Pintsized Powerhouse / Western Animation

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• A downplayed example with Caitlin Cooke from 6teen. She is shown to be quite strong despite her relatively small stature — in "Baby You Stink," Caitlin drags this big photo booth all the way to her workplace, and Nikki comments, "For a size zero, [Caitlin] sure can drag a heavy load" and in "Insert Name Here," when Caitlin's helping Wyatt to finally get over his feelings for his ex-girlfriend, Serena, the first thing she does is delete Serena's number from Wyatt's cellphone (and she literally wrestles the phone away from him), and Wyatt notes, "[Caitlin is] freakishly strong for someone so small."
• Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers: The Kiwi species are sci-fi Hobbits in most senses of the word. They're a meter high, their planet and culture specialize in agriculture, and they're generally a good-natured bunch. Not that they can't dole out the whoop-ass -- it just takes them a while to get them angry enough. Ambassador Zozo wears the planetary Hat to an extreme. He frequently takes on Mooks twice his size and wins — including a flying tackle onto the Scarecrow Entity.
• The Amazing World of Gumball: Subverted by the store manager in "The Refund". When Richard tried to confront him, he saw his ass getting handed to him despite the manager's small, cute appearance. However, the manager wasn't particularly strong, Richard was just a wuss.
• Hayley Smith from American Dad! is small for a grown woman (according to the cover art◊ for volume 6, she's barely five feet tall), but has displayed immense strength, is nigh-unstoppable when sufficiently angered and is skilled enough at fighting to curb-stomp her father Stan, who is not only much larger than her, but is a trained killer.
• Polly Plantar from Amphibia is a pollywog with Blood Knight tendencies who loves to fight, and has been seen swinging a mace that is larger than her.
• The tiny donkey Zazoom from Arabian Knights isn't even up to the knee of the shortest knight, but if someone pulls his tail, he becomes a quite literal whirlwind of destruction.
• Atom Ant. As well as Hal Seeger's Atom Ant expy, Fearless Fly.
• Both Aang and Toph from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Especially Toph. She's the shortest of the main cast, but she can levitate giant boulders into the air and smash them down on her enemies.
  • Bending aside, she's even shown to be the physically strongest teenager in the Gaang. This includes Sokka, whose shoulders her head barely reaches. She seems to be a match for Zuko, who is the oldest, and even taller than Sokka.
• Princess Looma from Ben 10: Omniverse is only six or seven feet tall (her race is usually over ten feet tall) but is undefeated in combat against any other tetramand.
• Camp Lazlo: Clam is the smallest of the Bean Scouts, but he can frequently haul heavy things without any difficulty.
• The Columbia Cartoons character Willoughby Wren is a small man who wears a magic cap weaved from Samson’s hair that gives him super strength, he can carry a bunch of elephants and can beat up a giant robot or gorilla, even a single finger poke can send a large opponent flying or stop a train, he appeared in Willougby’s Magic Hat and Carnival Courage.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog has lots of strength for a small dog like him, as he is able to carry Muriel and/or Eustace over his head with no effort.
• The Ethnic Scrappy Joe Jitsu◊ from the terribly stupid but quite funny The Dick Tracy Show; he stands only about 2 feet without his hat, but when Joe uses Jitsu, "Ah, so sorry. Excuse prease." He even pummels the bad guys at a fraction of his size!
• Donald Duck. Many times, his strength isn't just due to his Unstoppable Rage, but also sheer determination.
  • For example in "Canvas Back Duck", Donald manages to defeat boxing champ Peewee Pete by simply tapping him ever so slightly on his jaw (causing it to shatter like a window; Pete has a "glass jaw").
  • In "Tapped Out", similar to "Canvas Back Duck", but more deliberately, Donald manages to take down Pete as a pro-wrestling champ (when Mickey failed to do so) after the latter angered him after inadvertently ruining his nachos (which he does not like others to so much as touch).
