Interspecies Romance / Film

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Interspecies Romance in Films.

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Films — Animated

• Animalympics features a pair of marathon runners, Kit and René, who are a lioness and goat respectively, falling in love while running beside each other despite never saying anything out loud to one another onscreen. There are a number of smaller examples as well, such as a husband-and-wife figure skating team of a lizard and a hen.
• In Balto II: Wolf Quest there's a scene between a female fox and Balto (a wolf-dog). She's supposed to be Cunning Like a Fox but there's an element of seductiveness in her behavior. Subverted in that Balto is Happily Married and the fox promptly throws him into a river.
• In Bee Movie, Barry, a bee, is clearly infatuated with Vanessa, a human florist. That being said, it's not clear if they're officially together at the end; if so, they're a Chastity Couple for fairly obvious reasons.
• Brother Bear 2 has Kenai (a human turned into a bear) fall in love with a human girl named Nita. At the end of the movie, Nita also eventually becomes a bear so that she and Kenai can finally get married.
• A Bug's Life: Manny, a praying mantis, is married to a gypsy moth named Gypsy — a wise choice when you keep in mind what would happen if he hooked up with a female of his own species.
• This appears to be a very popular trope for DreamWorks Animation to use in their movies. Examples include:
  • Shrek starts out with Shrek and Fiona as ogre and human, and even after she becomes an ogre, too, we've still got a donkey/dragon romance, complete with mutant babies!
    • As revealed in Shrek 2, Fiona's own father King Harold is a frog married to the human Queen Lillian.
  • Over the Hedge has Stella the skunk and Tiger the Persian cat, who conveniently has no sense of smell.
  • Megamind: Roxanne and Megamind eventually end up in a relationship together. Although nobody really makes a big deal of it, she's a human while he's an alien. Roxanne was also rumored to have an affair with Metro Man, a Human Alien (he's actually "not her type").
  • Kung Fu Panda features some Ship Tease between Po and Tigress, a panda and a tiger, especially in the second film. The spin-off TV series Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness loves this trope in particular:
    • There's a duck and a pig together as a couple.
    • In the episode "Love Stings", we see Mr. Ping and Scorpion, the villain.
    • There's also a female goat who tries to flirt with Po all the time.
    • In the Valentine's Day episode "Bride of Po", Po ends up getting married to a goat that can do kung fu (not the goat mentioned above). Tigress is not amused.
    • Shifu (red panda) and Mei Ling (fox).
    • Taken up to eleven in "Way of the Prawn" with Tigress and the titular prawn.
  • The Croods features a romance between Guy (a human man) and Eep Crood (a Neanderthal woman). While What Measure Is a Non-Human? could be said to be at play here, modern humans and Neanderthals are two divergent species in the same genus.
  • Madagascar:
    • Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa made Melman (giraffe) and Gloria (hippo) an Official Couple.
    • Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted had Alex (lion) & Gia (jaguar) and King Julien (ring-tailed lemur) & Sonya (bear). The former case has the bonus advantage of being physically possible, though difficult due to mild Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action. The offspring are often called either Jaglions, Jaguons or Liguars.
    • Penguins of Madagascar has Kowalski (penguin) fall in love with Eva (snow owl), who rebuffs his advances. She reciprocates at the end, though.
    • In the Valentine special Madly Madagascar, Marty, a zebra, takes a love potion that gets EVERYONE attracted to him.
  • Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken has this between the titular Ruby Gillman, a warrior princess kraken living among humans trying to fit in as a normal human teenager who can turn into a kaiju kraken, and her classmate and crush Connor, a regular human high school student. They end up becoming a couple near the end of the movie. Bonus points that Connor likes her for who she is.
• MK and Nod in Epic (2013), and MK and Mub on Mub's part.
• The hippo/crocodile romance in Fantasia.
• In Fritz the Cat, Fritz's girlfriend, Winston, is a fox.
• In Hotel Transylvania, Dracula's daughter, Mavis, falls in love with a human named Johnny.
  • In the sequel, their hybrid son (who's a vampire) has mutual Puppy Love (pun unintended) with Winnie, a Wolfgirl. We also see that a woman from Johnny's neighborhood is married to a Gill-man.
• Ice Age:
  • In Ice Age: The Meltdown, Ellie is quicker to conclude that Manny is "part possum" than that she is not a possum at all. Manny is bemused and Crash and Eddie are dismissive ("You wish [you were part possum]"), but no real indication is made that such a thing is unheard of.
