the first place.
- Done to some extent in the live-action View Askewniverse movies, as the same actor can play two or three characters in the series. Ben Affleck appeared in two roles in Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back, first as Holden Mc Neil and then later as himself.
- Live-action war movies can be like this, since often everyone is a young man with a crew cut wearing fatigues, a helmet and a lot of obscuring mud. If the army in question is integrated, there might at least be a Token Black guy.
Newspaper Comics
- All young, attractive women in Beetle Bailey over the decades, varying only by hair style and clothing. They're also drawn in a very different style from the men and older women, with sensuously flowing lines (which is of course only an exaggeration of reality). The style has shifted somewhat over the years, but the theme hasn't. Two recurring examples are Ms. Buxley and Beetle's previous girlfriend, who look about as different as they can within this technique, but mostly it applies to the hundreds of usually nameless extras Killer and the other soldiers are typically drooling after. If a young woman is drawn any other way, she's almost without exception meant to be plain or ugly.
- All the younger men in Apartment 3-G look like each other.
- Scott Adams, author of Dilbert, isn't quite as bad as certain other examples on this page, but has admitted that he can't draw that many faces. This resulted in two main things:
- Ted the Generic Guy, and
- The Pointy Haired Boss being related to Phil, Prince of Insufficient Light.
Video Games
- Perhaps somewhat understandably, Final Fantasy XI does this, with most races having only 8 faces per race/gender combination, and a palette-swapped version of each face to give an alternate hair-color (the Tarutaru race has only 4 faces per gender, offering 4 sets of coloration per face instead of two). This is only a strict limitation on PCs and the quested NPC fellows (who were further limited to a subset of these), but even some story-important NPCs showed very little differentiation from these models (most egregious example from off the top of this editor's head is Doctor Shantotto, who is Tarutaru Female face 4-A in relatively common mage gear, with some custom animations), and most general NP Cs who are neither very young nor very old use the same faces as PCs. Also, each race/gender combination is identical from the neck down, with both sexes of Tarutaru being thus identical to each other as well.
- This is a complaint with quite a few MMOs. Most MMOs without extensive character generators tend to have very few facial choices per sex/race combination. World Of Warcraft, for example, tends to average somewhere around eight faces per sex/race combo, and usually only two of each of them look good enough to use most of the time. True, you can change hair color and shape, and facial hair, but that's really barely anything, and most of those favor heavily towards one style. Even one of the rare examples that shouldn't be, City Of Heroes, tends to lean towards this; while they have a lot, lot, LOT of options, only a few are really, honestly usable for "normal" looking characters. The rest are a bit too close to Uncanny Valley half the time to be tolerable.
- It's an awfully common thing for the awfully generic products that fill 90% of the Dating Sim market. This is visible in almost everything, stock character designs, stock plots, stock character types, stock Photoshop glowing pink, etc. This YTMND animation gives a really good example.
- Note that the characters featured in that animation are all designed by Naru Nanao; a couple of them even come from the same game. Her later designs vary a bit more.
- This also follows with anime based on h-games (AIR, Kanon, CLANNAD, etc.) which tend to have only one face — well, maybe two, one for boys and one for girls.
- Possibly the worst offender is Aoi Nishimata, possibly best known as one of the character designers for SHUFFLE. Some examples.
- Forget stock 'designs', the game Otome Wa Boku Ni Koishiteru literally uses the same three character pictures for any random students who aren't part of the main cast. This includes several named characters who are part of the Student Council during Takako's plot.
- Akira Toriyama, maker of Dragon Ball (see above), has been the character designer for a number of games, including Chrono Trigger and every single Dragon Quest. And, true to form, nearly every single character in those games has a visual counterpart to be found in Dragon Ball.
- In a couple of rare examples (such as Dragon Quest Swords, where none of the characters have spiky hair/Goku eyes, and a few are wearing decidedly Baroque-era or gothic outfits) he breaks out of the six faces mold, but when he phones it in (such as with Tobal No. 1 and Blue Dragon), it's really obvious that he is.
