Swallowed Whole

Behold, a bear-ly digested meal.

We are two mariners
Our ships' sole survivors
In this belly of a whale
Its ribs are ceiling beams
Its guts are carpeting
I guess we have some time to kill

— The Decemberists, "The Mariner's Revenge"

An extreme version of the Big Eater which is usually fat, usually a monster of some type, eats the hero or some other innocent bystander. But they don't chew, they don't rip the body up into smaller chunks to fit in their mouths — they just swallow the victim whole in one or two gulps.

It's often a fate in settings that feature dinosaurs or kaiju, although in Real Life there are few if any animals who could realistically inflict such a fate on a human.

A Sub-Trope of Eaten Alive. When a character tries to invoke this trope, it is a case of Eat Me.

Compare Just Eat Him and Eaten Alive. May overlap with Just Desserts. If the person eaten gets out alive and not much worse for wear it's Getting Eaten Is Harmless. In video games, can sometimes lead to a Womb Level set inside of the consuming creature. When the eaten mentions, considers or even ends up escaping using the... uh... "back door", then this trope has led to the Anuscape Plan.

Contrast Orifice Invasion (when the orifice is the mouth).

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Examples:

Advertising

• There was a weird campaign for Slim Jims in 1999 like this one where a talking Slim Jim was swallowed, and interacted with other talking food in the eater's stomach.
• An Italian ad for Puma brand sportswear features a gigantic supermodel rampaging in the middle of a city. A hapless idiot in a red convertible drives right up to her. She then picks up his convertible up and dangles it upside-down over her head, causing him to fall into her mouth and get eaten.

Anime & Manga

• Adventures of the Little Koala: Roobear Koala and Betty Koala are trying to save stranded sea creatures by throwing them inside a nearby pod of huge whales. Unfortunately they end up trapped inside one, and taken for a ride.
• Attack on Titan: In episode 5 , Eren gets swallowed whole by a Titan in his attempt to save his best friend. In episode 8, he then emerges unscathed on a different Titan.
• Bleach: There's a benevolent version where Unohana Retsu's zanpakutou takes the form of a flying ray-thing that somehow heals the Shinigami it swallows.
• Blood-C:
  • The series boasts a rare example in which a character is eaten whole by a ball of hair, leaving only an enigmatic puddle of blood behind. Some other episodes feature people being eaten whole, but it is much more common for them to become horribly mutilated before actually being eaten.
  • For a more traditional example; in the final episode, Saya purposefully enters the body of an Elder Bairn through its mouth to save Kanako and kill it from the inside.
• Cage of Eden: This happens to Miina.
• In Catnapped!, the rampaging monster Papadoll swallows dozens of citizens whole. It turns out he was just carrying them to his mistress to be used in her evil plot, because when he gets back to her, he spits them all out alive and unharmed. Curiously, the heroes who witness the "swallowing" seem to understand that the victims have been taken away and can be rescued, rather than assuming (as the audience might) that they were eaten.
• In Cat Paradise Futaba and her cat Gekko are swallowed by a snake; specifically, the "younger brother" of Sakira, one of the Five Spirit Beasts. They are later rescued and released by their comrades Tsukasa and Raimu.
• Chained Soldier:
  • While fighting Kumadouji, Shushu shrinks herself down and allows herself to be swallowed by the monster, at which point she grows to giant size, destroying it from within.
  • After being abducted by the Thunder Gods, Naon and Koko are eaten whole and absorbed by Kuusetsu who uses them as the basis for her humanoid form.
  • Also happens to Mira who is swallowed and absorbed by Kuusetsu after being defeated by her in battle.
• Delicious in Dungeon begins with an adventuring party’s White Mage being swallowed whole by a red dragon deep within the dungeon, but not before she’s able to save the rest of the party by teleporting them back to the surface. Their mission from then on is to make their way back down and retrieve her body while there's still enough of her left for a resurrection. Fortunately, dragons are known to have very slow metabolisms, so it’ll take more than a few days for her to be fully digested.
• Dragon Ball Z:
  • A variant; Buu can absorb other fighters to gain their power (gaining the outfit of the strongest person he has absorbed in the process) by engulfing them in the pink goo he's made of, doing so to Gotenks (the fusion of Goten and Trunks, who defuses while absorbed), Piccolo, and Gohan. When Vegetto, the fusion of Goku and Vegeta, is absorbed (as part of his plan to free the others), he puts up a shield, which prevents him from becoming a part of Buu, but defuses back into Goku and Vegeta, who then journey through Buu's body to free the others.
  • Another variant in Dragon Ball Z; Cell's goal is to absorb Androids 17 and 18 in order to reach his perfect form. He does this by opening the usually needle-shaped tip of his tail into a large funnel and then engulfing and absorbing them whole. Cell manages to absorb both 17 and 18, but later regurgitates 18 through his mouth after Super Saiyan 2 Gohan delivers a powerful punch to his stomach.
  • In Dragon Ball GT Cell nearly absorbs Kid Goku, but the latter manages to fight his way back out.
• Fairy Tail: Happens to Natsu when Fukuro uses his Capture magic to swallow him and absorb his fire magic. Fukuro nearly does it to Gray as well.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • At one point, Ed, Ling, and Envy are accidentally swallowed by Gluttony. Then, inside Gluttony's "stomach", Envy shifts to its true form and eats Ed.
• Karakasano Saien: In the last chapter, Otome the Yandere maid is offered as a sacrifice to the goddess Marie by Rokusuke so he can get out of his contract for working at her inn. Marie proceeds to swallow the girl whole, briefly resulting in a Balloon Belly before her stomach goes back to normal. Regretting the decision, Rokusuke voices his remorse, which Otome hears inside Marie's stomach awakening her and motivating her to cut her way out.
• In the Made in Abyss anime (but not manga), Riko and Reg fall into the stomach-like cavity of an amakagame, a carnivorous plant/animal that lures (rabbit-like) neritantan with the scent of baracocha fruit. There's light and air in there, and Riko cuts them out.
• In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha ViVid, Fabia's giant bat demon does this a lot. However, it doesn't digest the people it eats. Instead, it shrinks them then spits them out in a sealed jar for its master. Most of the new cast are captured in this manner.
• Mr. Stain on Junk Alley: Mr. Stain befriends a fish living in the fountain, and it grows huge over the course of the episode. Eventually, he gets eaten by it.
• Naruto:
  • Naruto experiences this during the Chunin Exams in the Forest of Death when one of Orochimaru's giant snake summons eats him. Naruto escapes by creating enough shadow clones that it burst open from the inside out.
  • Kinkaku and Ginkaku are swallowed whole by the Nine-Tailed Fox and start eating it from the inside, giving them some of its power.
  • This happens to Naruto again when Son Goku the Four-Tailed Ape catches him in his mouth. As before, Naruto escapes by creating so many clones the beast is forced open.
• One Piece: This seems to come up rather frequently in One Piece, as its world is stuffed to the brim with enormous sea monsters.
  • In the Skypeia arc, Luffy and some of his companions are swallowed whole by a giant snake. Once Luffy realizes he's in the snake, he figures the quickest way out is to head for the tail. His companions talk him out of this.
  • One man literally has a vacation home inside a massive whale's stomach.
• Pig God from One-Punch Man was a matchless wholly-swallowing hero, until he met his match in the Monster Association that tried to swallow him.
• Although most of the characters from Ranma ½ aren't giant man-eating monsters (there are some monsters, but they don't eat man as far we know), they seem to be capable of swallowing whole. Literally. Without chewing. This is demonstrated by the running gag which involves them accidentally eating something (as big as a bar of soap) laced with weird potions or sleeping drugs.
• In Spirited Away, this happens to quite a few of the bathhouse employees after No-Face goes nuts. Fortunately, Chihiro's medicine makes him cough them up. (Along with everything else he's eaten, much of which he spits up on Yubaba.)
• S Rare Soubi No Niau Kanojo: This happens several times.
  • In chapter 5, Yurina is swallowed by a large pitcher plant monster and Ea soon follows. However, Ea breaks both of them free by destroying the monster from the inside out.
  • In chapter 10, Haruka is almost completely swallowed by a large mollusk-like creature, but manages to break free.
  • During the heroes' first confrontation with Lamia, Lamia catches Ea by surprise and swallows her up. Yurina tries to free Ea, but she herself is swallowed for her trouble. Yurina is freed by Haruka and Lamia later releases Ea voluntarily.
  • In chapter 31, Honoka is swallowed by a giant frog and nearly digested, but she manages to free herself.
  • In chapter 37, Haruka is swallowed by a large toad-like creature, but quickly frees herself by blasting her way out.
  • During the final battle with Lamia, most of the heroes (and other characters) are steadily picked off by Lamia. First, Lamia swallows Daigo in order to gain his male sex organs (don't ask) so she can reproduce asexually. Lamia then turns on her remaining followers and comrades and swallows them too. Afterwards, Ami, Riho, Mayu, Saori, Honoka, Marimo, Rinmei, and Karasu all force their way into Lamia's mouth, allowing themselves to be swallowed so they can rescue Daigo. They manage to free Daigo, but they themselves remain trapped in Lamia's stomach. Lamia later attempts to swallow Haruka and Ea, and very nearly succeeds, but Rebecca forces her to spit them back out. After dealing a critical blow to Rebecca, Lamia grabs her and then, after savoring her, swallows Rebecca and absorbs her power, transforming into her most powerful form. Finally, Lamia nearly swallows Haruka again, but Haruka uses her special power to stay at the cusp of Lamia's mouth before she is ultimately defeated.
• Tokimeki Tonight: In chapter 5, Ranze mistakenly shapeshifted herself into a bread during a race and end up swallowed by her rival, Yoko. She managed to morph back and escape in the following chapter through Yoko's mouth when she was unconscious.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: The original series has this happen thanks to Forest Wolf, an anime-exclusive card used by Leon von Schroeder in a fairy tale-themed deck. It's based on the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale, being a large four-legged wolf wearing an old woman's nightcap and bedgown—any monster that it can destroy by battle is instead equipped to it, which is depicted in the anime as the wolf swallowing its prey whole with no regard to size and gaining a sizable belly.

Animation

• Pucca: Garu forces himself down a lion's throat to escape Pucca in "Big Top Bang Bang".