  • In the Quack Pack episode, "Ducks By Nature", the camping leader is jealous of Donald and calls him "city wimp" but Donald carries both his own and the leader's camping equipment (which includes a canoe!) and then the camp leader challenges Donald to a race to climb up a cliff. Then, he cheats by secretly tying Donald to a tree with an extra-strong bungie cord. Donald struggles for a bit before his determination makes him so strong that he not only uproots said tree but literally SENDS IT INTO ORBIT and gets him to the cliff top faster than the camp leader!
• The Dragon Prince: Besides Ezran and Ellis, Callum is the shortest of the named characters. Nevertheless, he can dish out serious damage with his magic.
• Droopy had a few:
  • Droopy himself, for starters. Usually, his tactic is psyching his opponent out, or letting him beat himself up; but when push comes to shove, Droop will face down his foe; tell him, "You know what? That makes me mad", and proceed to beat the ever-living crap out of him.
  • In the short "Droopy's Double Trouble", the audience is introduced to Droopy's stronger twin brother, Drippy. The plot revolves around Spike running into Drippy (who has been instructed to keep out all strangers) and wondering why Droopy keeps beating him up for no reason.
  • Then in "Homesteader Droopy", his infant son ultimately thrashes the bad guy.
• On Esme & Roy, Fig is able to pick up Roy, despite Fig being a little monster child who comes up to about Esme's waist and Roy being taller than the average adult human.
• Family Guy:
  • Stewie Griffin. Still a baby, but he can hold his own in a fight against Osama bin Laden and Lois in "Lois Kills Stewie", almost killing her if it wasn't for Peter's arrival.
  • Meg also has shades of this, in one episode she beat the crap out of a guy when he rammed into her car.
  • Despite being half the size of most characters and not fighting back most of the time, Brian is formidable in a brawl. "Play It Again, Brian" has him beat Peter in a brutal bar fight, which is quite impressive when his long, bloody scraps with the Giant Chicken are taken into account. It helps that as a dog, he can bite pretty hard; on two separate occasions, he traumatises Peter after biting his arm.
• The eponymous character of Fangbone! (and the original Fangbone! Third Grade Barbarian books) is a 9-year-old Barbarian Hero from a Proud Warrior Race with Blood Knight tendencies. He's able to take on ferocious monsters several times his size and win, break boulders with his head without flinching, and doesn't fear death in the slightest.
• The Flintstones
  • Bamm-Bamm Rubble can lift and carry a grown man with easy. Unfortunately, he often Does Not Know His Own Strength.
  • The end credits feature a rib place with a petite waitress who can carry a rack of ribs that seems twice as big as herself, which tips Fred's car over from the weight.
• Garfield and Friends:
  • Garfield, normally not averse to eating live birds like he is to eating mice at all, is afraid to get near Ludlow, a small bird who is naïve and kind of annoying. However, he is not (known to be) this trope, or the reason Garfield's afraid. Ludlow's father, on the other hand, packs quite a punch, and while he's bigger than his son he's quite a bit more literally pint-sized.
  • In another episode, one mouse's mother is inadvertently trapped in a cookie jar. He won't believe Garfield hasn't done anything with her, but since Garfield doesn't know what did happen, he's powerless to prove otherwise. This proves dangerous, as the mouse brings over a murine parody of Arnold Schwarzenegger to beat a confession out of him. The Cup-Sized Powerhouse knocks him around a while before Garfield is able to discover and subsequently produce the missing mother mouse.
  • Garfield himself has shades of this, despite his avoidance of fisticuffs and general laziness, as he's moved appliances and furniture by himself and has beaten Jon in an arm-wrestling contest before. In one episode, he loaded a horse and the mayor of Davenport, Iowa onto a table during a poker game, but that may not count as it was a dream...Or Was It a Dream? The remote does remain busted on the floor and he's wearing a scarf he acquired from the dream.
