Medium Blending / Western Animation

Medium Blending in Western Animation

Works with their own pages:

• SpongeBob SquarePants

Other works:

• Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers: Robert Mandell being a pioneer of this back in the early and mid 1980's, the show mixes CGI in with cel animation. The CGI was justified by having it be on computer terminals and as the avatar of A.I. units.
• The Amazing World of Gumball:
  • The show has this as a founding artistic element: Some characters are two-dimensional, some are CGI, some are stop motion, some are Paper People, and there's even a couple people that are in some way live-action (one character is a chinface, for example), etc. The backgrounds are photographs with some alterations added in CGI, while vehicles and objects may be CGI or two-dimensional. Footage shown in-universe is sometimes completely live-action.
  • The most apparent case would have to be at the end of "The Money". As the Wattersons begin to lose everything they have, they start to lose themselves, starting with Gumball losing his colors. As they attempt to recover their money, they start to warp the world around them, until only the storyboard is seen and they appear drawn on Post-it notes. After they sign the contract, the world returns to normal, but Gumball remains drawn in a Post-it because he refused to sign.
• The American Dad! episode "In Country...Club" has a shift from 2D animation to CGI when Roger eats an exotic bird, which sends him on a drug trip.
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force has a live-action episode that held open tryouts for a Carl look-a-like in a contest. The winner of said contest: here.
• Arthur:
  • The episode where D.W. manages to trick Arthur into taking her to a science museum had her and The Brain watching the TV educational documentary Nova (produced by the same PBS affiliate, WGBH), which had live-action sequences on the animated TV screen.
  • Also, the special "It's Only Rock and Roll" opens with Muffy and Francine watching a live-action Backstreet Boys music video. Strange, since in the special, the group is caricatured as anthropomorphic animals.
  • This show's Spin-Off, Postcards from Buster, shows Buster in animated segments and has him record live-action footage for his video postcards.
• The Beatles episode "Paperback Writer" had the group performing in concert with flesh-and-blood photos of them in the rear.
  • The opening of season three had a still photo of each Beatle transition to their cartoon likenesses.
• Big Mouth:
  • Maurice shows Andrew a photo of his brother. It's Nick Nolte's mugshot.
    "Love that crazy asshole!"
  • The "Gay Test", where Maury cycles through photos of (in order of androgyny to masculinity) Tilda Swinton, David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust and Jareth and Dwayne Johnson, just to gauge where his interests lie.
  • The Season 5 finale has a live-action Nick Kroll himself showing up to have his own character be again reminded that everything that happened was his own fault, but also reassuring him that his friends and family are still there and rooting for him.
• Big City Greens: In "Virtually Christmas", scenes taking place in the VR world of Outpost Infinity are rendered in 3D CGI.
• The Nick Jr. show Bubble Guppies have characters with CGI bodies and Flash-animated facial features. It also has some segments with Flash characters and backdrops.
• Bump in the Night has stop-motion animated protagonists Mr. Bumpy, Squishington, and Molly Coddle living in a house that is filmed in live-action and owned by a family played by human actors.
• Chowder:
  • The show is typically traditionally animated, but it frequently makes usage of stop-motion and puppetry.
  • In the episode "The Deadly Maze", there is a brief instance of a dancing CGI... creature that everyone finds very creepy.
  • There's also the infamous scene in "Shopping Spree", where Chowder, Mung and Shnitzel accidentally spend the animation budget on frivolous items. The scene then shifts to the voice actors, trying to figure out how to get the animation back.
• Christmas Carol: The Movie opens with live-action footage before switching to animation.
• City of Ghosts: The characters are animated in CGI and the backgrounds are painted over photos of Los Angeles.
• Code Lyoko:
  • Follows the formula of going from 2D animation in the "real world" to CGI animation in the Cyberspace of Lyoko and the Digital Sea.
  • Code Lyoko: Evolution changes the 2D element to live-action.