Comic Books

• Alan Ford: in Jaws, recurring villain Superciuk's escape attempts ends with him falling feet-first into the open jaws of a ravenous shark (in the Hudson, no less). Aside from him being starved on his beloved Barbera wine, the sojourn in the dogfish's belly has no ulterior effect on him.
• Bone: In Stupid, Stupid Rat Tails, Big Johnson Bone is swallowed by a giant rat creature and escapes by starting a fire. This leads to a series of events that is used to explain why the Rat Creatures dock their tails at a young age.
• The DCU:
  • Justice Society of America:
    • In the storyline The Return of Hawkman, Atom Smasher is eaten whole by an alien. Unfortunately for the alien, Atom Smasher's powers consist of Super-Strength and Size Shifting...
    • In Last Days of the Justice Society, Hawkman and Hawkgirl meet their (temporary) end inside the gaping jaws of the Hellhound Fenrir during the battle of Ragnarok. Atom and Power Girl try to come to the couple's rescue by tearing apart the jaws of Fenrir, but they were too late.
  • In an issue of Booster Gold, a transformed-to-rodent Blue Beetle is swallowed by an antagonist called Estrogina. After failing to free him, Booster despairs, until the spell changing Blue Beetle into a chipmunk wears off...
  • The origin of Ultra Boy from the Legion of Super-Heroes has him being swallowed up by a giant space-living energy creature and being bombarded by its radiation before another ship blasted the side of the creature, letting Ultra Boy loose but giving him superpowers. (Because the Silver Age of comics is sometimes not very subtle, Ultra Boy's real name is Jo Nah.)
  • In Justice League 3000, Hal Jordan is shrunk by Locus and swallowed whole so she can take him home with her.
  • The first issue of Harley Quinn and Power Girl features Sleezox owning a pet seven-headed Hydra, with one head swallowing Power Girl whole. As Harley tells the multi-headed monster "No eating her partner!" then proceeding to demand the one head to spit her out, Power Girl immediately bursts her way out from the monster's throat, decapitating the head which landed on Sleezox. Covered in slime, Power Girl tries to prevent being eaten again by standing at the edge of the creature's mouth, struggling to hold it open with all her might, until Harley uses with an impressive arsenal found at Sleezox's bunker and annihilates the Hydra.
  • Superman:
    • Two for the Death of One: During one battle between evil sorcerers Syrene and Lord Satanis, the former creates a humongous snake which swiftly and happily guzzles the latter down its throat.
    • In Bizarrogirl, Bizarro Lex Luthor gets gobbled down by a truck-sized insectoid alien. Supergirl is about to cut Luthor out of the monster's belly, when Bizarro insists that "there is no need for surgery". Since all Bizarros are clones, he will just make another Luthor.
    • In Superman (Rebirth), the Eradicator eats Krypto whole. Fortunately, Superman is able to get his dog out.
• Felarya: Most of the monsters swallow their prey whole, but they do have stomach acid and it's rare for the prey to get out alive.
• Grimm Fairy Tales: Played for horror in issue #33, which adapts the obscure fairytale "The Three Snake Leaves". A scientist uses a snake-based elixir to cure his wife's fatal cancer, after being given a copy of a book containing this fairytale. Unfortunately for him, the book-giver is Belinda, the evil "Storyteller", and his wife, like the wife in the story, is overwhelmed by the instincts of the snake. Worse, just after reading this part of the story, he gets a call from the man who sold him the snake, explaining that he was given a snake-eating, offspring-cannibalizing king snake, rather than the intended coral snake. There is a Hope Spot when he sees his eldest son is alright once he rushes home... but the last panel shows he was too late to save his youngest.
• The Hoffnung Symphony Orchestra: In one of the illustrations, an unfortunate musician has been swallowed by a serpent (an obsolete wind instrument).
  "For security reasons this instrument is no longer in use."
• I Hate Fairyland: Gertrude (in an adult body) is swallowed by a massive Monster Whale in issue 4 of the revival series, where she spends most of the issue. The reader is lead to believe she spends years in there, before it's revealed she was only in there for the afternoon before killing it with her filth alone.
• Mickey Mouse Comic Universe: In "Battle of the Giant Ants", it's the fate of any ant that is caught by a giant anteater. At the start of the story, the ants have got one captured. Mickey, Goofy, and Pluto free it to avoid being recaptured for slave labor, bringing about the deaths of many.
• My Little Pony: Legends of Magic: In the fifth issue, a snake is turned gigantic by a cursed stone and begins to roam the countryside, eating everything it finds and growing bigger and bigger as it does so. A large number of characters — a team of soldiers, an entire village, assorted other ponies, a large number of woodland animals and the wizard who created the stone in the first place — all end up being swallowed whole, and are found alive and well sitting in the beast's stomach by the story's main character when she ends up being swallowed herself.
• Spider-Man: In The Amazing Spider-Man (1999) #5, the first time Peter Parker meets Mattie Franklin, the third Spider-Woman, they both arrive to fight one of the Mole Man's giant monsters, who swallows Mattie when she's distracted — only for her, to Spidey's shock, to start beating the monster up from the inside until it coughs her up.
• Star Wars: Doctor Aphra: The professional monster hunters Winloss and Nokk are hired via a hologram transmission by Aphra to capture a giant treasure-guarding monster with a strict No-Harm Requirement. Turns out that's because Aphra is inside the monster, having been swallowed after stealing the treasure. She's wearing a protective suit, but still needs someone to get her out before she's digested.

Comic Strips

• In Wormy, Bender the salamander was swallowed alive by a long-jawed mudsucker, only to cut his way out with a knife it'd also swallowed.

Fairy Tales

• "The Dragon Sliced In Two": In this Swiss fairy tale, a clever young shepherd named Juri tricks a brutish but gullible giant into believing that he is as strong as him, and to help kill a ferocious dragon to stop it from eating a princess. Unfortunately, Juri gets swallowed alive by the dragon, but as he tries to hack his way out of its belly with a knife, the giant kills it with a blow on its spine that causes it to split in two, freeing the hero, who through some more fast talking cons the giant into thinking they killed it together; the giant outside, the hero inside!
• "Little Otik": Otik eats six people whole. Later, when Otik's belly gets ripped open, they come out of its stomach unharmed.
• "Little Red Riding Hood", in the younger versions at least — there are a couple older variants where the wolf carves up grandma and lil' Red (and they, hardly surprising, don't get out alive).
• "The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids": The wolf devours all of Mother Goat's children, but they are rescued in the same way Little Red Riding Hood and her Grandma are saved.

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon):
  • Part of the set-up of this story is that when Ghidorah killed Vivienne Graham this way in Antarctica during the events of Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), she was Only Mostly Dead before getting revived and metamorphosed inside San's decapitated head, turning her into a two-headed Artificial Hybrid with San becoming her second head's mind.
  • The Skullcrawlers infected by the Many also do this to fresh human meat they come across to assimilate them.
  • And eventually, Keizer Ghidorah swallows Viv and San into its Belly Mouth in order to transform them into their final form as part of its Evil Plan for Vivienne.
• Eldritchrune:
  • In their first meeting, Susie eats Kris immediately upon seeing them. Luckily, they don't chew. Unluckily, her stomach is an immense Eldritch Location, which they remain trapped in for days.
  • Then again in 'Parasite Problem', where Kris willingly ventures inside their infinite stomach to try and fight a parasite deep inside.
• The Heart Trilogy: In Heart of Ashes, as a part of a Cruel and Unusual Death, Smaug swallows Andraya down his gullet before letting his internal dragon-fire boil her alive in his stomach.
• The Keys Stand Alone: Averted in The Soft World. The Tax Monster tries to swallow John, but he frantically turns himself to water and escapes this fate (though he traumatizes himself for a while, because he hates doing that).
• Kingdom Hearts: The Antipode:
  • While Riku was unable to save Prankster's Paradise, Monstro survived and in The Year Between, swallows the Gummi Ship and Riku, Kairi, Donald, and Goofy as he did in the original Kingdom Hearts, leading to a Womb Level identical to the original game.
  • Cy-Bugs make an appearance in the story. As in the source material, Cy-Bugs devour their victims to take on their traits by eating them whole, something King Candy once again learns the hard way.
• Voyages of the Wild Sea Horse: Nabiki Tendo tries to exsanguinate the Nosferatu, only to be reminded the hard way that it's a Blob Monster made of sapient bacteria that merely can assume a human form, resulting in her slurping down the entire child-sized creature and distending her belly into an obscene pseudo-pregnancy. Also doubles as Orifice Invasion, as the Nosferatu actively forces its way into her mouth so as to infect her from the inside out.
• Vow of Nudity: Happens to Haara and the pegasus she was riding in one story. They escape by assaulting the creature's stomach to a degree that it spits them back out.

Films — Animated

• In An American Tail, Fievel is almost eaten by a cat but manages to climb back up its throat and grab its uvula, causing a gag reflex that makes it cough Fievel up. In Fievel Goes West, Fievel ends up in Tiger's mouth by accident. He's fine when Tiger hears him.
• Asterix: At the end of Asterix Conquers America, Lucullus gets swallowed whole off-screen by Caesar's pet panther.
• Finding Nemo: Right before finally arriving at Sydney, Australia, Dory and Marlin are swallowed up by a blue whale. Upon reaching Sydney, they're also swallowed by a pelican (which they escape from by choking him) and are carried about in the mouth of another (friendlier) pelican.
• In Hercules, the one-headed Hydra battled Hercules until it flipped him into the air and swallowed him whole. Satisfied, the Hydra lets out a loud burp and licks its fangs. But after a moment, Hercules slashes his way out from inside the monster's throat by decapitation and stands next to the headless steaming carcass, covered in green slime. Unfortunately, cutting off a Hydra's head spawns more heads in its place...
• In How to Train Your Dragon, the Red Death swallows a Gronkle whole for not bringing enough food to feed it. Also, when Hiccup, Astrid, and Toothless try to flee from it, it is also seen devouring a Hideous Zippleback.
• In Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Little Johnny the aardvark gets swallowed by a baby T. rex.
• In Ice Age: Continental Drift, Granny's pet whale, Precious, swallows her, Sid and Manny.
• In Ice Age: Collision Course, Gavin swallows Granny.
• In The LEGO Ninjago Movie, when Lord Garmadon threatens to use the Ultimate Ultimate Weapon on Meowthra, the giant cat eats him up. After Lloyd gives a heartfelt speech to his father, Garmadon cries flaming tears, which causes Meowthra to cough him up.
• The Missing Link: The protagonist is swallowed by a shark at a point. He lights a fire in its belly Pinocchio-style, which causes the shark to blow up and fly like a hot air balloon, and ends up finding the... natural way out.
• In Moana, the Giant Enemy Crab Tamatoa tries to do this to both Moana and Maui, but gets distracted both times before he can actually do so.
• In A Mouse Tale, Sebastian the Chosen One is swallowed by a conjured large bat minion, but escapes by causing explosive indigestion with a spell.
• In Peter Pan, the Crocodile swallows Captain Hook whole, before he re-emerges intact. During a tense moment, Hook tries to prevent being eaten by standing at the edge of the creature's mouth, holding it open with all his might. Hook is definitely a menace to Peter Pan, but in this instance he almost gets consumed by an oversized crocodile.
• The Pagemaster: At one point, a dragon swallows Richard whole. Fortunately, it had also swallowed a copy of Jack and the Beanstalk, which lets Richard summon the titular beanstalk and ride it out of the dragon's mouth.
• In Pinocchio, Gepetto, Figaro, and Cleo get swallowed whole by Monstro the Whale, and Pinocchio later does as well when trying to find them.
• Shrek:
  • The climax of the first film features Dragon bursting into the chapel of Lord Farquaad's castle and snapping him up pretty quickly while he's making a speech about how he will have control of his kingdom. The movie itself doesn't make it apparent, but some of the bonus material establishes that Lord Farquaad is whole and somehow managing to stay alive inside of Dragon's stomach. The 4D attraction at Universal Studios Hollywood had it that he later died inside Dragon and comes back as a ghost.
  • Shrek 4D has this happen to Tinker Bell by a frog. She manages to escape from its mouth, however.
• In The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Mario and Donkey Kong are swallowed by a gigantic Maw-Ray after faling off Rainbow Road and into the ocean. Lucky for them one of the Rocket Barrels from DK's kart still works.
• In Toy Story 4, Giggle McDimples goes through the unfortunate experience of being swallowed by Dragon, a cat that resides at the antique store. Fortunately, she is coughed back up a few minutes later.

