Unreliable Narrator / Western Animation

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• Adventure Time:
  • An early episode has the Ice King claim that he made his magic crown himself, which contradicts the back story we see in "Holly Jolly Secrets". Of course, that episode made it clear that the Ice King is even more unhinged than previously shown, so the contradiction makes a bit of sense.
  • While Hunson Abadeer wrote the Adventure Time Encyclopedia, it makes quite clear at several points that there are things he does not know (such as Simon Petrikov's relationship to his daughter, or his own origins) and that there are assumptions he makes which are incorrect (he is fond of assuming that centuries or eons passed at certain points when other sources would indicate it was probably more like days, years at most).
• Alvin and the Chipmunks: Manages to combine this with a Clip Show in the episode, “Alvin in Analysis”. Alvin goes to see a therapist to complain about how his family drives him crazy despite all his “selfless” attempts to help them. It doesn’t take long for the therapist to notice how all of his selfless acts tend to end disastrously and that maybe he’s not being completely honest with her. She decides to hypnotize him, and that’s when he starts telling the truth about how selfish he really is.
• American Dad!: Put an interesting spin on this in "The American Dad After School Special". For the first half of the episode, Stan is shown becoming dangerously obese, apparently thanks to his family sabotaging his diet to teach him a lesson about making fun of overweight people like Steve's girlfriend Debbie. Just before the ad break, we see that Stan is in fact dangerously underweight and the family's "sabotage" is their desperate attempts to help him. Since Stan is the viewpoint character...
• Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Zhang and Gan Jin tribes have been enemies for a century, and both have very different versions of how the feud began. Interestingly, the situation is resolved by introducing a third unreliable narrator - a.k.a. outright liar - in the form of Avatar Aang: To settle the matter, he claims to have witnessed the events in question (which were much more innocuous than either tribe remembers) and attributes the discrepancies to natural drift over the years.
• Batman: The Animated Series:
  • The episode "Legends of the Dark Knight" focuses on three kids talking about different stories of who Batman is, evoking different versions of the character. The 1950s-style story is questioned as particularly dubious because one of the kids heard it from his uncle, a security guard who was knocked out by Joker gas and didn't actually witness the events.
  • The first story in Batman: Gotham Knight, "Have I Got a Story", also does this. Where each kid describes Batman differently from a different point in a single chase (in reverse order). The first describes a Shadow demon, second strikes a similar figure as Manbat, third is a robot. When Batman shows up he is, of course, human.
  • Both of those episodes resemble a comics story, Batman #250's "The Batman Nobody Knows".
  • The episode "P.O.V." is a "Rashomon"-Style. The three versions are told by Harvey Bullock, who knows what really happened but is portraying himself as the competent hero and Batman as the one who screwed up; Officer Wilkes, who is genuine in his belief but makes Batman come off as a supernatural creature; and Officer Montoya, who tells the truth as she saw it but erroneously believes that Batman was killed.
• The Beatles: The narrator in the cartoon "I Want To Hold Your Hand" is ostensibly taking the viewers on a tour of a pleasure cruise and giving away the boys' hiding spots from their hysterical female fans. The narrator, in so many words, is told to bug off.
• Captain Planet and the Planeteers: It's not clear whether or not Gaia's tale from "Hog Tide" is completely true. At the end of the episode, Wheeler even suspects she was "pulling [their] legs". Linka believes that it's not really important, though.
  Linka: You missed the point of her story. [...] It is not smart to build so close to the water.
• Codename: Kids Next Door:
  • In "Operation: R.E.P.O.R.T."^note which even stands for "Ridiculous Exaggerations Possess Occasionally Real Truth", all five members of Sector V seem to be this. If one had to guess, Numbuh Five's version of the story was probably closest to the facts, but they were all rather farfetched.
  • Possibly the case in the Series Finale, "Operation: I.N.T.E.R.V.I.E.W.S." It is revealed at the end that the adult KND were deliberately misleading Father during the interview, so it stands to reason that the parts of the story that he did not actually witness could have been untrue.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog: The episode "Freaky Fred" is told from the point of view of the title character, who's an Ax-Crazy Expy of Sweeney Todd and viewed as one of the creepiest villains in the series. An interesting variation in that, while he is narrating the episode, the audience can see what is actually happening and catch the dissonance.