• The title character of Invader Zim certainly qualifies. He's absolutely tiny compared to a lot of characters in the series but he's ridiculously destructive. And insane.
• Jackie Chan Adventures: Jade, when she's not inflicted by Waif-Fu.
  • Also, Tohru's mother, if you ever mess with him in her presence.
• From the Justice League Unlimited episode "Dead Reckoning": Some of Grodd's legion of supervillains under Lex Luthor's arrive at a Buddhist temple. They encounter a child monk, maybe ten or twelve, who tells them that they cannot enter. Lex sends the Atomic Skull, one of the largest henchmen he brought, to deal with him Skull tells the young monk he won't go easy on him just because he's a kid; the boy responds that he won't either, and proceeds to kick Skull's ass.
• In Kidd Video, the gang's tiny fairy companion Glitter can perform godlike feats of strength, enough to lift entire buildings, when she "super sneezes", for a burst of a few minutes. Unfortunately, she genuinely has to sneeze in order to trigger it. Thus, whenever this ability is needed, she or one of her friends has to look for something like dandelions or a pepper shaker to make her sneeze, and there isn't always one within easy reach.
• Not so much in the majority of the series, where she's 5'6" at age 15, but Kim Possible is shown to be just as able to throw down in preschool as when she's a teenager.
• Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts: As Benson lampshades at one point, Wolf is a lot stronger and more agile than you'd think someone as short as she is would be.
  Benson: Obviously you can handle yourself. I mean, you just jumped over a full-on truck back there. And, like, how did you do that? You're like four feet tall and it was a truck!
• Sequel Series The Legend of Korra: Korra displays this trait as well. When the White Lotus Society first meets her, she is already bending three elements with skill... at about age four. Even in the series proper, she is by far the shortest non-child character in the cast.
  • Additionally, Aang's three airbending grandchildren are capable of taking out large groups of trained adult opponents, despite the fact that none of them are older than 11-years-old; the youngest, Meelo, even seems to be the best at combat of the three, despite being no older than 6.
  • Book 3 gives us the Red Lotus waterbender Ming-Hua, who's quite a bit shorter than Korra, scrawny, and one scary lady.
  • Toph Beifong's airbender granddaughter Opal is also fairly petite, and takes a level in badass over the Time Skip.
• In Legion of Super Heroes (2006), Karate Kid (not that one) is not only bereft of super-powers but also short and frail-looking, but can defeat Superman with his bare hands.
• Looney Tunes:
  • Henery Hawk. One short ends with him hauling away Foghorn Leghorn, the Barnyard Dawg he's always picking on, and a horse, all strung out on a rope.
  • And Chester as well. A pint-sized pup who was able to swing Sylvester around.
  • Bob Clampett's early version of Tweety would also qualify.
  • In the 1940s, Chuck Jones directed a handful of shorts featuring an African pygmy warrior named Inki. Also appearing in these cartoons was a small, black mynah bird who walked with a signature series of rhythmic hops and skips to the tune of Felix Mendelssohn's "Fingal's Cave" overture. The instant any attacker followed this bird around a corner (or otherwise out of the audience's line of sight), the sounds and music of a serious fight would ensue for approximately ten seconds, followed by the bird continuing on his way with nary a feather out of place. The attacker(s), on the other hand, were usually battered rather severely. To give one example, in the short "Caveman Inki", which was set in the stone age (described in the introduction card as being "probably before any of you people were EVEN BORN!"), the world's first last and only carnivorous brontosaurus was tied into several knots.
  • There was also Rocky the gangster, of "Rocky and Mugsy" and a few other Bugs Bunny shorts, who despite being a tiny man could easily beat up people much bigger than himself.
  • Kid Banty the boxing rooster from the Foghorn Leghorn cartoon "Sock A Doodle Doo".
  • The Mighty Angelo, the World's Strongest Flea, from "To Itch His Own". He performs several feats of ridiculous strength to deal with a Bully Bulldog who's picking on the dog where Angelo is taking a vacation.