• The Grand Finale of Codename: Kids Next Door is done as a Whole Episode Flashback with the Framing Device of the main characters being interviewed years later as adults: the flashbacks are animated as usual, but the interviews are done with live-action actors and sets. And when Father reveals himself to be the one interviewing them, he's in CGI.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog:
  • An episode where Muriel gets sucked into a computer, and when Courage goes in to save her, the first segment of the computer world has Courage animated in CGI.
  • A handful of monsters were shot in a different medium like claymation or CGI, which had the effect making them look like they were dredged up from the deepest, darkest crevasses of the Unintentional Uncanny Valley. Special mention goes to King Ramses, because of the simple effectiveness that came from the awful CG that was used to animate him.
• The Crayon Box: Whenever stories are told, it sometimes switches between live-action puppet segments, and 2D animated segments.
• The Doodlebops Rockin' Road Show features the characters interacting with live-action children discussing their problem before they are transported to their world.
• Doug: Skeeter, while staying at Bebe Bluff's house as part of a Trading Spaces bet among the friends, watches the TV at her house and notes that she has a lot of channels (at least one of which is distinctly shown in live-action).
• Drawn Together had an inversion of the typical "live-action show enters magical cartoon kingdom" thing, with Wooldoor finding a cow in "The Live-Action Forest". The cow then proceeds to wreak havoc all over the cartoon world, eventually getting into a "fight" with the "Live-Action Squirrel with Big Balls".
• Duffy's Dozen was an unsold pilot Hanna-Barbera was pitching in 1971 for a prime time spot. It focused on Ted Duffy, his wife and their ten adopted children travelling across the country with still photographs of noted landmarks as backgrounds.
• El Chavo Animado uses a mix of 2D Flash animation (used for the characters and objects they interact with) and CGI modeling and animation (used for the backgrounds and their elements, including cars and El Chavo's iconic barrel).
• Ella the Elephant uses 3D characters and objects against hand-drawn environments.
• The Epic Tales of Captain Underpants will regularly shift to either felt puppets or live-action costumes for flashbacks, Imagine Spots, and the "(blank)-O-Rama" presentation of the Incredibly Graphic Violence Chapter of each episode.
• The Fairly OddParents!: Channel Chasers features scenes made with paper cut-outs, anime, cel-shaded stop motion, and puppetry.
• Family Guy:
  • Live-action is used on numerous episodes like with Conway Twitty; Peter freaking out at the sight of himself in live-action, Alyssa Milano telling her lawyer to sue the show for a "cheap shot", and a live-action man repeating what Brian said to Meg while shouting.
  • At the end of the Y2K episode, a spoof of Dallas.
    "What's Family Guy?"
  • In "Road to Rupert", the Dancing Jerry scene is taken directly from Anchors Aweigh, with Jerry replaced by Stewie.
  • "Sibling Rivalry" features a cutaway where Peter meets Scrat the squirrel from Ice Age, who's rendered in 3D as usual.
  • "Let's Go to the Hop" features a cutaway where Peter recalls that doing drugs made things "too real". Cut to live-action footage of someone in a Peter mask.
  • "Wasted Talent" ends with Stewie hitchhiking over live-action footage.
  • "Road to the Multiverse" features scenes in a stop-motion universe based on Robot Chicken, one done in hyper-animated Disney style, as well as one of a live-action Brian and Stewie.
  • In "Friends of Peter G.", Peter and Brian watch The Sound of Music, actual footage of which is used.
  • In "Back to the Pilot", after screwing up the timeline in the past, Brian and Stewie go five years into the future to find that everything is done in "slicker" CGI and the writing has gotten lazier.
• The Felix the Cat short "Felix Saves The Day" has characters running up real buildings. It also features real shots of trains and people watching baseball.
• The humans in Firehouse Tales are animated in regular 2D animation, while the firetrucks and other vehicles are animated using CGI.
• Fish Hooks: The fish are animated, but everything around them is photorealistic live-action.
• Freakazoid!: The Relax-o-Vision scenes consist of live-action footage.
• Get a Horse!, a 2013 Mickey Mouse short, involves the characters emerging from their 2D black-and-white world and into our color CG world beyond the theater screen.