• Dofus: Kerub's Bazaar: Characters often get into arguments regarding how something actually happened, so it's highly likely that Kerubim embellishes his stories when no-one's there to dispute them.
• Earthworm Jim: The Narrator in the animated series not only often has no idea what's actually happening, he's also, at least once, bullied into reading a scene transition to the benefit of one of the villains. "Hey, Narrator guy. Read this or I'll disperse your molecules." "Oh. Erm... later, Psy-Crow and Professor Monkey-For-A-Head have defeated the evil Queen." <Scene transition to this having already happened>.
• Ever After High: Suffers from this, mostly because there are two narrators who constantly criticize how the other tells the story. One favouring the Royals (female) and the other the Rebels (male) doesn't help.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: In one episode Grim deliberately tells Billy and Irwin distorted versions of classic American stories claiming that he was there. Except it's (possibly) subverted, because Pecos Billy and the laser cows show up and shoot stuff at the end.
• Harley Quinn (2019): When Harley consults the Queen of Fables, she tells about how Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman took out her henchmen, Harley stops the story noting that Superman would never scorch anyone. The Queen of Fables admits to exaggerating to make the story more interesting.
• The Head: In the first episode, a thug who was spared from the attack by Roy, tells his own story of the attack on the news, which depicts the thugs as innocent and Jim as the thug.
• I Am Weasel: Once did a strange origin story for both I.M Weasel and I.R. Baboon (Baboon is a no-talent comedian and Weasel is a country singer who often comes to Baboon's rescue). It had an unidentified narrator with a somewhat deep Southern accent. At the end of the story, his voice drastically changes and he's revealed to be Jolly Roger, who of course made it all up.
• Invader Zim: Gir's witness account of Dib's alien video in "Mysterious Mysteries" is so out there it borders on Through the Eyes of Madness. He claims to have been Stacy: "The chubby lady hidin' in the bushes," and halfway through he starts talking about a giant space squirrel.
  Mysterious Mysteries Host: What does that have to do with anything?!
  Gir/Stacy: Me and the squirrel are friends.
  • In fact, the whole episode was an example. The episode involves Zim, Gir, Dib, and Gaz all giving their accounts of the alien video Dib takes and each one is obviously biased. As noted above Gir's is absolute nonsense, Zim's makes him and Gir out to be sympathetic children and Dib as an Ogre-style bully, Dib's show him as a powerful and confident hero while showing Gaz as the stereotypical damsel in distress, and Gaz's shows Zim and Dib as stupid to the point of mental retardation. All parties are obviously lying to some degree and what's worse is that from the actual video the you can easily tell what really happened.
• Iron Man: Armored Adventures: Pepper claims to have found information on AIM by clinging to the ceiling listening onto her father talking the the FBI. She later breaks down and admits her father just forgot to log off his computer.
• Kaeloo:
  • In seasons 1 and 2 of the show, Stumpy would complain about how he never knew what his mother did all day while he was at school and that she was neglectful and never spent much time with him. Later episodes in the show reveal that Stumpy's mother is a hardworking single mother of eight children whose only reason for not spending time with him is that she works three jobs to earn enough money for her family.
  • In seasons 1-4, Mr. Cat had an established backstory in which he ran away from home to escape his abusive family, consisting of an alcoholic father, a mother who always screamed at him, and two older brothers who bullied him. However, he kept saying things that conflicted with his established backstory. Season 5 explains that this was actually due to him deliberately telling lies about his past, and the established backstory was the only true one.
• King of the Hill: Certain parts of Cotton's recountings of his past are rather questionable. It's implied that he and his friends have shared war stories for so long that he cannot remember which ones he was actually involved in. In one episode Peggy helps him put together a record of his time in WWII and has to remind him that he was never in Munich, as he fought in the Pacific theater.
  Cotton: You forgot Munich.
  Peggy: You were never in Munich.
  Cotton: I wasn't?
  • Not to mention, the firehouse episode plays this for laughs; showing everyone's recounts of the events, Flanderizing everyone and in Boomhauer's case, everyone talks like him but he speaks normally.
  • In "Luanne Gets Lucky", Lucky recounts the tale of his grandfather finding a perfect walnut tree stump; while he says "Grandpappy" was on a church picnic, the Flash Back shows he was a criminal attempting to escape jail. However, it's implied that Lucky is simply repeating the (false) story that he heard from family rather than lying on purpose.