• Lynn Loud from The Loud House is roughly the middle kid when it comes to height out of Lincoln's 10 sisters. She's the same height as Lincoln who's 11. She's also one of the physically strongest out of all of them the closest second being the eldest Lori. She's also the most gifted athlete in the family, and is strong enough to lift Leni, the second-eldest Loud sibling.
• Klokateer Number 216 from Metalocalypse is a very small member of Dethklok's bodyguards, but he is a very strong and capable fighter.
• Mickey Mouse. Though not always victorious in his fights, Mickey has been known to jump into battle with much larger foes—Pete most often, but also the occasional monster spider (Gulliver Mickey, 1934), crooked Indian chief (Pioneer Days, 1930), or crew of pirates (Shanghaied, 1934).
• Mighty Mouse, obviously. Most of his foes are far bigger than he is, and in many shorts, he can curb-stomp them rather easily. (The formula usually had him only show up in the climax of his own cartoon, pulling a Big Damn Heroes after the villain had already wrecked havoc for a while.)
• The Kwamis of Miraculous Ladybug are cute little spirit creatures that could sit in the palm of your hand with room to spare. They are also the ancient Anthropomorphic Personifications of fundamental concepts that possess godlike power. The Miraculouses are effectively Power Limiters because if the kwamis try to use their power directly instead of through a chosen hero, the consequences can be disastrous. Just ask Plagg, Kwami of Destruction, who accidentally inflicted widespread structural damage across the entire city of Paris the one time he tried to act without Cat Noir, and was apparently responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs.
• Mr. Bogus often borderlines on this trope at times, especially due to his Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass and Determinator status. If any problems arise in either Tommy's house or in Bogusland, NOTHING can stop him.
• My Goldfish is Evil: Admiral Bubbles is shown to be very strong for a tiny goldfish, performing impressive acrobatic feats and managing to fight off much larger creatures.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Being small and living in a world of magic and running on the theme of Steven Ulysses Perhero, all of the ponies in Equestria are this by default, each of them having a special talent and power. Quite a few direct examples below:
  • Rarity. Unicorns aren't known for their strength, but she can drag carts full of gems with ease, carries a large boulder twice her size on her back, and takes a martial-arts stance and then goes ninja on a bunch of changelings in "A Canterlot Wedding" (season-openers and enders tend to be more action-packed than the rest of the mostly slice-of-life series.) In fact, she's faster to resort to combat than Applejack (rough-and-tumble farm pony and physically the strongest of the team.)
  • Twilight Sparkle is another unicorn. Despite not being exceptionally fit, her magic blasts have the power of a tank gun.
    • Twilight later becomes stronger (temporarily), by getting the power of the other three Alicorn Princesses. If you don't fear spoilers, behold her wrath and tremble.
  • Pound Cake is a Pegasus that can haul ponies twice his size while zooming through the air... and he's ONE MONTH OLD! It's worth mentioning that Twilight stated young ponies go through spurts where their innate magic surges and allows them feats normally reserved for adults, such as Pound's Super-Strength and his sister Pumpkin levitating herself with enough skill to match Pound's speed and maneuverability.
  • Maud Pie, Pinkie's Cool Big Sis, isn't any smaller than the rest of the cast, but she's certainly no more stronger-looking than your average mare. Turns out she can reduce boulders to dust with her bare hooves with ease. Which on the other hand makes sense since she is an Earth Pony.
  • "Crusaders of the Lost Mark" introduces a filly with enough Super-Strength to lift up the schoolhouse with one hoof.
• Phineas and Ferb:
  • Perry the Platypus. He's small, but packs a punch. At one point in the movie, he supports the combined weight of Phineas, Ferb, Candace, and Doofenshmirtz to prevent them from falling into lava.
  • Meap the alien . He's a tiny white snowman like alien with big blue eyes and a pink bunny ear hat, but is able to beat up opponents many times his own size and he is actually a police officer on his planet.