• Harvey Beaks: "Yampions" and "It's Christmas, You Dorks!" both have Stop Motion into this mix.
• An episode of Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law has the staff being seen through surveillance footage, which is all live-action footage. Some other episodes also have short live-action sequences, mostly featuring Birdman.
• The Hollow: At the end, when it's revealed that the show is actually a video game and the characters finally manage to leave, the series shifts to the live-action set of the titular game show.
• Jackie Chan Adventures:
  • An intro has live-action Jackie Chan getting spliced into the animation.
  • Each episode ends with Jackie answering questions in the flesh.
• Jake and the Never Land Pirates ends its episodes with music videos by "The Never Land Pirate Band".
• The Jimmy Timmy Power Hour and its sequels:
  • Given that The Fairly OddParents! uses Thick-Line Animation and The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius is CGI, characters are Medium Blended when crossing into the "other" show's universe. This is referenced through Timmy's usage of the adjective "bulgy" in Jimmy's world (itself a Shout-Out to "Homer³") and Jimmy and Sheen falling like cardboard pop-ups upon arriving in the FOP world.
  • In the third Jimmy Timmy Power Hour, the Big Bad of the movie creates "Retrodimmsdaleville", which is depicted as a bizarre mix of both animation styles; that is, the FOP art style in a papery 2½D void.
• Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures has the main characters venturing into "Quest World", a place where their traditionally 2D animated selves became 3D.
• In the KaBlam! episode, "The Best of Both Worlds!", Henry and June want to go into the real world (a.k.a. "The Legendary Third Dimension"), and when they make it there, the show becomes live-action, with Henry and June being played by actual kids (their voice actors did them speaking to avoid viewer confusion).
  • The Life With Loopy shorts were made with a mixture of stop-motion animation (the main characters as well as various other human characters appearing), puppetry (non-human characters), and live-action (for other human characters).
• Lalaloopsy's cartoon adaptation frequently blends live-action and Flash-animated elements.
• Animated short Leisure features crude line drawings of a cartoon man, as well as still photos used in Stop Motion collage style a-la Terry Gilliam. Sometimes they mix, as when the cartoon man interacts in the photo collage world.
• Two Looney Tunes cartoons had this.
  • "You Ought to Be in Pictures" combined still photographs as backgrounds along with cutting from an animated figure to a live-action figure (Porky and the studio gate cop) to the Roger Rabbit Effect (Daffy Duck and Leon Schlesinger).
  • The original version of "Porky's Pooch" exclusively used live photos as backgrounds, though the 1967 redrawn edition replaced them with hand-painted backgrounds.
• The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack has the same production company as Chowder and follows its example with a lot of stop-motion segments. There's one in the opening credits, even!
• Middlemost Post: Middlemost Post is frequently shown as a clay or CGI model while the characters are 2D.
• The Muppets:
  • Muppet Babies (1984) regularly had the babies interacting (in their imagination) with scenes from live-action films, or occasionally specially recorded live action celebrity cameos.
  • Muppet Babies (2018) doesn't use this gimmick as much, but did once show the babies time travelling to the opening credits of The Muppet Show, and another episode featured them talking to the puppet version of Dr Teeth on a video screen.
• My Dad the Bounty Hunter: The show is mainly 3D, but certain flashbacks will dip into hand-drawn animation at times
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • "A Friend in Deed" features a segment of Pinkie's imagination, animated in felt. In the very next (normally animated) scene, she holds up a piece of felt from the animation.
  • In "Pinkie Pride", a song duel includes two live-action cutaways (the first one to a rubber chicken dancing on strings, and the second one to a serene baby alligator).
  • Invoked in "Make New Friends But Keep Discord", when Discord threatens to banish Tree Hugger to an alternate dimension. What we see of it consists of a cheaply-made sock puppet and a crayon drawing.
• Off the Air uses 2D, 3D, and Live-Action, and combines this with Art-Style Clash.