• Looney Tunes: Two cartoons, The Trial of Mr. Wolf and Turn Tale Wolf, have the Big Bad Wolf tell alternate versions of Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs, respectively, with him as the victim. (At the end of the first one, when it's clear that no-one believes him, he says that if he's lying, he hopes he's run over by a street car, at which point that's exactly what happens. Then he gets up and says, "Okay, maybe I did exaggerate a bit...")
  • A modern short featuring Daffy as "Superior Duck" had him getting frustrated with Thurl Ravenscroft's apparent inability to announce him as being faster than a bullet and more powerful than a locomotive.
• Molly of Denali: In "Climb Every Mountain," Midge tells Oscar that she broke her toe the last time she went climbing with Nat, which only serves to make Oscar afraid to try rock climbing. Nat later specifies that Midge tripped on a tree root on the trail back from the rock.
• Motorcity: In the episode "Threat Level: Texas!", while being interrogated by Tooley, Texas tells him about the events of several previous episodes, only in which he is the hero of the story rather than Mike Chilton, to the point where the rest of the main cast is incredibly out of character and very goofy, constantly praising him.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: "MMMMystery on the Friendship Express" involves Pinkie trying to figure out who took a bite of a cake she was delivering to a dessert contest. She blames the three competing chefs on board by inventing wild explanations as to how each one did it, accusing a griffin of being a Dastardly Whiplash-esque villain, a donkey of being a Ninja, and a unicorn of being a James Bond expy. It turns out that three of Pinkie's friends got so hungry hearing her talk up how delicious the Marzipan Mascarpone Meringue Madness was, they each snuck a bite while she wasn't looking.
• Over the Garden Wall: Wirt mentions a few times that he recently lost out on love against a guy named Jason Funderberker, whom he describes as somebody impossible to compete with. Eventually, we actually see the incident in a Whole Episode Flashback, and not only is Jason Funderberker a scrawny nerd even geekier than Wirt (if less self-conscious about it), it's clear to the viewer that the girl in question, Sara, likes Wirt and only sees Jason Funderberker as a friend.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998): A very literal example of this (which occurs due to the Rule of Funny) happens in one episode, where Mojo Jojo attacks, ties up, and gags the narrator and takes over the job so that the events of the story turn out in his favor. The Girls eventually realize what is happening, ignore his narrations, and beat the crud out of him. At the end of the story, they rescue the real narrator.
• Rick and Morty: In the third season, after Rick's arrest by the Galactic Federation one of their agents enters his mind to interrogate him. They then relive his origin story where an Alternate Universe version of him murders his family, whereupon Rick reveals that the entire memory was fabricated and the code he stole from it was a virus. Two seasons later it's revealed that this was a half-truth, and the memory he showed him was for the most part real with the entire Smith family being Replacement Goldfish for the one he lost.
• Rocket Power: Ray and Tito frequently tell stories of their escapades in the 60s, but a few episodes make it pretty obvious that they're exaggerating it for the sake of getting a point across. Even the kids are aware of this; when Tito mentions that he stepped on a piece of lava so hot he lost the hopscotch competition, they look at him skeptically. Tito quickly dodges further questions by saying he has to go do some dishes.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power:
  • Scorpia states that her family welcomed the Horde and willingly gave Hordak the Black Garnet. However, a brief flashback shot to Horde soldiers stealing the Black Garnet, as well as the state of her family's royal hall in "Princess Scorpia", reveals that this is propaganda that was fed to Scorpia. Her kingdom was simply the first territory conquered by the Horde.
  • Inconsistencies in Hordak's flashback in "Huntara" and the events of "Destiny, Part 2" suggest that his account of his past may be inaccurate or incomplete. First, Horde Prime looks very different in Hordak's flashback and in person. Second, Hordak's flashback suggests that his cloning flaw was what angered Prime, but when the two men meet at the end of Season 4, Prime is angered by Hordak's displays of individuality and free will.
• The Simpsons: Homer Simpson is this in-universe. In one episode, he wanted to buy a bottle of expensive hair-regrowth formula. After the pharmacist tells him the price, Homer realizes he can't afford it, he breaks down crying and says, "Forget you, pal. Thanks for nothing," as he leaves. This is changed in his story to his friends to an angry, "Forget you, pal! Thanks for nuthin'!" as he "stormed" out.