Films — Live-Action

• The Adventures of Baron Munchausen: Swallowed by an enormous sea creature, the travellers locate Gustavus, Adolphus, and the Baron's trusty horse Bucephalus. Finally they escape by blowing "a modicum of snuff" out into the sea creature's cavernous interior, causing it to sneeze the heroes out through its whale-like blowhole.
• The Brothers Grimm: A young girl is swallowed whole by a cursed horse. It spits cobwebs at her and pulls her into its mouth feet first. At one point, the camera looks down the horses throat and the girl is seen sliding further down. Another girl is later shoved into the stomach of a mud creature.
• Chompy And The Girls: The titular Chompy is seemingly a normal human, until his mouth opens ridiculously wide. He kicks off the film's main plot by swallowing a little girl whole in view of the main characters, resulting in him pursuing them like a terminator.
• The Creeping Terror is basically seventy-odd incredibly tedious minutes of leggy ladies getting gulped down by the rug monster from outer space.
• Deep Rising: The creature's tentacles can eat human beings in one gulp, and function as a digestive chamber as well. One such victim falls back out after the heroes fire at a tentacle, still alive and half-melted.
• On Dude, Where's My Car?, Tommy is gulped down by the Super Hot Giant Alien. Cut from the movie is Tommy's rude comment ("Do you spit or swallow?") that led to her swallowing him in the first place. At the end he survives after the Alien is blown up, Covered in Gunge.
• From Beyond: Tillinghast is in the process of being swallowed from the neck up by a giant worm-creature when Bubba turns off the Resonator to banish it back to its home dimension. Tillinghast comes away from it with his life, but he loses his hair in the process.
• Gamera:
  • In Gamera vs. Barugon, Onodera tries to steal a priceless diamond that's being used to lure Barugon into a lake to drown. He succeeds, but Barugon notices him getting away...
  • In Gamera vs. Gyaos, Gyaos does these to several humans that he comes across.
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: In the opening battle against an Abilisk, Drax the Destroyer willingly jumps into the eldritch beast's mouth to get swallowed in the belief that he can slay it from the inside since its skin is too hard. He is wrong, and Gamora saves him by cutting the Abilisk open after locating a small wound in its neck.
• Hisss: The Protagonist Nagini eats a number of her victims in this manner. If they're lucky, she crushes or bites them to death first. She's even seen contentedly sleeping with a Balloon Belly after eating the Asshole Victim that tried to rape her.
• Jaws 2: One of Michael's female friends is eaten by the giant shark right in front of him.
• Jurassic Park: The Mosasaurus is responsible for this at least twice.
  • Jurassic World: Happens to Zara Young when the Pteranodon that has her in its talons gets snapped up by a Mosasaurus.
  • Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom: One of the group sent to collect the Indominus rex's rib in the film's opening suffers this fate by the Mosasaurus. And just when he thought he was safe too.
• In Krampus, Jordan is swallowed whole by Der Klown. The adults arrive in the attic in time to see her boots disappearing into Der Klown's mouth.
• At the end of Lockjaw: Rise of the Kulev Serpent, Kelly stands still and allows himself to be swallowed whole by Lockjaw in order to allow Sarge to get a clear shot at the giant serpent. Fortunately for Kelly, once killed, the serpent dissolves around him, leaving him intact (if slimy).
• How Max handles the neighbor cat in Man's Best Friend. It's a dog-eat-cat world.
• The Meg. Happens to a couple of the megalodon's victims, but there's also a scene where the Meg tries to swallow the cylindrical shark cage (which it can't break open) with Suyin inside it, forcing the hero to do something recklessly stupid to save her.
• Men in Black:
  • Men in Black: Agent K gets swallowed whole by Edgar the Bug in the climax of the first movie. This turns out to be a ploy to blow Edgar up from the inside.
  • Men in Black II: A mugger ends up getting eaten whole by Serleena shortly after she lands and assumes human form.
• The Asylum did a Setting Update of Moby-Dick where the titular whale was upgraded to a kaiju. In one scene the tourists on a whale-watching boat are overjoyed to see a whale breach fully out of the water, only for the eponymous Monster Whale (which it's fleeing) to leap out of the sea after it and swallow the whale whole, then slam down and crush the boat as well.
• MonsterVerse:
  • In Godzilla (2014), the female Muto does this to a group of soldiers on a pier, and would have done so to Ford as well had Godzilla not force-fed her his Atomic Breath.
  • Kong: Skull Island: The Skullcrawlers, when they eat humans, tend to devour them in just one or two gulps, as they do to Bill Randa and one of Packard's soldiers.
  • In Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), Dr. Vivienne Graham is eaten this way by Ghidorah's middle head in Antarctica, and one of the Raptor pilots duelling Rodan is swallowed whole while ejecting.
• Nope: The Star Lasso Experience turns out to more than Ricky can handle, as what he thought was a ship was instead a pissed off carnivorus creature that proceeds to suck up him, his wife, their 3 boys and the entire audience of men, women and children into itself, where it torturingly digests them over the course of hours. The sound design is horrifyingly effective.
• Pacific Rim: Hannibal Chau gets swallowed by Otachi's offspring partway through the film, but eventually cuts his way back out. The "Aftermath" comic series (the canonicity of which is uncertain) sees him slowly dying of exposure to Kaiju Blue as a side-effect of it, though someone else ends up fatally shooting him first.
• In Rampage (2018), the female protagonist Kate Caldwell feeds the Big Bad Claire Wyden to the giant mutated gorilla George and the latter is swallowed whole along with the cure that will extinguish George's aggressiveness.
• Star Wars:
  • The Empire Strikes Back: When escaping Imperial pursuit, the Millennium Falcon goes to ground amidst a cluster of asteroids and lands within a cave. When a stray shot makes the cavern shudder, Han realizes that the "cave" is in fact the gullet of a gigantic space worm, and the Falcon makes its escape just as the beast's jaws snap shut.
  • Hutts, in various other media if not the movies themselves, are able and often willing to eat human-sized creatures whole.
  • The Saarlac monster on Tatooine not only does this, but keeps the victims alive for decades or more as they are slowly digested. Of course, Boba Fett wasn't inclined to go along with that idea.
  • The Rathtars from The Force Awakens devours human-sized prey using this method, grabbing them with their tentacles and shoving victims into their gigantic mouths.
• Tremors 3: Back to Perfection marks the first time that a character (namely, Burt Gummer) survives getting swallowed by a Graboid; he's in an oil barrel at the time, which offers a degree of protection, but he's still looking a little grotty when he's cut free from the corpse. For anyone else in the franchise, this is invariably fatal; Burt only survived because the barrel kept him from being crushed and the secondary protagonist managed to both trick the Graboid into caving in its skull by charging head-first into a concrete barrier and then dig up & cut through the corpse before Burt suffocated. Movie 6 eventually proves that this didn't come without consequences, since Burt got poisoned by the Graboid and falls terribly ill in that film.
• Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen: Devastator uses his giant vortex thing to eat Mudflap. Shortly afterward, Mudflap punches Devastator's eye out from inside his head and starts to hit him with it.
• One of the deep-sea Fish Men in Underwater does this to one of the deep-rig crew, unhinging its lower jaw and engulfing her (hard-shell dive suit and all) into its distendable belly.
• In Where the Wild Things Are, KW hides Max from Carol by swallowing him. She pulls him back up once the coast is clear.

Game Shows

• On BrainSurge, in Level 2, when a contestant gets a question wrong, they get eliminated, by getting sent backwards on a chair through a wall (of teeth).

Literature

• The Adventures of Pinocchio, again, only in the original Italian story it was a giant shark, not a whale.
• Animorphs: This happens sometimes.
  • In one book, Rachel is swallowed by a kronosaur, morphs into a grizzly, and claws her way out.
  • Marco gets swallowed in spider morph by a bird and survives only by morphing back to human inside of it.
• Deathlands: In Dectra Chain, the protagonists are pressganged into service on a whaler. However these are mutant Monster Whales and a sailor is swallowed whole. When the whale is killed and cut open he's still alive, but half-mad and partly dissolved by the stomach acids, so he commits suicide by jumping overboard.
• Dream Park: This is the Nibek's preferred method of attacking. Creepily, the house-sized creature's mouth is only the size of a human's, but can open up like a flower to engulf people.
• Dune: The burrowing sandworms home in on vibrations on the surface, and can grow big enough to swallow entire vehicles.
• Fablehaven: In Fablehaven: Rise of the Evening Star, this happens to Seth, after a demon he awoke catches up to him. He lives.
• Forest Kingdom: In the Hawk & Fisher spinoff series book 6 (The Bones of Haven), a giant spider encountered in the sewers lands on Hawk when it's killed. While it doesn't actually swallow him, he punches a hole in its descending abdomen with his axe, ends up inside its (mostly hollow) belly, then spends the next couple of minutes hacking his way out.
• Gaea Trilogy: How one travels by blimp. Luckily, blimps' digestive acid has approximately the pH of strong tea; they can only digest food that's been pre-digested and crapped out again by their symbiotes.
• Galaxy of Fear: During the course of The Nightmare Machine, Tash and Zak end up in the mouth of a whaladon, and know that being swallowed will kill them. It's a hologram.
• Golly Gump Swallowed A Fly, a children's book by Joanna Cole. The title character accidentally swallows a fly (it flew into his mouth while he was yawning), then deliberately swallows a spider to catch the fly, a bird to catch the spider, a cat to catch the bird, a dog to catch the cat, and a dogcatcher to catch the dog! At the end, Golly has an idea, and angrily threatens the six: "If you don't all get out of there, I'm going to swallow a grizzly bear!" It works, and they quickly climb (or fly) back out of his mouth, alive and unharmed.
• Just So Stories: In the story How the Whale Got His Throat a shipwrecked sailor is swallowed whole by a gluttonous whale who is curious to see what man tastes like.
• The Kalevala: The giant sage, Antero Vipunen, swallows the god-hero Vainamoinen alive. Unperturbed, Vainamoinen sets up a smith's forge in his belly and threatens to slowly eat Vipunen from the inside, forcing Vipunen to regurgitate him and reveal the magic that he came to seek in the first place.
• Leven Thumps: This happens on purpose in Leven Thumps and the Gateway to Foo when an Earth Snake eats the gang. They get back out alive. Happens by accident in Leven Thumps and the Whispered Secret when Leven swallows Geth.
• The Light Fantastic: Rincewind finds himself in troll country. The trolls tell him of Old Granddad, a huge prehistoric troll who has since become one with the world. However, when Herenna decides to use his huge mouth as a cave and lights a fire on his tongue, he begins to awake. The mercenaries scatter. Twoflower, Cohen and Bethan are about to be eaten when the sun rises and turns Old Granddad to stone.
• Lord Valentine's Castle: This happens to several main characters. Luckily for them, water-lord anatomy is weird.
• Oddly Enough: The giant in "The Giant's Tooth" has a habit of doing this. Justified in that he eats humans, and his size naturally makes him big enough to just swallow them in one gulp.
• Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing: Peter's pet turtle Dribble is swallowed alive by his little brother Fudge. It doesn't survive of course, but Peter's first question upon learning that the turtle is out of Fudge's system is if it's alive or dead, as he'd hoped this trope might apply.
• True History: On returning to Earth, the crew's ship is swallowed by a whale 200 miles long, in whose cavernous interior they find a landscape of forests and cities home to different kinds of fish people. They eventually escape by setting its internal forests on fire, killing the beast and letting them slip out through its mouth.
• The Wild Ones: Sixclaw meets his end this way, being abruptly eaten by Gayle in just one gulp before he kills Kit.

Live-Action TV

• In The 100, this happens to Craig when he's pushed overboard while a mutated, giant eel-like creature is swimming about.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: In "Graduation Day, Part 2", Principal Snyder starts yelling at the newly ascended Mayor Wilkins, who has just assumed the form of a giant snake demon. Wilkins responds by eating Snyder in one bite. He did say he was going to need a snack after assuming his new form.
• In Charmed (1998), the Big Bad Wolf does this to Piper and Grams in a fairy-tales-come-to-life episode. Piper blasts it into a cloud of fur-tufts from inside, and the two are released unharmed.
• Dinosaurs: In "I Never Ate for My Father", Earl, Robbie, and a few mammals get eaten alive by a giant swamp monster, and are still alive, whole, inside its stomach (as it takes a week for a creature of that size to digest its meals).
  • It's also common place for the Dinosaurs to eat mammals, sometimes when they're still alive.
• Farscape: In "Green-Eyed Monster", the protagonists' starship Talyn is swallowed whole by a truly gigantic Space Whale called a budong.
• First Kill: Davina is on the receiving end of this after pushing Elinor and Sebastian too far, thanks to Sebastian's fusion with the Queen Serpent giving him snake-like attributes.
• Freaky: A boy loves swimming, so he jumps on a waterslide, is somehow transported into prehistoric times then gets back to present day time. He decides to jump into the pool again using the diving board (as he thinks it's safe to go back to the water now) It isn't. It's now inhabited by a giant prehistoric shark that eats him in one bite CHOMP
• Honey I Shrunk The Kids The TV Series show the family accidentally getting swallowed by Grandpa Murdock in the first episode.
• House of the Dragon: In the first Season Finale, the chase between Lucerys Velaryon on the back of his young dragon Arrax and Aemond Targaryen on the back of his old and gigantic dragon Vhagar ends with Vhagar swallowing both Lucerys and Arrax (minus Arrax's wings and tail).
• Jonathan Creek: The B plot in "The Seer of the Sands" involves Adam's latest ludicrous publicity stunt. It goes awry when the obnoxious midget he has employed passes out drunk, and then the anaconda he is using for the act escapes, and devours the midget. Jonathan's shocked crew discovers the sleeping snake with a midget shaped bulge in its stomach.
• Power Rangers and Super Sentai:
  • One Monster of the Week on Series/Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger and Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers who was serious Nightmare Fuel for young viewers was Dora Boogaranan/Terror Toad, who was able to do this to the entire team except the Pink Ranger, Mei/Kimberly; at the last moment, both heroines were able to make him cough them up.
  • A lesser known monster who could do this was the Invenusable Flytrap from Power Rangers; in that case, Jason, Zach, Kimberly, and Billy were able to blast their way out.
  • Kyūkyū Sentai GoGoV and Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue have a cobra monster named Vacuuma (in GoGoV) or Freezard (in Lightspeed Rescue) who shrinks down his victims, then vacuums them into a frozen chamber in his body. Both versions succeed in sucking up four of the five Rangers (save Red), but are defeated when Red weakens it and allows the others to escape so the full team can finish it off.
• Primeval: The Mosasaur's first victim in Episode 3 is Eaten Alive in this manner, and it's lampshaded by the characters. It later vomits up a gruesome bolus composed of what remains the Mosasaur couldn't digest.
• Star Trek: Voyager:
  • In "Bliss", the Voyager crew is led inside a giant bioplasmic creature who deceives them into thinking they are flying into a wormhole that will lead them straight to the Alpha Quadrant. Only Seven of Nine, Naomi Wildman, and the Doctor are unaffected, as Seven and Naomi share no interest in returning home and the Doctor was taken offline by the rest of the crew. They encounter an alien pilot of another ship who was trying to destroy the creature and work together with him in order to escape.
  • In "Basics, Part 2", Hogan is killed at the mouth of a cave where a giant snakeasaurus lives in a lightning-quick Discretion Shot. Later, more of the Voyager crew attempt to sneak across a cavern where the snakeasuraus sleeps in a pit. It doesn't work. A nameless crewman slips, wakes the beast, and gets swallowed just like Hogan.