  • Also there's Agent S aka Sergei the Snail, who despite his small size and lack of limbs can somehow toss Doofenshmirtz around like it was nothing.
    Doofenshmirtz: That snail is dynamite!
• PJ Masks: Greg, as Gekko, has super strength as his primary power. Slightly less pint-sized but still counting is Armadylan, who is introduced in Season 2.
• The Plastic Man show had Mighty Man, a shrunken Flying Brick, and Yukk, the World's Ugliest Dog, who had to wear a full-head doghouse helmet so no one would see him.
• Popeye is much shorter than most bad guys, but always manages to outfight them with ease. His four nephews and even his infant ward Swee'pea have been known to knock guys like Bluto out in one punch. (Having a guy like Popeye as a guardian helps.)
• The Powerpuff Girls practically embody this trope. They are short, but they can lift a lot more than people twice their height can and beats up skyscraper-sized monsters on a daily basis.
• Scooby-Doo:
  • Scrappy-Doo does lift Scooby and Shaggy with one hand at least twice. So he has the strength for it... he just tends to borrow his strategies from Leeroy Jenkins.
  • Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: The original Scooby-Doo's Velma was definitely this. Although she's the shortest member of the gang, she can carry all the rest of the gang and run from the monster at the same time.
  • Be Cool, Scooby-Doo! also has Velma carrying the entire gang while running from the monster, which eventually leads her to question why they keep forcing her to do this when she is very clearly the gang's smallest and weakest member. The gang doesn't answer her. Nor do they stop.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks gives us the Texas-class. The class looks as small as a Nova-class, but its phasers as strong enough to overpower the shields of a Sovereign-class and has a photon torpedo launcher capable of splitting into smaller warheads. And this is supposed to be designed for Second Contact-based missions. It's one fatal flaw? Its A.I. Is a Crapshoot - it uses a version of the AI code that brought about Badgey.
• Star Trek: Prodigy introduces the USS Protostar. Despite being a very small ship (even smaller than the Defiant), she's capable of some impressive Beam Spam and has an advanced drive system that can shoot her to Ludicrous Speed.
• Amethyst from Steven Universe is pretty strong even by Gem standards despite being as short as Steven. "Too Far" reveals that she should have been even stronger and Large and in Charge to boot because she's a Quartz Gem. However, she stayed in the ground too long and came out an "overcooked runt", as Jasper put it.
  • Steven himself also becomes quite strong as the series progresses, at one point demonstrating this by easily lifting a trunk on his own that two grown men struggled with. Being the son/reincarnation of Rose Quartz (or rather Pink Diamond's) would explain a lot of Super-Strength.
• Nova from Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!. She's a cute 2-foot-tall cyborg monkey who can instantly transform her hands into huge Power Fists that will knock any monster silly, as well as give her a monster grip. Back that up with what may be centuries worth of martial arts training, and you've got one Cute Bruiser who will never disappoint.
• Sushi Pack has Wasabi Pow, who is the smallest (and possibly youngest) member of the team. However, he can actually lift large objects without effort including a watermelon in "Sign of The Tuna".
• Most Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles incarnations portray the turtles as slightly shorter than adults, or at least make them smaller/the same size as most of their enemies. This is the most obvious in the 2003 series, where the turtles were at least a foot shorter than April (and only slightly taller than Splinter), and visibly shorter than the Shredder. Most mutants they go up against (such as Bebop and Rocksteady) are often bigger than them. Still, the four of them are trained martial artists and usually manage to defeat those bigger than them, sometimes using their size against them.
• Teen Titans (2003):
  • Robin. He's just a normal and scrawny teenager... Who has defeated many superpowered foes.
  • Starfire is tall, but quite scrawny (though really, everyone but Cyborg is, so maybe it's down to the art style), which makes it all the more hilarious when she gets dangerous and introduces villains to the full wrath of a starbolt-wielding Flying Brick.