  • There's also when Mr. Burns builds a casino in town. Homer claims that Marge made a huge scene because she refused to accept gambling in Springfield. When Marge reminds him she was in favor, Homer recalls his version of the events: Marge's hair is green, she wields a rolling pin, Homer is musclebound and Apu has three heads.
  • A kind of meta-example. In the episode where the family have the opportunity to go to Japan, which Homer isn't keen on, Marge attempts to convince him by mentioning all the aspects of Japanese culture he likes. She tells him that he enjoyed Rashomon, to which he retorts 'That's not how I remember it.'
  • Lisa accuses Homer of this in "And Maggie Makes Three" when he tells them about his brilliant advertising campaign involving randomly discharging a shotgun into the air. Marge laments that actually happened.
  • As a more general character trait, Grampa Simpson is this. Throughout the series he relates several wacky stories from his youth, though owing to his senility they are to be taken with a pinch of salt.
• South Park:
  • Anytime that Eric Cartman tells a story, you can bet that he is lying, either intentionally, or because he's just that deluded.
  • The episode "Fishsticks" had Kanye West being offended by a joke that Jimmy made up, and Cartman claim he had co-created the joke. We soon see he actually believes this when he recounts the opening scene with Jimmy being more enthusiastic about seeing him and Cartman coming up with the joke all by himself. Cartman then explains the lesson is that Jimmy is such a narcissist that he rewrites his memory to include himself in a bigger role (Or something like that).
  • In the third version of the memory, Cartman is interrupted when writing the joke (himself, of course) by someone claiming that the "Jew robots" are invading the town. Cartman turns into the Human Torch and proceeds to melt the "Jew-bots" before finishing the joke. When the flashback ends, Cartman nods that this is exactly what happened.
  • In "Mysterion Rises", the Coon attacks a little girl who was only asking about Mintberry Crunch, with a man breaking the fight off. In the Coon's subsequent summary of what transpired, the girl was depicted as a villain who was bigger than him and "fought with all her might" against him, while spectators cheer the Coon on.
    • All of the "comic book" scenes regarding the Coon invoke this.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Little Yellow Book", SpongeBob's narration from his diary states that Squidward was lecturing him on how to take care of a housepet properly, and both he and Mr. Krabs were doing "cleaning day" together. In reality, Squidward was calling him out for allowing Gary to chew most of his belongings, and Mr. Krabs had SpongeBob do most of the work while he sat on his lazy butt reading a magazine. Justified, in that this is coming from SpongeBob's perspective.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
  • Prime Minister Almec is revealed to be this over the course of several series. When rumors spread that the neutral Mandalore is planning to defect to the Separatists, Obi-Wan travels to the planet to investigate. Almec dismisses them as rumors, and the mysterious Mandalorian warriors that have been committing acts of terrorism are unconnected to them. Obi-Wan then brings up Jango Fett, whom Almec dismisses as nothing more than a common bounty hunter in stolen armor. This caused a lot of wonder whether Jango (and by that same extent, Boba) were true Mandalorians, especially in the wake of Disney discarding the old Expanded Universe and rendering Jango's original backstory (a native of Concorde Dawn who lost his family to Death Watch and was raised by a covert of Mandalorians) moot. However, there was plenty of doubt on Almec's part, as Season 3 revealed he was a corrupt bureaucrat who profited off the suffering of others, and eventually sells himself out to Maul in Season 5 before falling in Season 7. The Mandalorian finally confirmed Almec was lying thanks to Boba Fett himself, who presented a record showing Jango as having been a foundling, thereby making the Fetts true Mandalorians.
  • The Mortis arc introduces The Ones who are living embodiment of the force. While the Daughter represents the Light Side, the Son represents The Dark Side and the Father is the balance between both sides. While on the surface it might seem a fairly standard case of Balance Between Good and Evil, with both the Father and Son expressing the sentiment that there's no light without dark, upon closer investigation of the story, it becomes clear it's a deconstruction. The Father might claim to be the Balance, but in reality, all he does is keep the selfish Son leashed, because the Daughter, who's selfless, doesn't want to upset the Balance of the Force and the Galaxy in the first place. Father refuses to see this, due to his emotional attachment to both his children, and instead tries to use "balance" to rationalize letting Son live, despite knowing the repercussions of Son getting free. In other words, Father himself is being selfish, both towards the Son, by imprisoning him against his will, and towards the Galaxy by letting a selfish creature who'd wreak havoc on it live. While the Father claims that the Light side isn't inherently good, Word of God states that in fact it's the Force's natural state of being.