- In Backyard Baseball and other Backyard Sports games, all characters, besides the 30 main ones, are based off of a few models.
- Tetsuya Nomura is often accused of succumbing to this trope. At least there's an in game excuse for all the characters that resemble each other in the Kingdom Hearts games.
Webcomics
- Achewood falls into this trope at times. Since the introduction of Ray, Pat, and Roast Beef, it has been revealed that the majority of the animal population are cats (dogs have been established as typically non-anthropomorphic and excluded from the animal underground.) In keeping with Onstad's generally minimalist art style, most of the cats are interchangeable in terms of facial features. There are three or four body types, and a couple of heads to go with them, and generally the eyes, muzzle and ears of the cats are exactly the same (exceptions being Ray and his family, as well as his ex-current-ex-business partner-ex-girlfriend Tina, who have been identified as American Curls.)
- Real Life Comics does something similar.
- Everyone in Dominic Deegan would be almost indistinguishable from one another if they all shaved their heads if not for the eyelashes and occasional orc fangs.
- Mookie is not above lampshading it on occasion. One such example can be seen here.
- Parodied in this Shortpacked! strip.
- Kristofer Straub's Checkerboard Nightmare and its successor, Starslip Crisis, have identical-looking humans except for hair and costuming. The strips don't suffer for this, though.
- Lampshaded in this Starslip Crisis strip.
- A common criticism of Ctrl+Alt+Del is that the art style involves most characters having nearly identical facial features. This image◊ is provided for examination. Memetic Mutation has branded this expression B^U because it looks like said digits turned sideways, and by extension its author is often called Tim B^Uckley.
- If his personal artwork site is anything to judge by, Buckley can draw fairly well.
- Word Of God states that he keeps a photoshop database of stock expressions and gestures in order to get the comic out in a timely manner. When Buckley actually gives a shit and hand draws a comic (usually used when he's doing Take That-style gags or working with very specific subject matter), the results are pretty stunning.
- Though he has no meme associated with him, Scott Ramsoomair of VG Cats is often criticized of the same thing. Ironically, it used to be praised for not falling into this trope, before people started really paying attention and notice that most characters have the same insane look on their faces.
- The reason that the criticisms only came more recently is that the problem really did get worse as the art evolved. It could be related to the fact that he is obviously relying on his computer a lot more. While Leo and Aeris did always look like essentially palette swapped versions of each other, it can be pointed out that the different facial expressions often look very similar now, I.E. pissed off character A looks like pissed off characters B, C, and D, or at least a lot more than before. It doesn't help that yes, they do tend to look pretty weird.
- I think Scott heard us.
- Megatokyo: Many readers can barely differentiate between the female characters that didn't wear insane outfits - even Piro is androgynous enough to be confused for one of the girls in a few scenes!
- The fans find endless amusement in pointing out that Piro could very well be his girlfriend's twin sister, especially as his bangs grow ever longer.
- Kimiko gets a bit of it right back due to her small bust and non-existent hips, though it’s mostly Piro’s fault for looking like her.
- This is more so with the male characters Dom, Matsui and Inspector Masimichi Sonoda. As can be seen in this strip where Matsui has to be captioned to identify who he is. The other similar-looking man present is Dom (obviously).
- The tendency for all bishonen in any given anime series to have the same generically pretty face is parodied in this strip at the Anime News Network website.
- In some really early strips of Penny Arcade, Gabe and Tycho looked very similar, but by late 2000 Tycho had started to develop his trademark baldness while Gabe had started to get his current pig-like face. It got better, so now they look very different.
- Played with in Order Of The Stick, which has Only Two Faces. The faces are male and female, differentiated by the position of the eyes and mouth (women have both positioned lower on the face, suggesting more delicate features and smaller chins; the difference is showcased by the storyline in which Roy uses the Belt of Gender Changing and his features shift accordingly). However, in this case the trope is justified because they're, well... stick figures. Xykon is the only member of the cast who completely stands out, as he is a skeleton.