• The 1992 Disney short Off His Rockers has the settings and objects, including the rocking-horse character, be computer-animated while the young boy is traditionally-animated.
• Out of the Inkwell from Fleischer Studios is one of the first, if not the first example of medium blending. It involves a live-action artist (Max Fleischer) drawing animated^note and frequently rotoscoped characters as they leak out from an inkwell in the silent era of film.
• Paddington (1975) has the title character animated using a stop motion puppet, the other characters were coloured paper dolls, and the backgrounds were black and white static drawings.
• Pibby: The trailer has a brief scene where the main cast (all cartoon characters) run across a table in a commercial for grape juice, with a live-action young boy watching in shock.
• Pickle and Peanut does this excessively for many of its gags including live-action, puppetry and photorealism.
• P.C. Pinkerton: In "Slipper", the kids are shown a live-action film of a police dog going through training.
• Each episode of Popetown has a live-action introduction featuring a Catholic school class before the animated part. Theoretically tied-in with the episode content, but rather pointless.
• Popeye: Made possible by the "stereoptic process" (of Fleischer Studios, invented in the 1930s), panning across 3-dimensional backgrounds in their cartoons.^note They constructed physical models on a rotating table, which was photographed with cels held in front of it one frame at a time. For an example of the effect, watch Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor.
• The Powerpuff Girls:
  • The 1998 series was to have had an episode titled "Deja View," in which the titular girls are transported to an alternate universe of Townsville where they meet Evil Doppelgängers of them and an heroic version of Mojo Jojo. The alternate universe's scenes were meant to be made in CGI, but the episode went over budget and was running into deadline issues, so the story was given to DC Comics to be made into issue #50 of their comic book for the show.
  • In the 2016 series' episode "Once Upon a Townsville", Buttercup's beatbox solo segment features live-action stock photos for the background.
• The Pumuckl television series creates the main kobold character using the Roger Rabbit Effect.
• The animated short Rabbit and Deer creatively blends hand-drawn 2D Stick Figure Animation and 3D Stop Motion.
• The CBeebies series Razzledazzle frequently had the CGI-animated character Razzledazzle appear alongside live-action actors.
• Robot Chicken:
  • A very bouncy live-action woman acts alongside the show's traditional stop motion. The Excitebike, parts of the Pac-Man/Matrix, and Space Invaders parodies were all done in ways that looked close, if not identical to their video game counterparts.
  • The Golf Jam sketch combines a stop-motion Tiger Woods with 2D DiC characters.
  • The Boglins sketch has the creatures themselves as live-action puppets, while the other characters are stop-motion.
  • A Press Your Luck sketch, like the original, uses 2D animation for the Whammy.
• Both Rose Petal Place specials have a live-action flashback telling the origin of the garden, while the rest is animated.
• The Simpsons:
  • The famous "Homer³" segment on the Halloween Episode "Treehouse of Horrors VI", where Homer winds up in the "third dimension" where he's animated differently in 3D CGI. The episode ended in Homer getting teleported to the real world, while still being computer-animated. "Homer³" aired before Toy Story came out, and was animated by future Pixar rival Pacific Data Images.
  • One of the Couch Gags in a later season is the normal title sequence filmed in live-action, which was originally a commercial made for the syndicated broadcast on the U.K. channel Sky1 (the parts with the car were flipped so they were in line with the way cars and roads are in America).
  • Maggie's dream in the 2010 Christmas Episode, with the Simpson family and Mr. Burns as Muppets, and Katy Perry appearing live-action.
  • The episodes "HOMR" and "'Tis the Fifteenth Season" both feature characters watching stop motion footage on TV.
  • Similarly, "I Won't Be Home for Christmas" shows an actual live action scene from Miracle on 34th Street on TV.
  • Throughout the episode "Daddicus Finch", Homer and Lisa can be seen watching scenes from the 1962 To Kill a Mockingbird film starring Gregory Peck.
  • The special LEGO episode "Brick Like Me" combines CGI (mimicking stop-motion photography) with the show's usual traditional animation.
  • The episode "Cue Detective" uses actual live-action clips of Doctor Dolittle when Skinner shows the movie to the kids.