Music

• The Decemberists' "The Mariner's Revenge" is told from inside a whale. The speaker notes, "Its ribs our ceiling beams, its guts our carpeting. I guess we've got some time to kill."
• Peter and the Wolf: The duck; unlike many examples of this trope, he does not escape, though he's still alive at the end of the story...
• In the Starbomb song Regretroid, Kraid threatens to do this to Samus Aran, before learning that Samus Is a Girl.
• Voltaire's "Goodnight Demon Slayer" contains the line "If he eats you, don't you fret/ Just cut him open with an axe."

Music Videos

• This is the fate of several women in the music video for Best Friend. In order to maintain her youth and to steal the attractive features of her rivals, a struggling supermodel hunts down and swallows her fellow fashion models alive one by one. At one point we even see a woman's legs sticking out of her mouth and kicking frantically as she gulps her down.
• BubbleButt: At the end, apropos of nothing, Buttzilla uses one of the pumps she can produce from her mouth to grab one of the dancers off the dance floor. Despite the woman's flailing she is tossed into Buttzilla's mouth, who then swallows her in a single gulp. Meanwhile, everyone else just keeps dancing without a care in the world.
• The The Chemical Brothers song "Come with Us/The Test" features Weston being approached by a curious blue whale, which she then swims into the open mouth of.
• Subverted in the music video for "Me Olvide Ti" by the band Los Retrovisores. The lead singer's ex-girlfriend grows into a giantess and starts chasing the band around the city. She eventually corners them in an apartment building and drags the lead singer out of a window. As she is dangling him in the air, she gives him a look and one assumes she's going to swallow him whole, as giant women are want to do in music videos. However, while she does eat him alive, instead of swallowing him in one gulp she instead chews him up a bit before downing him in a couple of large swallows.
• Lit: At the end of the music video for "Miserable", the bend members are picked off one-by-one by a giant Pamela Anderson who devours them alive. For the most part, outside of toying with them a bit, she simply swallows them in a single gulp while they beg for mercy. The only one who doesn't get this treatment is poor Jeremy. Instead, after slurping him up, she chews him a bit before spitting out one of his signature shoes.
• The Czech band Lucy has a song called "Panic" that ends with the lead singer getting engaged to a very attractive blonde giantess in a red minidress and high heels that has been playing musical accompaniment throughout most of the music video. She then immediately decides to eat him alive. After swallowing him she pulls his guitar out of her mouth and lets out a loud burp. Of course, as the video includes several prolonged shots of women gnawing ravenously at raw meat bones, and the giantess handing a huge chunk of raw meat to one woman who promptly begins devouring it, this surprise cannibalism doesn't come completely out of left field. Just mostly.

Mythology and Religion

• Miniatures of St. George and the Dragon often show George freeing a maiden (unharmed) from the dead dragon's belly.
• Greek Mythology:
  • Kronos swallowed all of his children whole when he found out that one of them would overthrow him the way he had his father. When Zeus (who escaped such a fate by the trickery of his mother) slips an emetic into Kronos' drink, he vomits up Zeus' siblings who help Zeus overthrow the Titans.
  • When Zeus finds out that he's to succumb to the same fate, he eats his pregnant lover. However, it is their daughter that reemerges unharmed in the end.
• Early Mesoamerican artwork suggests that the cultures of the area had a story similar to Jonah. Statues of a man being swallowed by a large fish have been found on archaeological sites.
• Jonah and the giant fish from The Bible and The Qur'an.
• At least one Native American tale has Coyote undergoing this as a deliberate strategy, being prepared he cut his way out, killing the monster and freeing all of its other victims.
  • Another Navajo story, 'Coyote and Horned Toad', relates the story of Coyote angrily devouring Horned Toad, and promptly being punished for it. Horned Toad stomps about inside him and threatens his organs, finally slitting his throat to escape.
• Aztec Mythology has Quetzalcoatl. Befitting his status as a giant snake, he has been depicted swallowing a person whole (albeit with precious little context as to why, considering he's supposed to be one of their nicer deities).

Pinball

• The Mini-Game for the Sega Mega Drive version of Psycho Pinball has Psycho the Armadillo swallowed by a whale.

Podcasts

• Mission to Zyxx sees Nermut eaten alive by a tornada, but he exits the other end intact.

Puppet Shows

• The Muppets: Many Muppet characters have been eaten whole by monsters over the years. One of the most notable examples being the "Under My Skin" number.

Tabletop Games

• Chaosium's supplement All the Worlds' Monsters Volume III
  • The Hell Worm is a 30 foot long black worm-like monster that can swallow an opponent man-sized or smaller. Once inside its stomach, each melee turn the victim takes 3-30 Hit Points of acid damage and loses 1-4 levels of Life Energy.
  • The Murkworm (a different version of the Arduin Muckwurm) uses its 4 large (20-30 feet long) palps to pull its prey into its mouth and swallow it. The Muckworm's stomach acid does 8-48 Hit Points damage per melee round (which cannot be regenerated) to the swallowed victims.
  • The Giant Snake is 30-40 feet long and can swallow a man-sized victim in one gulp. If the victim's body is recovered from the snake's stomach after more than two days have passed it is too badly damaged by the stomach juices to be brought back to life.
  • The Giant Toad grabs victims (of up to human size) with its adhesive tongue, pulls them to its mouth and swallows them. The swallowed creature will die in six melee turns and be digested in 2 hours. It can try to cut itself out before then.
• Arduin RPG, The Compleat Arduin Book 2: Resources:
  • The Boomer is a type of giant frog (up to 180 lbs.) that can swallow victims that have up to 3 times the Boomer's Hit Points.
  • The Gworm is a giant black earthworm up to 300 feet long. On a successful hit, any target with less than 50 Hit Points is swallowed and takes 4-48 Hit Points of acid damage while in the monster's stomach.
  • The Hell Hopper is a giant frog (up to the size of a small horse) that uses its tongue to drag victims to its mouth and swallow them. Victims take 3-24 Hit Points of damage per action taken inside the monster.
  • The Ibathene is a giant reptile (up to 400 feet long) with a tongue up to 40 feet long. Its victims are dragged to its mouth by its tongue, suffer a vicious bite (up to 80 Hit Points of damage) and are swallowed whole. The victim takes up to 40 Hit Points of damage from stomach acid.
  • The Maggoth is a giant slug that has a 75% chance of swallowing any creature with Hit Points less than or equal to 1/2 the maggoth's total and a 25% chance of swallowing larger creatures. Its stomach juices do 3-36 Hit Points of damage to the victim.
  • Muckwurms can pull a victim into their maw and swallow it. Once in its stomach the victim takes 1-8 Hit Points of damage per melee round.
  • The Silver Slyth has Combat Tentacles that it uses to grab and crush its opponents before pulling them to its mouth and swallowing them whole. Its stomach acids to 11-20 Hit Points of damage to the flesh of swallowed victims.
  • A Snow Maggoth can swallow any creature that has Hit Points equal to or less than its own. Its stomach acids do 1-20 Hit Points per melee round to its victims.
• In Changeling: The Dreaming, Redcaps can swallow victims whole. (They have to pass a difficult check to do so, so it would normally make more sense just to use a bite attack.) If the victim doesn't escape within one turn other Changelings lose their fae powers for a time as well as any memory of what happened to them, while mortals are simply killed.
• Dungeons & Dragons
  • Some monsters have the Swallow Whole ability. (Purple worms are likely the most notorious creatures who do so.) Victims take damage as they are digested, but can try to cut themselves out. However, "muscular action" closes the hole afterward, meaning that multiple swallowed adventurers each have to cut their own hole. Utterly ridiculous, yes, but it stops players from deliberately getting swallowed and then insta-killing the monster. In 5th Edition, being able to cut one's way out of a monster after being swallowed whole was instead changed to the monster reflexively regurgitating anyone it had swallowed if it was subjected to enough damage from the inside, removing the WTF factor.
    • Advanced D&D monsters that can swallow another creature whole are the albino wyrm, behir, carnivorous whales, Dinichtys, froghemoth, Tyrannosaurus Rex, giant catfish, giant frog, giant gar, giant shark (Megalodon), manta ray, remorhaz, sea wyrm, verme and wereshark.
    • Basic D&D monsters with this ability include the caecilia (giant worm), large carnivorous land dinosaurs, giant sturgeon, giant manta ray, giant toad, killer whale and nightcrawler.
  • The Bag of Devouring is a classic cursed magic item which, while it appears to be a useful Bag of Holding, actually leads to the stomach of an other-dimensional monster that can drag the user in to be digested alive any time they reach into the "bag".
  • Why would anyone want to be Swallowed Whole by a monster? The third-party splatbook The Guide to Hell mentions the Worm of Minauros, a unique creature that lurks in the swamps of the third layer of Hell that resembles an extra-large purple worm. If anyone tries to fight it, it might as well be an extra-large purple worm. (It also hates devils with a passion, killing any it comes across.) However, if a mortal with an alignment other than Lawful Evil approaches it with no weapons in an act of surrender, it opens it jaws, allowing the creature to approach. Anyone brave enough to let himself be eaten at this point (it requires a Will Save to avoid fleeing in panic) and able to survive in its stomach for anywhere from two to seven rounds is spit out. After that, his highest ability score is increased by 1 and he gains a bonus to experience points gained. (There's a catch, however. These bonuses tempt the recipient to evil deeds, and committing dark acts is required to keep them, or they eventually fade.)
• Games Workshop games:
  • Warhammer and Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: The Colossal Squiq has a massively cavernous mouth that allows it to wholly devour multiple smaller creatures with a single bite. This is represented in-game by a rule that gives the monster a chance of causing unstoppable mortal wounds against the enemy.
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • Tyranid Mawlocs tend to do this. And their victims are still alive and conscious while they're being digested. Which didn't work out so well when one swallowed Ghazgkhull Thraka, who proceeded to blast his way out of the beast and rally the orks to defeat Hive Fleet Leviathan.
    • The Red Terror does it as well. Both in gameplay mechanics and fluff. In fact there is a codex story devoted entirely to the subject.
    • Foulspawn, a Chaos-Spawn turn Daemon Prince of Nurgle both swallows victims whole, but grows in intelligence as it consumes more victims
    • One piece of Flavor Text tells the tale of an infamous Callidus assassin known as Mother Gullet. Upon discovering that her target, a defiant Imperial Governor, had a young son that he doted on, the assassin infiltrated the palace and used the shapeshifting drug Polymorphine to distend her jaw so that she could swallow the infant prince and smuggle him out of the palace inside her own body. The Imperial authorities were then able to use the prince as a hostage to ensure the Governor's compliance.
• GURPS Space Bestiary:
  • The River Snake is a water serpent that grows up to sixty feet long. It can swallow a human-sized creature whole. While inside the snake, creatures take one Hit Point of damage per second from digestive juices.
  • The vortex is a barrel-like aquatic creature about thirty feet tall. It sucks in several tons of water and living creatures. Any living thing inside of it takes 1-6 Hit Points of acid damage per second from its digestive liquids.
• Pathfinder, as a D&D spin-off, naturally features pretty much everything that appears in D&D, and a few more besides.
  • The ketesthius is a wolf-headed Sea Serpent with a pocket universe for a stomach, allowing it to have entire cities living unharmed inside its guts and entire ecologies formed from stranded ship crews and other sea monsters. This can end being recursive, because ketesthiuses can and do devour one another.
  • Dwiergeths likewise possess extradimensional gullets, which in their case lead to seemingly endless mazes of tooth-lined intestines. The creatures, of course, prefer to swallow enemies whole one after the other and let their gut-mazes do the work of dealing with them.
  • The implicitly evil-oriented Witch archetype called the Gingerbread Witch allows humanoid beings, even player characters, to do this as well, devouring anything as big as themselves or smaller — the larger the meal, the bigger the Balloon Belly that results. Unsurprisingly, it appeared in a splatbook orientated towards horror gaming. Weirdly, though, aside from the initial bite attack needed to trigger the swallow whole attempt, the victim actually suffers no damage from this, although they do risk being nauseated (and thus unable to try and cut their way out) whilst inside. Perhaps because of this, it doesn't explicitly require an evil alignment, although Dungeon Masters may be leery of players who want to play the class.
• Skyrealms of Jorune. The Mandare monster has an amorphous body with a large mouth at the end of its long thin neck. It can swallow prey whole before digesting it.
• Stormbringer: In the Second Stormbringer Companion, the adventure "Sorcerer's Isle" has a megalodon haunt the water around the island. It attacks and sinks ships, and anyone unfortunate enough to end up in the water is in big trouble. If the megalodon makes a critical hit when biting a victim, it swallows them alive.
• Varanae generic RPG supplement Monstrum 1. If a natural 20 (before any modifications) is rolled on a 20 sided die when a Snow Shark attacks a target, the victim will be swallowed whole.