- Even that variation gets lampshaded when Redcloak creates some Xykon decoys by getting some skeleton monsters and dressing them up like him.
- Vaarsuvius, whose sex is deliberately ambiguous, is a hybrid, with features higher on his/her face than a woman's but lower than a man's.
- College Roomies From Hell has often been accused of this, particularly the gigantic noses of all the characters.
- Many of the characters in Jack are essentially the same model with different markings. It's very hard to tell what species some of them are meant to be without being told (Arloest is a panda; Farrago is a ferret; it's hard enough to tell them apart, let alone discern their respective species).
- Concession only has one face for all it's characters. In fact, one of them is a pangolin but the only hint that he's not a cat or a wolf or some shit is the tail, which looks like that of a pangolin, if you're really looking hard for one. There's a FAQ, and one question addresses this; the artist's answer is that his characters, for example the pangolin fellow, would be pretty fuck ugly if they looked like their right animals. This begs the question why he bothered at all.
- The author likes pangolins.
- xkcd, with the exception of a handful of early pieces, tends to have zero faces.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has one face. Luckily, it's a gag-a-day comic with zero recurring characters.
Western Animation
Real Life
- Can be Truth In Television: a brain disorder known as prosopagnosia or face blindness results in a person being unable to recognize faces. Hairstyles, clothing styles, and distinctive features such as scars still work for distinguishing individuals.
- To clarify a little, it's not that the disorder takes away a person's ability to see or understand faces - they know what a face is, they can identify an eye, an nose, or what not, and faces look normal to them. However, the ability to put it all together into a unique face is lost. They're 'just faces'; even when looking at one's own face.
- In some Drug Rehab centers part of the process is shaving your head because it eliminates vanity and encourages camaraderie among those trying to get clean. The first thing you'll notice is that when everyone is bald, everyone starts to look the same. This is part of the reason why some people go for extreme hair and clothing styles because they want to stand out in a crowd.
- Done for the same reasons in many armed forces and some cults.
- Autistic individuals may have trouble recognizing faces due to impaired brain development; autistic children who are shown pictures of their mothers show the same lack of recognition as when they're shown pictures of strangers.
- In fact, the prevalence of this trope in anime likely has something to do with the fact that studies show that Autism & similar conditions are abnormally common in Japan.
Literature Illustration
Close Literature Illustration
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◊.
Impossibly Cool Clothes or unusual hairstyles can create an extremely powerful framing effect, meaning the rest of the character's design may be quite simple as a shortcut. The unfortunate result may be a fundamentally homogenized artstyle, further exacerbated if the designs are simplified further for characters who must be easy to animate in large groups. Naturally this runs the risk of looking somewhat cheap, especially if the cast gets very large. This can be compensated with color redesigns, or sticking a character habitually into one outfit. Theoretically, the chance of a character's outfit being unique should seemingly go up with this trope as another means of distinction. Likewise totally homogeneous outfits would seem to encourage other variation.
This ignores the typical cause: a lazy (or just inexperienced) artist. A character's 'unique' appearance is still not actually allowed to vary in a realistic manner, unless that is a specific "mode" or tonal shift for them. At that point, it also may cause a shift to empathizing a different aspect. As Asians culturally focus on eye and face shape to identify faces to a larger degree than those in other places and eye shapes are extremely easy to change on the fly, anime typically uses a large amount of variation on eyes rather than faces.
Female characters seem especially susceptible to this, due the emphasis on the character's stylised and stereotyped attractiveness/cuteness further limiting any unusual variation.
It should be noted that this is not
◊ a modern phenomenon.
When applied in excess to secondary characters, it can become Faceless Masses. The Videogame version of this trope is You ALL Look Familiar.
The opposite of this trope is a Cast Of Snowflakes, where even the most incidental characters designs tend to be unique and well-defined. Sounds like but is unrelated to Same Face Different Name, which is about creators going by different monikers.