  • It's also interesting that when Eddie worries that they'll have to repopulate the Earth, Crash points out that if their group makes up the last of the living creatures, "everyone left is either a dude or [their] sister." No mention is made of the various species that make up the small group.
  • Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs has Scrat and Scratte, although superficially similar, probably aren't of the same species: she's a flying squirrel and he's not (and is surprised to discover she is one). Possibly the writers simply didn't know that flying and non-flying squirrels are only distantly related. Or they did it for the lulz like they did with everything else in the movies.
    • Judging by the fourth movie, one can make an argument that this is really a case of Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism since Scratlantis shows creatures that look like both Scrat and Scratte.
  • Also in the third movie, Mama T. rex and Sid the Sloth. They each try to raise the babies in their own way, Mama brings Sid into the warm cave for the night, and later risks her life to rescue him from Rudy the albino Baryonyx.
  • The fourth movie shows Louis, a molehog, having a crush on Manny and Ellie's daughter, Peaches, although she isn't aware of his crush, however.
• The Jungledyret Hugo series prominently features the romance of Rita the fox and Hugo the jungle animal.
• In Leafie, a Hen into the Wild Leafie is a hen who is in love with a duck. It is unrequited as Wanderer already has a mate. After Wanderer's mate is killed by the one-eyed weasel and he makes a Heroic Sacrifice, Leafie adopts his hatchling.
• The Little Mermaid (1989) has a mermaid/human romance.
• Mars Needs Moms has one between Gribble (human) and Ki (martian).
• Mr. Bug Goes to Town has a romance between the title character (a grasshopper) and a female bee named Honey.
• In Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Amazing Pleasant Goat, Miss Lotus, a goat, thinks Wolffy, a wolf, proposed to her after he hits her with a stick (his intention was to knock her unconscious so he can eat her) and develops a crush on him.
• While their condition is magically-induced and temporary, Naveen and Tiana from The Princess and the Frog are clearly two different species of frog at the time they fall for one another.
• Queer Duck: The Movie:
  • As in the original web series, Queer Duck's boyfriend is an alligator named Openly Gator. The two even get married at the end of the film, even though they already did so in the web series episode "Wedding Bell Blues".
  • Oscar Wildcat falls for a male dog named Rex, who he originally knew as a woman named Regina due to Rex being an exceptionally skilled drag artist.
  • Queer Duck's lesbian sister Melissa is shown to have a beaver girlfriend named Yvette.
  • Lola Buzzard is a buzzard and her pig manservant Peccary is said to be her second and fifth husband. She also marries Queer Duck, who ends up having sex with her (leading to her death) because of Reverend Vandergelding making Queer Duck straight.
• In Robin Hood (1973), since Maid Marian, a fox, is said to be the niece of both King Richard and Prince John (both lions), this could imply that Richard's wife the unseen Queen is actually her parent's sister, making the Queen Marian's aunt... which means that the Queen of England may actually be implied to be a fox like Marian.
• A mild example in Rio: Rafael the Toco Toucan is married to Eva, who is a Keel-Billed Toucan.
  • In Rio 2, they reappear, and there's also Gabi (a Poison Arrow Frog mimic) and Nigel, the Cockatoo villain from the last film. It's an unrequited romance because Gabi can't touch Nigel without killing him or so she believes, and Nigel, in return, regards Gabi as an Abhorrent Admirer. When Gabi finds out she's actually not poisonous, she aggressively drags Nigel away into the jungle to keep him as her lover.
• In The Secret of Kells, there are a few sparks between Brendan (human) and Aisling (a fairy whose alt form is a giant white wolf.) Though they were originally planned to be fully-fledged love interests, in the end the writers settled on them just being Like Brother and Sister instead.
• Song of the Sea has Bronagh (selkie) and Conor (human). It ends just like it usually does in legends about selkies.
• Strange Magic has not only the official couples of Marianne and the Bog King (A fairy and a goblin, respectively) and her sister Dawn with Sunny (A fairy and an elf) but the Love Potion shenanigans produce many others in the background including but not limited to a fairy and a frog, and an elf and a lizard.
• A rather painful aversion in Disney's The Sword in the Stone: Wart (Arthur) gets turned into a squirrel temporarily by Merlin's magic, and a big-eyed girl squirrel falls for him, instantly turning into a Stalker with a Crush(Merlin also has to deal with the amorous advances of a female squirrel). Though annoying, she is terribly upset when Wart turns back into a human, and he apologizes, "If you could only understand," while she, not comprehending a word, runs away and cries. The scene fades with the poor squirrel sobbing her little rodent heart out, which seems to be the (for kids!) movie's only commentary on romantic relationships.