  • Blackfire, Starfire's sister. She's somewhat taller, has the same superpowers as her sister, and studied a number of alien martial arts.
• Tom and Jerry:
  • In the cartoon "Jerry's Cousin", the eponymous cousin is called Muscles Mouse, and the cats where he lives live in fear of him.
  • Jerry himself becomes a Pint-Sized Powerhouse after a poison concocted by Tom backfires and gives him super strength in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Mouse".
  • And in "The Milky Waif", Jerry becomes this after Tom starts picking on his little nephew and triggers Jerry's Papa Wolf instincts.
• Transformers:
  • Brawn, in his various incarnations, is one of the smallest Autobots (a little shorter than Bumblebee), but he's got muscle and attitude far beyond his size. Some of his exploits include picking up Soundwave and Megatron and tossing them like rag dolls.
  • Soundwave's Cassetticons (and later series' versions of those characters) can get pretty badass for their size. The one everyone knows is Rumble: Human-sized, but able to shake the ground and bring giant-er bots down to Earth, as well as being able to hit as hard as any car or truck-bot. The one who takes the cake, is the Marvel comic's version of Buzzsaw, though. You probably don't remember the bird guy who was like Laserbeak but yellow if you've only seen the show, but in the comic, they were quite different characters. Laserbeak's job was a scout and spy, whereas Buzzsaw's job was to kick serious skidplate. The little guy had a habit of not just holding his own against, but curbstomping full-size bots. He considered himself an "artist" and his idea of a masterpiece was Autobots who'd been trashed with what he considered great precision and what everyone else considered "Holy Primus did he just take down OMEGA SUPREME?!"
  • Of course, don't think the Autobots can't pack a lot of mean into a little a space, too. One of Blaster's tape buddies was a rhino called Ramhorn, and he could tackle down any full-size 'con and boasted hip-mounted rocket-launchers (three missiles on each side). Now, if only he could do something about that awful stutter. Of course, nobody who's smart gives him any crap about it...
  • Transformers: Animated has Dirt Boss, who is capable of delivering roundhouse kicks that knock over bots 4 times his size!
  • Transformers: Prime:
    • This series' incarnation of Laserbeak is the baddest yet. Definitely a case of Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass, he hardly seemed a character in his own right, deployed on extremely rare occasion to be Soundwave's eyes and ears and never being referred to by name. Then came Triage, when Soundwave left the dogfight he'd gotten into with Wheeljack's ship to Laserbeak. Minicon-sized bird-bot versus building-sized ship piloted by a badass Wrecker; who would you bet on? In fact, Laserbeak brought down the Jackhammer alone and only took one hit. (The one hit, though, was enough to keep Laserbeak down long enough for Ratchet to hack him and get at some Decepticon secrets, but still, damn. Even so, by the end of the episode, Laserbeak was still mobile, and easily fixed. Not so the Jackhammer.)
    • Miko was easily the most aggressive of the human sidekicks (despite the fact that her willingness to be involved in the action often caused more harm than good). In the last season, however, she becomes the wearer of the Apex Armor, an indestructible and incredibly strong armor. While wearing it, she's still much shorter than the average Cybertronian, but she's strong and tough enough to fight Starscream and two Vehicons at the same time...and win. Also, before that, she became the only human character in the series to directly kill a Decepticon when she took down Hardshell.
• The Twelve Tasks of Asterix has the third task of winning a fight. The big doors open to a very small martial artist, who can easily throw Obelix around.
• Elmyra Duff from Tiny Toon Adventures has been shown manhandling large animals on multiple occasions.
• X-Men: The Animated Series: Nimrod the Sentinel. He's much smaller than his fellows, being the size of an ordinary human, but far more powerful. Bishop's terrified at the sight of him, and this fear? Justified. It's heavily implied he killed Future Wolverine by blasting all the flesh off his bones.

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