  • Fittingly for a Christmas episode, "Bobby It's Cold Outside" incorporates clips from It's a Wonderful Life.
• Smiling Friends, while primarily in 2D, frequently features stop-motion, CGI and live-action, which adds to the show's wackiness. Even some 2D characters stand out from the rest, such the rotoscoped Party Bro and a Hobbit-type character who, while still digitally animated like the rest of the characters, is designed to imitate traditional 20th Century cel-shading.
• South Park
  • The Emmy-winning World of Warcraft episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft" has some sequences taking place within the game; these were animated using a modified version of the WoW engine.
  • Real photographs of people every now and again (like Saddam) wade into the territory of the pseudo paper cut-out technique of the show.
  • The two-part episode "Pandemic" features live-action guinea pigs attacking cities in an obvious Cloverfield parody.
  • In the episode where Tweek fights Craig, the shop teacher's late girlfriend is seen in flashbacks as a live-action actress.
  • In "Funnybot", Funnybot is cel-shaded.
  • The "Faith Hilling" episode has a live-action cat saying "Oh long johnson". (The clip was borrowed from America's Funniest Home Videos, of all shows.)
  • "I Should Have Never Gone Ziplining" has the last segment done as a dramatization by live actors, and the X-ray/inner body shots are made with CGI.
  • In some episodes, the houses look as if they are 3D.
  • Season 2 episode "The Mexican Staring Frog of Southern Sri Lanka" uses live-action historical Stock Footage of Vietnam for Mr. Garrison's Imagine Spot and Stock Footage of helicopters for Jimbo's rather... bizarre recollection of the Vietnam War.
  • Season 4's controversial "Pip" episode is presented by "a British person" in live action.
• Strawberry Shortcake
  • The 2003 series, for the Sweet Dreams Movie, shifted the series from 2D animation to 3D CGI.
  • In a similar vein, the 2021 reboot, ''Berry in the Big City", shifts the series artstyle from 2D animation to 3D for the Netflix specials.
• Sunny Day features Flash-animated characters with CGI settings and accessories.
• Superjail! has a dream sequence where Jailbot and The Warden are seen fishing together while animated in 3D CGI. This episode and another end with The Warden as a hobo in the real world.
• Team Umizoomi regularly has live actors interacting with the computer-animated characters and environments.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) tends to mix 2D and 3D animation (such as flashbacks being done entirely in "motion comic" format), and the show's camera angles, effects, shading, and character designs are reminiscent of comic books.
• Thomas & Friends:
  • The third season episode "Buzz, Buzz" features cel-animated bees alongside the live-action models.
  • The twelfth season, the final season of the model era, combined live-action models with CGI faces, characters and certain "props".
• Thunderbirds 2086: CGI is mixed in with cel animation.
• Uncle Grandpa: The amply named Giant Realistic Flying Tiger. Live-action Stock Footage was also used.
• In the Van Beuren Studios Tom & Jerry short ^note Absolutely no relation to the more famous cat and mouse duo of the same name"Plane Dumb", the opening has a live-action waterfall superimposed behind it, for reasons unclear.
• VeggieTales videos produced in The New '10s have the letters the characters receive replaced by video chats featuring real children.
• In The Venture Bros., whenever recurring villain, The Sovereign, appeared on his telescreen, he was shown in what appears to be live-action footage of someone wearing a cap for his exaggerated forehead.
• Where the Wild Things Are: In the early 1980s, Disney planned to make a featurette version that would have had traditionally animated characters moving around in a computer-animated environment. The plans fell through due to costs, but a 30-second test of What Could Have Been can be seen here.
• As of season 5 of Winx Club, the show combines traditional animation with CGI animation, usually when the fairies move to some plane that can not be reached normally without some very specific transformation.
• Your Friend the Rat (from the Ratatouille DVD): CGI is used for the framing scenes of Rémy and Émile. Traditional animation is used for the rest, with a stop-motion scene and a couple of live-action Stock Footage shots.

---