• Treasure Planet has Dopler (a canine-like alien) paired up with Captain Amelia (a cat-like alien). Who says dogs and cats can't get along?
  • Then again, since they have children by the end of the film, it is possibly a case of Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism.
• In Turning Red, Mei enjoys drawing and imagining her crushes as mermen implying this trope.
• The Wild has Bridget, a giraffe and Benny, a squirrel.
• Judy and Nick of Zootopia get a lot of Ship Tease.
  • At least one piece of promotional art depicts Judy holding Nick's tie in a manner traditionally used by love-interests in similar art.
  • This oft-quoted line certainly helps:
    Nick: You know you love me.
    Judy: Do I know that? Yes. Yes I do.
  • The fact that the director, Byron Howard, who is apparently a Whovian, drew fanart featuring Nick as Ten and Judy as Rose, as well as the two as Mulder and Scully, just adds even more fuel to the shipping fire.
  • Director Rich Moore openly blessed the shipping name "WildeHopps".
  • One of the deleted scenes had Nick meet Judy's family, some of whom assumed he was her boyfriend.
  • Judy's neighbors, Bucky (a kudu) and Pronk (a gemsbok) Oryx-Antlerson, were confirmed by director Jared Bush to be a same-sex couple.

Films — Live-Action

• The 2019 live-action remake of Aladdin pairs Genie with Dalia, Jasmine's human handmaiden. However, since Genie becomes a human at the end, this no longer applies.
• In Alien: Resurrection, this is very disturbingly implied between Ripley and one of the Aliens, in a sequence late in the film which is shot as if it were a love scene. The studio wanted to cut the scene because of the implications, but Sigourney Weaver demanded it be kept in the film.
• The core plotline of James Cameron's Avatar, with a human falling for an alien woman while manipulating a half-human, half-alien body, the title avatar. This is subverted in the end when the human lead permanently transfers himself into the alien body, making the couple the same species.
• Big Top Pee-wee has Vance, a talking pig, being pursued by Zha-Zha, a lovesick circus hippo. Of course, he appears to take a liking into her at the end.
• The Bride and the Beast is a '50s B horror movie featuring a human woman who spends the first act of a movie entranced by her husband's captive gorilla, Spanky (which her husband kills after the ape gets too handsy). It turns out that she was a gorilla in the past life, and when she returns to Africa with her husband she meets some of Spanky's wild kin, with predictable results.
• Cannibal! The Musical: "My pa was an elephant/But that's irrelevant/My ma was an Eskimo!"
• Both Casper and Casper Meets Wendy falls in line of this:
  • In Casper it is shown that Casper a ghost has a crush on a human teenage girl, and while he does become human to dance with her in the end, it was only short-lived as he became a ghost again after the clock struck ten.
  • In Casper Meets Wendy Casper and Wendy who are a ghost and witch respectively tried to get their respective elders to hook as well as the two forming a hint of romantic feelings for one another.
• Clerks II: "Hey! That's "Interspecies Erotica", fucko!"
• Coneheads has the daughter Connie dating Chris Farley's character. The SNL cartoon also had her with a boyfriend.
• Cool Cat Saves the Kids (And every other film in the franchise) features a romance between the human Derek Savage and the feline Mama Cat, which is never commented on in-universe. Interestingly, the two have a son who takes after his mother, and the mismatched last names imply Derek may have married her (if he did at all) after she already had Cool Cat.
• Cool World:
  • "'Noids do not have sex with Doodles." But Holli Would if Holli Could...and Holli Does.
  • A secondary example comes from the cop Frank (Noid) who's girlfriend is Lonette (Doodle) a Cool World waitress. Because of the law they can't consummate the relationship, which causes them both no small amount of torment.
• Creature from the Black Lagoon: The Creature falls in love with Kay, the female member of a scientific expedition sent to study it.
• Dark Angel: The Ascent: Veronica, a rebellious demonic girl, begins a romance with a human doctor named Max during her stay on Earth. She's eventually forced to reveal her real nature, but he doesn't care.
• DC Extended Universe:
  • Wonder Woman: Steve Trevor (human) had a brief, but deep romance with Diana (Amazon demigod).
  • Aquaman: Atlantean Atlanna was swept from the sea and rescued by human Thomas. They fell in love and had a child together, Arthur (or Aquaman), the titular protagonist.
• The Deaths of Ian Stone: Main Hero - Ian (surprising?) is in love with a human girl, but later finds out, that he himself is a strange half-ghostly entity that feeds on humans fear. It is heavily hinted (though without iron proof) that his love for the girl is what makes him capable of killing his otherwise immortal folk.