Theme Parks

• In Back to the Future: The Ride at Universal Studios, the DeLorean gets swallowed by a Tyrannosaurus, but it spits the car out shortly after.

Video Games

• Aquaria has a small Womb Level side-quest where you can go inside a whale (after you sing to it, of course). You can enter or leave whenever you want, though.
  • Played a bit more straight with the King Jellyfish, a boss that introduces itself by engulfing you.
• Banjo-Kazooie get eaten by a gigantic photorealistic..ish dinosaur in Banjo-Tooie. Luckily it just wants the duo to rid its stomach of ulcers in a Mini-Game.
• Battle Chess: Rook takes Queen.
• Bayonetta 2 has an Elite Mook called a Resentment that can do this to the heroine after turning her into a child, inflicting a One-Hit Kill. Also, Bayonetta's summoned demon Baal does this when used as a Torture Attack (which, ironically, is used on Resentments) or a Climax Attack. Plot-wise, it happens to her after the Boss Battle with Insidious, leading to a Womb Level.
• Born of Bread: When Jester tried to summon one of the shards up, he also summoned a giant whale which ate the ship and everyone on it.
• The Necromorph Nexus in Dead Space 3 tries to inflict this on the heroes multiple times during its Boss Battle, forcing you to Attack Its Weak Point to prevent their gruesome deaths. Eventually there're no weak points left to shoot, making the player think they messed up when the monster gives it another go, but it merely results in an Unexpected Gameplay Change that treats the player to a brief Womb Level where the heroes have limited time to kill the Nexus from within.
• The T-Rex in Dino Crisis will devour Regina in one bite if it gets in range.
• Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice: Replacing the Dragon class' usual flying claw strike is their Inside Tour attack, which does this to the target (And potentially a teammate, if the dragon is using the move as part of a Combination Attack, though they're Friendly Fire Proof). The victims literally get pooped out a few seconds after being devoured.
• Don't Starve: The playable character Webber is an instance of this... with the caveat that the spider doing the swallowing couldn't digest the human prey.
• Dragon Lore: The player at one point has to get himself swallowed by a large fish to retrieve a key it ate (Or you can just kill it and gut it. Rather ridiculous since the fish is not a giant, but "merely" eight feet long or so, and is also a pike, one of the few types of fish that do not swallow their prey alive, but rip them apart first.
• One of the two endings of DREDGE involves this: the Fisherman throws the Tome of Eldritch Lore that started all this weirdness back into the sea, whereupon the Leviathan comes out of the depths to swallow the book, the Fisherman, and his boat whole. And this is the Good ending. The Bad ending is much worse.
• Fallout: New Vegas: A data file found In-Universe in the Old World Blues expansion pack reveals that the Nightstalkers (coyote/rattlesnake hybrids) are actually capable of doing this to their victims. Of course, this never happens to you.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy II: Anyone possessing a Crystal Rod seeking out the Ultima magic winds up swallowed by Leviathan. By the time the heroes wind up in Leviathan's stomach, there's a sizeable community dwelling within, including the last of the Dragoons.
  • Final Fantasy VI has the Zone Eater, who possesses 2 attacks, one of which is to simply devour a member of your team whole. Letting this happen to your entire party is the only way to get into the Womb Level where Gogo, one of the game's 2 hidden characters, resides.
  • Final Fantasy X:
    • The early boss Geosgaeno tries to do this to Tidus in a Hopeless Boss Fight, but the latter manages to escape. It later becomes an Optional Boss and it can actually succeed this time. Should this happen, the victim can only either guard or use the Trigger Command "Struggle" which will cause Geosgaeno to spit them out for a One-Hit Kill. Waiting will cause Geosgaeno to evenetually regurgitate them with merely an HP to One effect while killing the other two combatants, which may or may not be better. If Geosgaeno is defeated while a party member is in its gut, it will also regurgitate the victim, dealing 9,999 HP of damage to all party members for a Mutual Kill unless anyone has the Break HP Limit ability needed to have 10,000 HP or more.
    • Sand Worms on Bikanel Island can swallow a character and later regurgitate them for considerable damage.
  • Final Fantasy XIV:
    • In the World of Darkness, the boss Cerberus will put out area of effect attacks that immobilize your character and will cause an instant death, unless you picked up an orb that gives you Mini status. Naturally, the strategy is for one alliance to be intentionally get swallowed and attack the innards of the beast to allow for free damage and to prepare for the next set of mechanics.
    • In the Churning Mists, the FATE "Whole Foods" has you rescuing an unfortunate Moogle that was swallowed whole by a boss, only for his friend to discover a pile of fur and bones, leading him to ask where his friend went
    • In the Weeping City of Maach, Ozma will swallow the raid, which will force the raid to burn down the Mobs and Ozmashade before the meteor hits, causing a total Raid Wipe. Bonus points if you notice that Ozma's location is in the 'Gloriole' when you're 'swallowed.'
• Flotsam: The post-flood skill Whalebelly Survivor indicates that the drifter resided in a whale for months, gathering scrap until they could fix up their ship and sail right back out.
• Fossil Fighters: On Champions' Icegrip Plateau, the party is swallowed by a whale named the Bonehemoth. They survive, but are stuck there until given a chance to fight their way out.
• God of War III has the boss fight with Cronos end with him grabbing Kratos and throwing him down his gullet, mockingly exclaiming "Trust me, eating you will be more unpleasant for me!" He has no idea how right he is.
• Heart of Darkness: Happens near the end, where Andy falls right into the mouth of a big monster. Turns out this very same monster earlier swallowed Andy's gun. You know the rest.
• Inkulinati: Snails can swallow enemy Beasts, Tinies, and obstacles in one go, instantly killing them regardless of their remaining health.
• Kingdom Hearts: Monstro (a Space Whale version of the whale from Disney's Pinocchio) appears in four of the eight games, and each time winds up swallowing the players.
  • Kingdom Hearts: the Gummi Ship is swallowed by Monstro, and the characters have to explore his insides and beat a boss monster before being spat back out.
  • Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories: Essentially a reenactment of the original level. Downplayed in that Monstro himself is never seen swallowing the characters, a doorway to a recreation of his innards is created.
  • Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance]: A subsection of the "Prankster's Paradise" world in Riku's side of the story, where he explores the whale's innards and unlocks the Keyhole. While Riku is shown to simply awaken inside Monstro at the start of his tale, Sora's story shows Pinocchio, Jiminy, and the Chill Clawbster boss getting swallowed by Monstro in full view.
  • Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep Final Mix: As a boss battle, wherein the player alternates battling Monstro itself and being swallowed by it, forcing them to defeat several Unversed before being sneezed back out to continue facing Monstro.
• King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella: Rosella gets swallowed up by an enormous whale. She can escape by climbing back up to the mouth and tickle its uvula with a feather to make it sneeze her out.
• Kirby:
  • Inverted with the titular character: you're the one who swallows the enemies, even if they're bigger than the main character's entire body!
  • Certain enemies swallow Kirby as an attack, but usually just munch on him and spit him out for a bit of damage. King Dedede, according to supplementary material, learned how to inhale and spit out foes from emulating the titular character. One particularly gross example is King Dedede under the influence of Dark Matter in Kirbys Dreamland 3 who swallows Kirby through the huge mouth on his stomach... and spits him out of his actual mouth.
  • Kirby: Triple Deluxe: Takes Kirby's ability to swallow things larger than his body to entirely new extremes with Hypernova. While using Hypernova Inhale, Kirby can ingest things multiple times the size of his body, like massive trees, speeding trains, houses, enormous eels and mini bosses for a One-Hit Kill, and almost anything else that gets in his way, up to and including the Final Boss's last healthbar!
• In Klonoa: Door to Phantomile and its Wii remake, Klonoa is swallowed whole by Nahatomb, the Final Boss, when he defeats his first form. He then has to fight his second form inside his stomach.
• The fish-themed champion of League of Legends, Fizz, has an ultimate attack, Chum the Waters, which can have this effect. The attack summons a gigantic shark from the ground, dealing heavy damage to one target and knocking everyone else away. If a small enough champion is killed by this, such as a child or a yordle, no corpse is left behind as the shark returns underground with the champion devoured.
• Lobotomy Corporation: Should an employee get a bad work result with the Big And Will Be Bad Wolf, the wolf will eat the employee. Although it's not really a danger considering who the wolf is based on, so the employee can be released the next day or if another employee preforms a successful Instinct work on the wolf.
  • Big And Will Be Bad Wolf also returns for Library of Ruina as the second Abnormality fought in the Floor of Language, and every 2 scenes he'll try to eat one of your librarians. This time however, it is actually dangerous; if the Big And Will Be Bad Wolf isn't staggered by the end of the scene if he ate a librarian, that librarian will be digested and allows the wolf to take on a much stronger form.
• In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Link gets swallowed whole by Jabu-Jabu, leading to the Womb Level.
  • Jabu-Jabu also appears in Oracle of Ages.
  • Also in Skyward Sword, if Link fails in the missions to stop the Imprisoned reaching the Sealed Temple, the monster will swallow the Old Woman whole, and subsequently devour Zelda, inside the Temple.
  • Like-Likes are also fond of swallowing Link whole, then spitting him back out minus a tunic or shield, and lest he wants to purchase said items at the shops, Link has to kill it quickly to get his stuff back before it gets digested.
  • Moldworms, that appear in one little out of the way area of The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, will swallow Link whole, push him through their entire body, and out the other end. Making it even worse is that Link comes out, ahem, "dirty".
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: A stone tablet relates the story of how Prince Sidon of the Zora was fighting against a giant Octorok that swallowed him whole. He escaped and killed the monster by cutting through its stomach with his spear.
• Lethal Company: Anything that is underneath the Earth Leviathan when the ground starts to rumble around its area of effect will be killed instantly when it pops up under the ground and swallows anything in its wake. This includes both the players (and any loot they're holding) and any enemy unfortunate enough to be standing near it.
• Man-Eating Plant have you playing as a Man-Eating Plant (well, yeah) assigned by your lord to dispose of intruders. Which you spend the entire game chomping down, and as you get bigger you can swallow up to eight mooks at a time (more often than not spitting out their skulls).
• In Mass Effect 3, the flavor text for a shotgun called the Graal Spike Thrower explains that being swallowed whole by a thresher maw is a very real threat on Tuchanka, so the krogan designed the Graal with blades on the outside specifically so they could cut themselves out or take the thresher down with them in case that happened.
• Mega Man: Both Mega Man X's Launch Octopus and Mega Man X5's Duff McWhalen levels have enemies that do this. It's more inconvenient than harmful, since the titular android can simply blast his way out.
• In NetHack, some monsters in will do this to you, though they'll spit you back out if you're wearing a Ring of Slow Digestion. You can cut yourself free or break out with a Wand of Digging, which leaves the monster with just 1 Hit Point left — meaning that against some monsters, like the Arch-demon Juiblex, getting swallowed whole is the easiest way to defeat them!
• The first boss of The NewZealand Story is an ice whale that occasionally lunges forward and tries to eat you. Once inside, you need to shoot at it while avoiding drops of bile in order to beat it.
• In Ōkami, Amaterasu and Issun are eaten by the Water Dragon. In another part of the game they have to dive in voluntarily to retrieve a rare artifact.
• Outer Wilds: The Anglerfish living in Dark Bramble will kill the player by eating them whole, irrespective of whether they're in the ship or not.
• Pilgrim (RPG Maker): One of Akemi's potential deaths in Storey 4 is getting dragged by an Overly-Long Tongue into a living wall with eyes and a mouth.
• Pokémon: Any Pokémon that can use "Swallow" fits this trope.
• Primal Carnage: Tyrant class dinosaurs have a bite attack which instantly kills any human that is caught by it, and replenishes a chunk of the Tyrant's health. The victim is treated to an animation of themselves being chomped and eaten while screaming horribly, which also functions as the attack's cooldown. However, the Acrocanthosaurus has to crush the human in its jaws before it can swallow them due to its somewhat smaller size.
• Purgatory (RPG Maker): Enri can die by being swallowed by a giant worm.
• In the Runescape quest "Deadliest Catch", the fisherman Jones gets swallowed whole by the Thalassus, a giant sea monster. The Player Character feeds the Thalassus some nasty-tasting karambwan fish and it spits him right back out again.
• Science Girls!: Some monsters will swallow one of the characters and have to be fought in order to release her. At one point, the whole party gets scooped up together and then has to force the monster to spit them back out.
• Keep going past the goal in the Windows game SkiFree and a childishly-drawn monster will catch up to your skiier and eat it right up.
• In Skullgirls, the monstrous shapeshifter Double tends to do this in some story modes, in particular consuming those she deems as "candidates". In her own story mode, she swallows every other non-DLC player character and Marie. It doesn’t end well for them. In Beowulf’s story mode, he is swallowed by her, revealing that everyone else who Beowulf fought was eaten, though they’re alive and (mostly) unconscious within her. He fights her within Double’s Womb Level before Annie sets Beowulf and everyone else eaten free.
  • Umbrella’s Level 3 Blockbuster involves this as well, where her sentient umbrella Hungern grows to a much larger size, grabs the opponent with his tongue, and engulfs them in his mouth, dealing heavy damage. If the opponent still has health afterwards, then Umbrella will squeeze Hungern, forcing him to spit them out, but if they are knocked out in the Blockbuster, then Hungern will swallow them.
• Spelunky features a Dune homage where if you offer up the proper "bait" you will be swallowed by a giant worm and find yourself in a bonus level inside the worm's body. It's even more dangerous than the game's normal levels, which is saying something, but there's a very powerful weapon, the Crysknife, available at the end.
• Star Fox Adventures: The boss fight concluding the Dark Ice Mines stage involves an enormous reptillian centaur swallowing Fox whole. Once within the cavernous stomach of the creature (illuminated with the light of a Spell Stone), the protagonist must continually assault a dangling mass of tissue before the monster regurgitates him back onto the battlefield.
• StarTropics: Mike is swallowed by a giant whale, but reunited with Baboo, who is relived to see Mike safe and sound, but dismayed they had to reunite in the belly of a whale, of all places. Together they work on escaping the huge beast by building a fire and promptly getting sneezed out.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Boss-Boss-Cheep-Cheep, A.K.A. Boss Bass (not truly a Boss, but at very least an Elite Mook), can do this to Mario in Super Mario Bros. 3, and it's a One-Hit Kill if it does. There's also a nastier-looking version of this guy in Super Mario 64
  • Bowser does this to the brothers in Bowser's Inside Story, and they spend a large portion of the game in various parts of his body. Later, he gets the ability to do this in battle, devouring enemies and leaving them for the bros to fight.
  • Done doubly so in the Turtle Zone of Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins. The titular turtle swallows Mario, though there's nothing stopping him from just leaving. The last level of said zone is inside a whale.
  • In your first battle with Belome in Super Mario RPG he will swallow your party member whole and only spit him back out after you hit him a few times.
  • In Paper Mario, this accidentally happens to a Fuzzipede. Mario and partner go inside the whale on purpose to fight it, and all three are shot out through its blowhole when you win.
  • In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Koops tells Mario that his father went to try to slay Hooktail ten years before the game starts, but never returned and is presumed dead. When Mario's party finally does slay Hooktail, she coughs up the Diamond Star and Koops' dad, who was swallowed back then, but survived by hiding in his shell. (Presumably, the magic of the Diamond Star is what kept him from starving.)
  • Mario Party DS: In the minigme Cheep Chump, all players are swimming in a pond where some Cheep Cheeps are, and one of them is big and hungry. From time to time, it will position itself close to the water's surface and begin sucking water to create a whirlpool in an attempt to swallow the characters. The objective, therefore, is to dodge the whirlpool to avoid being eaten (if a character is caught by the whirlpool, they can press A repeatedly to try to escape). The last surviving character wins, though more than one character can win if they resist during 30 seconds; conversely, the minigame ends in a tie if all players gets swallowed at the same time. Funnily, the characters who get eaten are later spat upward, likely because the Cheep Cheep doesn't like their taste.
  • This is Yoshi's trademark ability. While it initially just got rid of enemies (Size rarely being an obstacle), later games would have them transformed into eggs, which could be used as weapons.
  • Most of the bosses in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island get zapped by Kamek before the fight starts, making them bigger and stronger. For the world 3 miniboss, though, Kamek zaps Yoshi and Baby Mario, shrinking them down to a convenient bite-size for Prince Froggy to eat. You beat the boss by attacking its uvula with eggs you make from other enemies the boss eats.
• Several Resident Evil creatures will do this to a character they kill, such as Yawn and Neptune in the first game, the mutant Sewer Gator in 2, Gravedigger in 3, the Gulp Worm in Code Veronica, the Lurker in 0, and Del Lago in 4.
• Get killed by a chelicerate in Subnautica: Below Zero, and you'll see a victim's-eye view of this happening to Robin, head-first.
• Super Monkey Ball: The monkeys the second game get swallowed up by a greedy blue whale. They later ram its stomach, upsetting the ocean giant and forcing it to eject them from its blowhole.
• Tales of Graces: The Rockgagong does this to the party, though only because it was agitated by an infestation of parasitic monsters. It ends up spitting them out after Asbel opens a pouch of pepper he unknowingly received from his brother. If you decide to provoke it into attacking you with the Rockggaong Flute that's found inside of it, it'll try to do it to anyone who's standing too close to its head in the resulting fight. The whole episode is pretty darn hilarious because, for a while, the party had seriously considered "going with the flow" (so to speak) as their only method of escaping.
• Tales of Monkey Island: Most of one chapter takes place inside the belly of a giant manatee. Some of the residents are actually quite content there.
• Tribal Hunter: Munch can do this to his fallen foes, several enemies will try this against him though.
• Warcraft III has the Devour ability, held by large animals such as dragons, Kodo beasts and dragon turtles. The victim is slowly digested unless the beast is killed, suffering no aftereffects aside from damage taken. While there is no size limit, allowing for eating creatures barely smaller (or bigger in custom maps) there is a level limit, which usually corresponds to bigger foes.
• In A Witch's Tale, the Demon's Mouth Inn is alive, and swallows Liddell to restore her health. (It warns her that it might accidentally digest her.)
• World of Mana: This is the trademark attack of Pakkun Lizards. It tends to make them more of an annoyance then an actual threat, as they usually can't do anything until they spit out their victim.
  • Legend of Mana being the only game where they don't suffer from an immobilizing Balloon Belly as a result of swallowing someone that's generally twice as big as them.
• World of Warcraft:
  • The final raid boss of classic WoW swallows party members whole throughout the fight. The swallowed party members must destroy him inside out but also try to escape before the stomach acids dissolve you alive.
  • In this Youtube video, as a group of players are preparing for battle, one of them unexpectedly equips himself with a Toyota pickup truck. He then charges into battle with a dragon, which promptly swallows the truck whole. After about a second, the dragon's belly explodes and the truck emerges with the dragon's heart in the bed.
  "Did you see me lay down the law? I AM DA LAWGIVAH!"
  • Borrok the Devourer is a very tough boss who can OTK a player with its Devour Player skill. (Of course, Borrok is a Puzzle Boss who you aren't supposed to attack directly, and should you manage to actually kill it, you get nothing. The objective is to subdue the ogres so that it eats them instead, until it coughs up a Devourer's Gutstone.)
• The Xiaolin Showdown PS2 video game has three levels involving this trope - Dojo's Mouth, Dojo's Esophagus, and Dojo's Stomach. The entire cast is swallowed whole and must fight enemies inside him. Doubles as a Womb Level.

