It isn't always practical in animation to draw each individual tooth in a character's mouth and in fact, can run the risk of careening down the
Uncanny Valley. Because of this, a popular way of simplifying teeth is to draw them as a solid toothy mass stretching from one side of the mouth to the other.
Examples:
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Anime And Manga
- Characters drawn in manga usually have these. And when they do, it's usually the creepy/funny-looking kind.
- Notably averted in BECK in that every character has all their teeth visibly shown.
Literature
Live Action TV
- This is one of the signature traits of the eponymous purple dinosaur, Barney.
Newspaper Comics
- Parodied in FoxTrot. Roger tries a whitening toothpaste which erases all the lines between his teeth.
Video Games
Webcomics
Western Animation
- My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic
- Pretty much anyone in a Seth MacFarlane series. Especially Mr. Bottomtooth of Family Guy, a pretentious rich guy with a single bottom tooth. His son shares this trait. Strangely, the creepy pedophile also has tooth strips when he laughs or chuckles, despite not having most of his teeth...
- Averted in South Park— even though the characters are crudely animated, they still have lines to mark the division of teeth.
- We see a weird variation in Invader Zim: the Irkens all have their teeth joined together in an undulating, zipper-like pattern
◊. The humans usually have their teeth drawn separately.
- Many other characters in Western animation use tooth strips for the same reason as anime/manga. Drawing them with individually divided teeth looked bad and would be difficult to draw. It isn't so much lazy animators, but what looked decent and was reasonable to animate.
- Pixar is infamously known for their tendency to give most of their nonhuman characters this kind of teeth, whether they are either toys, insects, monsters, fish, or vehicles.
- Played straight with many animated Disney characters. Aversions include Beggar Jafar's crooked dentures and The Coachman's Nightmare Face.
- This is standard in 3D modelling: the artist models a tooth strip and maps the color and normals to make it look like a row of discrete teeth.
- Bubs from Homestar Runner.
- The Car Crusher at the end of The Brave Little Toaster apparantly has a large guillotine-like blade used to crush cars into tiny cubes that's shaped like a wall of teeth.
- Recess uses this sometimes.
- 101 Dalmatians: The Series, Depending on the Artist.