• Steven Universe:
  • Absolutely everything that happens in the series must effectively be seen or heard through the eyes of Steven, who never actually narrates and rarely broadcasts his inner thoughts. As such, things that Steven is uncomfortable about or doesn't deem relevant are never brought to attention unless done so by another character in the vicinity. An example of this is "Steven's Birthday", where the audience and Steven's friend Connie learns Steven's age and that the human-Gem hybrid hasn't physically aged in the past several years. Steven was already aware of this information, but it's only when Connie brings focus to it that it becomes a plot point.
  • Likewise, the knowledge we do receive may be cut down by other characters acting as Unreliable Narrators, who would rather Steven not yet become privy to certain pieces of information until some event forces it out of them or are simply biased. For example, a major element of the show is Steven learning about his late mother, Rose Quartz. Initially, Steven (and thus the audience) only hear about her from the Crystal Gems, who idolized her and portrayed her in a positive light. It's only as the show progresses that Steven learns more about Rose's flaws and mistakes from her enemies, and develops a more nuanced view of her as a result.
  • Played with in episodes where Steven is listening to/reading a story, with what we see being how he imagines the story, but the actual events therein being from the perspective of whoever is telling or writing the story (be it Greg, Garnet, the town's founder, etc.)
  • For that matter, the whole of Gem Homeworld society appears to be a Cult of Personality built around the Diamonds, depicting them as perfect, flawless beings. It's Peridot's realisation that her leader Yellow Diamond is capable of being vindictive and irrational, and that Homeworld has been ignoring or outright denying the value of organic life, that drives her to finally rebel against Homeworld.
  • Garnet is also this, if accidentally. She participated in the Gem War, but wasn't aware of most of the secrets behind it, in particular that "Rose Quartz" was actually Pink Diamond, and faked her own death rather than shattering Pink.
  • Pearl, meanwhile, knows more than Garnet about the war, but is under a sort of Geas preventing her from saying the details about what she knows but Garnet doesn't. Interestingly, though Pearls are a Slave Race in the Gem hierarchy and it's clear from dialogue that she was once owned by another gem, she effectively never speaks of what her life was like before she joined the rebellion and never indicates who her former owner was. In part due to said Geas; her owner was Pink Diamond, and she specifically joined the rebellion at Pink Diamond's own request.
• This is a core trope of Summer Memories. Because the show is told through the memories of protagonist Jason, the story depicts the world entirely from his perspective and injects a heavy dose of surrealism to emphasize this. The trope becomes more and more obvious as the series goes on, with the episodes "That Ain't the Way I See It" and "Summer Forgettory" in particular exploring the implications and making this more obvious to viewers who haven't caught on, including alternate perspectives from other characters.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003), teasers and recaps are narrated by a character who plays a prominent role within the episode. In the episode "Rogue in the House, part 2", said duty falls upon Zog, a brain-damaged Triceraton which the turtles — taking advantage of the fact that Zog believes them to be Triceratons — recruited in the previous episode. Despite accurate visuals, Zog's narration states what he wrongly believes is actually happening — that the turtles are a Triceraton sabotage unit, the Foot are a Federation.
• ThunderCats (2011): Jaga's Opening Monologue is shot through with half truths, neglecting to mention that Third Earth's "peace and prosperity" belongs solely to Thundera's upper-class Cats, or that the ruler's "just heart" does not extend to other species.
• Transformers: Robots in Disguise: Starscream explains how he survived escaping the Predacons as seen in the finale of Transformers: Prime. Casually proclaiming that he bravely (ran for his life) faced them while luring (too scared to notice) them to a chamber to use a weapon (accidentally activated a laser turret by sheer luck) to destroy them.
• The Venture Bros.: The Monarch claims in his origin story that after his parents died in a plane crash he lived among monarch butterflies in the wilderness for an entire summer before taking a cab to New York to claim his inheritance. Word of God states that he most likely imagined most of it (or received mild brain damage in the crash, which would explain why he doesn't remember knowing Rusty as a child) and was picked up by a state trooper after a day.

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