Web Animation

• DSBT InsaniT: This happens to whoever is eaten by Sushi.
  • Snake does this to his cotton candy in 'Carneelval'. He is a snake after all.
• Grim Reaper Flag-chan!: Mobuo and Flag-chan get swallowed whole by a big snake on Mobuo's expedition.
• Hanazuki: Full of Treasures: In "What is a Chicken Plant, Anyway?", the titular Chicken Plant gobbles up Lime Green Hemka, Yellow Hemka, and Blue Hemka. Hanazuki has to force her way in for Yellow.
• Inanimate Insanity Invitational: In "Spring on the Breakfast!", Springy is swallowed whole by The Floor after MePhone4 finds out his true motives. Later, it's shown that he survived, but the incident has left him horribly disfigured.
• RWBY: It is not a good idea to launch into an enraged, negative monologue about the hopelessness of life as a Huntsman while in direct proximity to attacking monsters that are attracted to negative emotions. A Griffon responded to that ranting beacon of negativity by swooping down from behind and swallowing its prey whole. The victim concerned was Roman Torchwick, who had reached the end of his tether with Ruby's idealistic heroism constantly interrupting him.

Webcomics

• Bloody Urban: Shannon (a ghoul) swallowed one of his classmates in the 6th grade because he wanted to assume the other kid's identity. Unlike with most uses of this trope, it's implied that the boy's face was badly burned by Shaz's stomach juices, and when you see him as an adult he still has some noticeable scars.
• Bronze Skin Inc.: Internet prankster Messy Miles gets eaten by the giantess Charlotte in Chapter Five. At the end of the chapter, he is seen still alive inside her digestive track.
• Champions of Far'aus: While traversing the underground, Skye gets swallowed by a Thokobra, causing Flamel to panic about how to rescue her.
• Genocide Man: The team gets swallowed by... something large and aquatic in an episode.
  Giriii: My dad took me whale hunting once. Never thought I'd be swallowed by one.
  Jacob: This isn't a whale. Whales don't have card tables, chemical toilets, or crates of MREs.
  Girii: It smells like a whale.
• George the Dragon: The Loch Ness Monster (aka Gladys) has a stomach which is full of all manner of undigested sea critters who have created a civilization in her stomach and who in fact are going to war.
• Girl Genius:
  • Gil ends up swallowed whole by a giant carnivorous plant in the Castle. He cut his way out after as if he'd tried to pull himself out when he was only partway in it would have torn him up quite badly.
  • Gil's ice wyrm is seen snapping up the largley intact bodies of Martellus's spark hounds following their fight outside of Mechanicsburg.
  • The extradimensional monster summoned in England pops Tarvek into its mouth whole, allowing for him to get spat out when the thing is subsequently hit hard enough.
• Homestuck: In her journal, Mindfang mentions that Redglare's dragon lusus, Pyralspite, swallowed her own guardian monster whole during Redglare's torching of Mindfang's pirate fleet.
• The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!: It has become a minor Running Gag that Bob keeps winding up in giant monsters' mouths, though he's only actually been swallowed once. That time, he turned out to be inidgestible by the alien, and got out by punching the inside of its stomach until it spat him out like a projectile.
  Jean: "Get out of the monster's mouth!"
  Bob: "Oh hey gee, honey, that's a swell idea!"
• Whether the predators in Kevin & Kell swallow their prey whole or kill and carve them first seems to depend mostly on Rule of Funny.
• Kevin Moore's Wanderlost "Out to Sea" chapter has Sheldon the pig getting gulped down by a friendly whale called Tuvia, who was rescuing him from being mauled by sharks.
• Two members of The Order of the Stick find themselves swallowed whole by black dragons. Haley is rescued when Vaarsuvius casts Suggestion on the dragon and orders it to vomit, and V deals with being swallowed by casting Shapechange. The results aren't pretty.
• Sleepless Domain: Heartful Punch is very nearly swallowed whole by a monster in Chapter 8. It's only thanks to Undine's last-second Heroic Second Wind that she makes it out alive.
• Cassandra Kam, in Tales Of Gnosis College, arranges for this to happen to herself, apparently as part of a Self-Sacrifice Scheme.
• Tower of God: The solution or winning condition in the Ball Test and the Submerged Test was to be swallowed whole by the White Steel Eel and the Mangdol Madame, respectively.
• Kaz the Jester in Work Sucks is a collector of monsters, so this happens fairly often. He’s invented several methods to get out of those situations,one of which being a pill called "Pukitol”

Web Original

• One episode of Critical Role has the party fighting a pair of gigantic worms, with two members swallowed in quick succession. Scanlan manages to teleport clear after attacking from the inside, but Vax is trapped when the worm is taken down and almost killed by Friendly Stabbing when Grog attempts to cut him free.
• Hobo Bros gives us a more benign example: In the Hobo Theatre video "Waluigi and the Great Heist", Globox swallows Waluigi to help him sneak into the bank.
• On Walfas, victims of "death by Yuyuko" are put to death via this. That is, most of the prisoners in the Daily Flash universe.

Western Animation

• 2 Stupid Dogs has Big Dog swallow most of a family in "Family Values", and a witch swallows Red (Little Red Riding Hood) and both dogs in "Red Strikes Back".
• Lemongrab 2 of Adventure Time fame gets swallowed whole three times by his brother, Lemongrab 1. First time around, he loses a chunk of his head and his legs, but the other two times leave him relatively unscathed, and able to literally fight his brother from the inside.
• All Hail King Julien has this quite regularly with mostly fossas eating lemurs and similar animals, which is not really considered murder apparently due to the kingdom being animalistic in nature.
  • This happened to a previous king... after he used taco-scented body wash in the shower.
  • It's also how Karyn goes out, as not every fossa wanted to follow her orders.
  • One time however, there was a giant snake, which ate quite a few lemurs before being forced to spit them out unharmed.
  • When King Julien tries to make peace with the butterflies, the queen is eaten by his peace offering, which was a carnivorous plant.
• Happens fairly often in Amphibia due to being a Death World inhabited by countless giant predators:
  • In "Best Fronds", Sprig gets eaten by a large water snake, but he brought a spicy pepper to make it spit him out.
  • In "Hop Luck", Anne and the Plantars get swallowed by a frog-eating tomato plant, which they manage to eat their way out of.
  • In "Prison Break", an unfortunate mook is eaten by a large heron this way.
  • In "Marcy At The Gates", Sprig gets swallowed by the Queen of the Barbari-Ants, and is rescued by Marcy.
• Animaniacs:
  • One episode of Animaniacs, "Pinky and the Cat", was a pairing between Pinky and Rita, the plot of which had Rita eat Pinky for supper very easily. Pinky can be heard talking from inside Rita's stomach, claiming to like the accommodation.
  • The short Moby or Not Moby ends with Moby-Dick swallowing Captain Ahab whole. As the whale swims away Ahab can be heard deep inside its stomach demanding to be let out.
• The Ant and the Aardvark: On some rare occasions, Charlie Ant would be swallowed up by the Aardvark, but he would either escape or be rescued like a Distressed Dude. "From Bed to Worse" is a case in point, in which Aardvark is x-rayed after he is discovered to have swallowed Charlie.
• In Les Belles Histoires de Pomme d'Api, in the episode Kifedebuldanlo, the eponymous hippo is constantly made fun of by a local village boy named Maki. One day, while giving him and his sister Mala a ride across the river, the boy makes fun of him again, so Kifedebuldanlo knocks him into the river and swallows him, much to Mala's horror. At first, he adamantly refuses her and the villagers' pleas to release him, even after being promised reeds in return. However, after a restless night of Maki kicking in his stomach, he eventually returns to the village and spits out the boy.
• Happens to Sir Morris and his pet hamster Sir Doris in The Big Knights; Sir Doris wanders into a sleeping dragon's mouth in search of food, and Sir Morris gets swallowed while wandering around in a depressed funk about his missing pet. Sir Morris tries to fight his way out, to no avail, but Sir Boris comes to the rescue with a big bucket of pepper to induce the dragon to sneeze them back out.
• This happens several times on Brandy & Mr. Whiskers.
• In Camp Lazlo, the Lardadoodle in "The Big Weigh In" will eat anything within reach, including Lazlo and Lumpus, and doesn't chew because it's a bird.
• CatDog had this several times. One time, Cat swallows Winslow to send him down their shared stomach to give a message to Dog after he ran away from home (It Makes Sense in Context). Another, an alligator that they were using to keep thiefs of their golden hydrant away swallows them and the thieves at the end of the episode.
• Cracked (2016) has Ed often eaten this way, especially by the crocodile. He always manages to escape, such as in "Upset Stomach" where he uses his bad gas to make it spit him up.
• In an episode of Dinotrux, tiny reptool Revvit accidentally gets consumed by large Dinotrux Garby. Revvit tries to avoid all the rock crushers inside Garby but eventually he escapes encased inside of one of the cubes Garby poops.
• A common thing in Fish Hooks, usually involving Snake as a joke. However, some other animals do eat characters too, like a bird eating Milo in "Fail Fish".
• In an episode of The Flintstones, Fred and Barney went fishing, only to be swallowed by - what else - a whale. (Realizing it when they found graffiti in its cavern-like stomach saying "Jonah was here".) After finding some large feathers, they escaped by tickling it until it coughed them up.
• Leela and the Planet Express crew from Futurama get devoured in "Möbius Dick" by the eponymous four-dimensional space whale that feeds on obsession; ironically, Leela's obsession with defeating the creature is what gets them eaten. What's worse is they discover it has an infinite gut, and they may never escape.
• In The Garfield Show Garfield is put on trial by fish everywhere for his crimes against them. He's found guilty, and sentenced to Larry. Garfield is naturally confused, until a massive whale named Larry arrives to swallow him up.
• Gravity Falls:
  • In "Dipper vs. Manliness", when they introduce the leader of the Manotaurs an old Manotaur comes out. It turns out that he's a sacrifice to the real leader, who eats the the tribute.
  • In "The Land Before Swine", Old Man McGucket gets swallowed whole by a baby pterodactyl. He's seen trying to crawl out of its mouth later, and at the end it's all but stated he ate his way out of the beast's belly.
• In one episode of The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, Irwin is swallowed whole by a giant alien bug creature. When he turns up alive and rather disoriented at the end of the episode, and they ask him how he got away from it, he says, "Try not to dwell on it too much..."
• Hello Kitty's Furry Tale Theater adaptation of "Pinocchio" has both Pinocchio and Geppetto get accidentally swallowed up by Geoffrey the humpback whale, who they mistook for a cave.
• "Man-At-Arms" gets the honor twice in the 2002 He-Man series. Actively struggles against bodily functions pushing him toward the acid filled stomach but the place is still well lit, better than the outside the first time.
  • In the second season (which focuses on the Snake Men) King Hsss has been known to do this (via shadowy indiscretion shot) to victims just as large as he is somehow. (King Hsss is man-sized.) Unlike most examples of this Trope, such victims do not survive.
• Hercules: The Animated Series: There are several instances where monsters swallow someone whole, mainly teenage Hercules. In "Hercules and the King of Thessaly", Pain and Panic turn into a giant lion to battle Hercules, with Pain swallowing him whole, only for Panic to spit him out. In "Hercules and the Long Nightmare", Hercules had a dream of being attacked a three-headed Hydra, screaming for help before the Hydra swallowed him whole, then saying he couldn't get out and was stuck in its pancreas, before waking up.
• In Home: Adventures with Tip & Oh, Tip gets swallowed up very rapidly by a 3-eyed hippo-like animal when trying to get a funny picture taken by Oh of her holding its mouth open. Thankfully for her, Getting Eaten Is Harmless if gross.
• On an episode of Inch High, Private Eye, the diminutive detective is captured by a criminal mastermind who also makes robots, one of which he has swallow Inch whole. But Inch manages to bounce his way back up to the robot's mouth, and by using a feather, gets it to sneeze him out. As he comments immediately afterwards, "...[You] can't keep a good man down!"
• In Tex Avery's "Jerky Turkey" (1945), a bear named Joe swallows the pilgrim and the turkey alive.
• Twice on Jimmy Two-Shoes. Once to Lucius, who is eaten by a large sea monster in the Beach Episode. Then done to Jimmy himself in one of the shorts. Both, naturally, make it out okay.
• Kaeloo: In Episode 174, Kaeloo gets turned into a giant monster and swallows Mr. Cat. Mr. Cat really seems to be enjoying it.
• In Kid vs. Kat, in the episode "When Bad Dogs go Big", the dog Growler, accidentally made big by Kat's device, swallows Coop, Dennis, and Kat. When Growler starts returning to normal size, the former quickly decide to head to his front rather than the other way, and are sneezed out, while Kat is left to be... farted out.
• In King Arthur's Disasters King Arthur, Merlin and his men are swallowed by a blue whale on an ill-fated voyage. Inside they meet Pinocchio, and later start a fire. They are sneezed out to Spain, which is coincidentally exactly where they wanted to go.
• The Legends of Treasure Island: In the Season 2 episode "Dragon", Jim is swallowed by a giant Dragon, and Long John Silver is sent into its digestive system to get him out.
• Looney Tunes: In the Larry Doyle-produced short "Museum Scream", while trying to sneak into a museum to eat Tweety (who's part of an exhibit) Sylvester is attacked and eaten by a snake. After the museum closes, he climbs back out.
  • In a scene that predates the aforementioned The Ant and the Aardvark episode "From Bed to Worse", as Sylvester is approaching Tweety from behind, he hears Granny's voice before hustling back to bed, but with one difference: when Granny gets to his room, she sees Tweety's bed empty, followed by Sylvester hiccuping out the yellow feathers. In a panic, she takes him to the x-ray room, where a Funny X-Ray shows that Sylvester has swallowed him whole (of course, we don't see him in the action unlike in the 1971 episode), and it takes a trip to the ER to rescue Tweety from the cat's stomach like a Distressed Dude.
• He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (2021): In the "The Tomb of Grayskull", He-Man battles a giant snake summoned by the Sigil of Hssss until it threw him into the air and swallowed him whole. He-Man screams as he ends up falling into a pool of Havoc in the creature's stomach. He embraces the Havoc to escape the snake and destroy the Sigil.
• Happens a few times in Mickey Mouse (2013). In "Third Wheel", Goofy accidentally eats the two lovebirds Minnie and Mickie, finally giving them a romantic setting inside his stomach. In "Down the Hatch", Mickey and Goofy, who were shrunken, end up swallowed by Donald and take a full tour of his organs, even to his nearly-empty brain cavity...and ending coming out in an egg out his rear when they unshrink.
• Merrie Melodies: "A Day At The Zoo" from 1939 ends with Egghead inside the lion's stomach, still alive.
• The Orbots from Mighty Orbots end up inside Leviathan, a gigantic alien whale. The criminal organization 'Shadow' intent to use the creature flatten the native underwater cities via an implanted Mind-Control Device in its brain. They have to journey inside its vast anatomy to shut down the device, and revert Leviathan back to its normal-self.
• Miraculous Ladybug: The Villain of the Week, Ikari Gozen, in the form of a giant car centaur swallows her daugther and Cat Noir whole to imprison them inside her.
• Hanna-Barbera's Moby Dick episode "The Sea Monster". Tug is swallowed by the title monster and finds that its interior is hollow.
• Happens to Chris twice on Monster Buster Club.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • A hungry tatzlwurm manages to swallow both Twilight Sparkle and Princess Cadance in "Three's a Crowd", albeit very briefly. They manage to blast themselves out in about a second because, surprise surprise, swallowing live creatures that can shoot Projectile Spells from their heads is bound to end pretty badly.
  • Happens to Sweetie Belle during a Nightmare Sequence in the episode "For Whom the Sweetie Belle Toils", courtesy of a screaming Rarity.
  • In "No Second Prances", Trixie tells of a dangerous stage trick called the Moonshot Manticore Mouthdive which involves being shot into a manticore's maw, getting swallowed by said manticore, and then reappearing in a nearby black box alive and well. Appropriately, the swallowing is shown on-screen twice - first during a short montage with Hoofdini as the performer, and later when Trixie is the one performing.
• On an episode of The New Adventures of Huck Finn which combined elements of "Moby Dick" and "Fantastic Voyage", Huck and his friends Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher are swallowed by a giant whale while trying to escape a mad Ahab-like sea-captain who was trying to force them to help him kill it. The whale also swallows the captain when he falls overboard while trying to harpoon it, and the kids go on a strange and perilous journey through the insides of the beast, trying to evade the villain and find a way out, which they eventually do through its blowhole, leaving their pursuer to be presumably digested or trapped forever.
• Happens in New World of the Gnomes, "A Whale Song" where David and Tomte are accidentally engulfed by a blue whale. The same whale even rescues the daughter of a whaler who has been hunting him!
• In Avery's Northwest Hounded Police, the Wolf tries to escape the ever-present McPoodle of the Mounties (Droopy) by feeding himself to a lion. Guess who shows up in there with him.
• In the OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes episode "Deep Space Vacation", Cosma swallows Planet X, including all its habitants, whole. This proves to be especially problematic for the heroes, because Radicles and his parents are visiting Planet X at the time. K.O. and Enid spend the second and third acts of the episode trying to get Planet X out of her.
• Happens occasionally in Ollie's Pack. In "King Swelly Belly", a parasite actually lives in Ollie's stomach to help him on a date. In "Scienc Project Gone Wrong", a blob monster eats several characters, who are only saved when it dissolves.
• In an episode of Phineas and Ferb Dr. Doofenshmirtz once dated a girl who left him for a whale, motivating him to create an invention to get revenge on the species. In the end, it backfires, causing him to be swallowed by a whale. Inside its stomach, he finds his ex preparing dinner in a kitchen built inside of the whale.
• In a Rupert episode "Rupert and the Missing Snow", Rupert, Polar and Will were adrift on a small iceberg only to be swallowed up by accident by a massive whale. She was suffering from a terrible toothache for mistaking the North Pole as a piece of candy. They were fortunately blown out her blowhole.
• In The Simpsons parody of Paul Bunyan, a giant Homer accidentally swallows Lenny. Groundskeeper Willy swims up through the stomach juices to Lenny saying "I've found another exit. It ain't pretty, but it'll do".
• Skylanders Academy has the episode Belly of the Beast, in which all of the skylanders get swallowed by a fire viper, and have to work together to get it to spit them out.
• The Smurfs (1981) had the title characters on a sailing ship swallowed up by a whale in "Smurfs At Sea". They escape by tearing apart their boat and turning part of it into an escape raft while the rest was converted into a hydraulic lift to keep the whale's mouth open long enough for them to escape through it.
• In The Snorks, the Snorks are swallowed up by a giant Snork Eater that plays hypnotic music that lures its prey toward it. They manage to escape by blowing a giant bubble inside it while Tooter duels musically with the Snork Eater.
• Kenny in South Park was once swallowed whole by a giant reptilian bird.
• In the controversial SpongeBob SquarePants episode "One Coarse Meal", Plankton has a nightmare where he is swallowed by Pearl the sperm whale and digested alive!
• Happens in Star Wars: The Clone Wars when Durge uses his body to completely swallow Obi Wan Kenobi. However, Obi Wan is able to use Force Repulse and frees himself from Durge, resulting in an alien version of "Pop!" Goes the Human.
• In the Steven Universe episode "Giant Woman", Steven (and a goat) getting swallowed by a giant bird prompts Pearl and Amethyst to do their Fusion Dance to save him (after he'd been begging them to do it for the whole episode).
  • Also happens in "Back to the Kindergarten" when a corrupted Gem attacks and swallows Peridot. Similar to the above, Amethyst once again gets involved in a fusion, this time with Steven, and Peridot is freed when the corrupted Gem's body is destroyed.
• In the Super Mario World cartoon, Hip, Hop and King Koopa are swallowed by a giant Piranha Plant which is then eaten by Yoshi. After Yoshi complains of being sick, he spits the Koopas out.
  • This entire scene is lampshaded by the episode's song, "Rockin' the High School."
  One big tree's gonna steal the show,
  Goin' down easy,
  Gonna swallow you whole!
• On Taz-Mania, Taz often eats Wendell T. Wolf whole. Fortunately for Wendell, Taz doesn't like the taste of Tasmanian wolves, and is quick to spit him out. One time he swallowed both Bull and Axel at once; he spit them out when the director advised against "alligator eating" in the cartoon.
• Rather benign example in one episode of Teen Titans. Aqualad leads the Titans to Brother Blood's undersea base to destroy the sonic cannon he built with Cyborg's blueprints, but the T-Sub is destroyed on the way; Beast Boy gets the smart - but disgusting - idea of turning himself into a whale and holding the others in his mouth to save them from drowning. ("Please don't tell me we're where I think we are," muses Raven. At the end of the episode, when the base is flooding and they realize they have to leave the same way, she seriously weighs that option against drowning, but takes it at the last second.)
• In Teen Titans Go!, when Beast Girl thinks she's Madam Rouge, she promptly turns into a giant snake and eats all of the Titans except Beast Boy, who convinces her to spit them back out.
• Tiny Toon Adventures:
  • In "Li'l Sneezer" (part of "Test Stressed"), Furrball successfully manages to catch Sneezer and swallow him whole. However, Sneezer manages to sneeze his way out of Furrball's stomach due to being allergic to both anchovies and cats.
  • In the episode, "Buster and the Wolverine", the wolverine swallowed Babs, Plucky, Hamton, Furball, Sweetie, and the Myna Bird after taking them to his cave, they later managed to escape after beating him up from the inside and playing their instruments knocking him out, then Buster hits his butt with a mallet causing him to spit them out.
  • In the "The Devil Dog on the Moors" sketch from the Night Ghoulery special, after removing her protective antlers out of disbelief, Babs gets swallowed whole by the Devil Dog who is revealed to be Byron Basset.
• The Tom and Jerry Show (2014) episode Belly Achin' has Tom swallow both Jerry and Quacker the duck after the two eat his take-out, with the plot afterwards being their attempts at escaping.
• In T.U.F.F. Puppy, during a flashback to one of Kitty's horrible birthday parties it's shown that once she ate a mouse magician that her parents had hired, then coughed up a bunch of scarves.
• Wander over Yonder: In "The Hat", Wander and Sylvia get separated when running away from a giant worm that's trying to eat them. Sylvia spends most of the episode trying to find him using his hat which, according to him, will give items that are not wanted, but needed. The things it gives her keep leading to her almost getting swallowed, and when she finally does, she finds that it's swallowed him too, and the hat was trying to reunite them so it could give them something to help them both escape.
  • In "The Bounty", they get swallowed again by the seemingly harmless Potted Plant, one of the bounty hunters sent by Lord Hater to capture them. Commander Peepers has been trying to stop the bounty hunters so he can capture them instead to gain Hater's respect, and he ends up getting eaten too. He cuts his way out of it, but that allows Wander and Sylvia to escape, much to his annoyance.
• Happens a lot on Wild Kratts, as the show practices Bloodless Carnage yet doesn't shy away from showing predators gobbling up their prey. Played with in the Hamster episode, when Martin stuffs Cheeks alive into his Hamster-Power-generated cheek pouch to conceal the little rodent from the fox kits.
• One of the episodes of Wonder Pets! had the Wonder Pets get eaten by a whale- oddly enough, the whale never meant to eat them, it was just eating a salad. The animals they rescue spend the remainder of the episode trying to free them, till they eventually tickle the whale into releasing them.
• In Xiaolin Showdown, the episode 'Enter the Dragon' involves Dojo becoming evil for a day, turning into a giant two-headed dragon and swallowing the main cast whole. As Clay tells Omi, "Good thing Dojo never learned to chew his food." They eventually make it out safe when Omi gets sweated out and defeats Dojo in a Xiaolin Showdown.

Real Life

• This trope happens in Real Life, usually in predators with large (and/or expandable) mouths. Fishes, amphibians such as frogs and toads, some birds, reptiles such as snakes, and cetaceans like baleen whales have extremely flexible mouths that allow them to engulf their prey whole.
  • Among fishes, the ones dwelling in the abyssal zone of the sea are the best examples. The most notable are the anglerfish and their relatives, the pelican eel and the black swallower. As food is scarce in their habitat, these fish will eat almost any prey that approaches, even if they're many times bigger than themselves thanks for having expandable stomachs.
  • The bizarre anglerfish known as a "frogfish" uses an extremely rapid strike to capture and swallow prey fishes whole. Since the frogfish's mouth and stomach are both expandable, it can swallow prey significantly larger than itself without harm.
  • To some extent, humans too - we're not capable of the feats shown by other vertebrates in this section, but as anyone familiar with acts of stupidity on the internet know, we're not above giving it a try. Jay Swingler, one half of the YouTube duo TGF Bro, once attempted to consume as many brined frankfurters as possible without chewing them; it didn't take long before his stomach forced several up and out of his throat so hard that one of them was shot across the room.
  • Among reptiles, snakes are well-known for devouring their prey whole. Without any ability to chew, they don't have much choice. To this end they evolved extremely movable jaws with extra joints and ligaments, and highly flexible bodies. Large snakes tend to kill their prey first by means of constriction or venom, but most small snakes just swallow their prey alive. Other reptiles like monitor lizards can also devour their prey whole.
  • Some predatory birds can also engulf their prey whole. The herons and egrets typically do this, as do many other fish-eating birds like the darter, also known as the "snakebird." More bizarre examples include the colony of pelicans that live in London's St. James's Park and are known to catch pigeons for extra sustenance◊.
  • In amphibians, several species of frogs and toads (even salamanders) eat their prey whole. But the best example among them is the Ceratophrys genus of horned frogs. Also known as 'Pac-Man frogs', these frogs have huge mouths, allowing them to swallow anything that can fit. Among the things these frogs eat are insects, snakes, fishes, mice, and even other frogs.
  • Many cetaceans, primarily the baleen whales and beaked whales, can't chew or bite, and thus have no choice but to swallow their prey whole. Baleen whales in particular do it on a huge scale, engulfing hundreds or thousands of very small prey animals (krill, small fishes, or zooplankton) in a single mouthful and swallowing the lot whole.
  • Cnidarians (jellyfishes, corals, anemones, etc) and ctenophores (comb jellies) have to swallow their (usually tiny) prey whole, because their mouths are simple openings without teeth.
• Averted with carnivorous arthropods, annelids and mollusks: Due to the fact their brain develops from a ring surrounding their digestive tube rather than from the endpoint of a dorsal cord, they have to swallow very small chunks of food, or they risk being brain damaged.
• Invoked in the Discovery Channel documentary Eaten Alive, where a man tries to be devoured by an anaconda, but subverted at the end.
• There is a practice where people eat whole octopi in some parts of the world. However, since the octopus is still alive when eaten, its tentacles armed with suckers can grab hold of the oesophagus and present a choking hazard.
• In 2021, lobster diver Michael Packard got in the way of a feeding humpback whale, which unwittingly scooped him up whole. (Humpbacks often feed by swimming with their mouths wide open, but usually avoid ingesting anything much larger than krill.) Realizing what had happened, Packard thrashed around in the whale's mouth for about 30-40 seconds until it realized its mistake and spat him back out. Packard survived with no worse than some bad bruises.

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