• In District 9, the government issues the false story that Wikus had sex with a Prawn and gained an alien STD as a way of explaining his Body Horror. Inter-species prostitution also occurs (unless that was also propaganda).
• Djinn: The female djinn loved a human, bearing him a child.
• Earth Girls Are Easy: as the alien Mac calmly takes off his clothes, preparing to have sex with human Valerie, she keeps rambling on, trying half-heartedly to talk herself out of doing it. At one point she says "Maybe we're not even compatible..." (glances over...) "...OK, we're compatible.."
• Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask had a romance between Gene Wilder and a sheep.
• In Galaxy Quest, human Fred Kwan hooks up with tentacled alien Laliari who transforms part-way to her original non-human form while they're both making out. Fred doesn't mind this and, in fact, seems to — ahem — rather enjoy it. The Plucky Comic Relief Guy, however, is in the area when they begin, and is absolutely disgusted.
  Guy: Oh, that's not right!
• Touched upon twice in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019):
  • Mark guessed the reason why Ghidorah is heading straight for Isla de Mara for Rodan, is to either eat Rodan, kill Rodan or mate with him.
  • Mothra is portrayed as Godzilla's counterpart, being the Queen to his King and it's said the two of them have an ancient, symbiotic relationship, though one character wondered if they, one being a giant reptile and the other a giant insect, are "a thing", though its likely nonsexual. Apparently director Mike Dougherty ships it harder than◊ anyone.◊
• Howard the Duck features a romance between Howard (a male anthropomorphic duck from another dimension) and Beverly (a female human from what is supposed to be our world).
• Jupiter Ascending has the human Jupiter and the half-wolf genetically engineered supersoldier Caine.
• In Kamen Rider Fourze & OOO: Movie War Megamax Gentarou Kisaragi, the aforementioned Fourze, falls in love with a alien substance known as SOLU that has taken up the form of high schooler Nadeshiko Misaki. And becomes a Kamen Rider, too, doubling as a Battle Couple!
• Definitely present, albeit unconsummated and one-sided, in King Kong (1933). Peter Jackson's remake made it more of a mutual platonic crush on both sides.
• Owen, a human boy, leaves the town with his vampire lover Abby at the end of Let Me In.
• The Shaw Brothers movie, The Snake Prince, is a gender-flipped adaptation of Madame White Snake, with the main character being an ancient snake spirit who fell in love with a human woman after being summoned to a village to save the local population from a drought.
• With the number of non-human entities running around in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it's no surprise that this has popped up here and there.
  • The first two Thor movies feature a romantic relationship between Jane Foster (a human) and Thor (an Asgardian).
  • In Guardians of the Galaxy, Peter Quill is a bit of Casanova when it comes to humanoid alien women (as well as notably having "lain with an A'askvarian.") He also is strongly attracted to his fellow Guardian Gamora, and eventually learns that he's the result of one of these between his mother Meredith and a "space man."
  • This becomes a major plot point of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, where Peter learns who his father is: Ego, the Living Planet. It turns out that his father had been quite prolifically spreading his attentions to females across the entire galaxy, breeding countless offspring while also seeding parts of himself into each planet so when the time came he'd be able to convert them into other living planets like himself. However, Peter also learns the darker side to this romance: that his father discovered he was falling in love with Meredith and he gave her the cancer that would kill her so that his feelings for her wouldn't interfere with his plans.
• Nagisa Oshima's Max, Mon Amour deals with a love triangle between a British diplomat, his French wife, and a chimpanzee.
• Men in Black II hinted at this between Kay (Tommy Lee Jones) and an alien princess sometime in the past. Jay fell hard for a woman who also turned out to be a Human Alien, although she left Earth before it got very far. Interestingly, it's implied the said Human Alien was Kay's daughter with the aforementioned alien princess.
• The Mermaid revolves around the titular mermaid and a property tycoon she's assigned to kill in order to save her merfolk community... only for her to fall in love when realizing he's actually a good man.
• In Michael, it is implied that John Travolta's eponymous archangel character has sex with human Anita.
• Played with in The Muppets Take Manhattan (apart from the traditional Kermit/Piggy Official Couple). Masterson Rat, waiting tables at a restaurant, asks Brooke Shields if she believes in Interspecies Dating. She doesn't make the situation any better with her reply of, "I've dated a few rats before, if that's what you mean."
• Prominent in the Pirates of the Caribbean series:
  • Davy Jones and the goddess Calypso in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.
  • Philip (human) and Syrena (mermaid) from Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.
• Planet of the Apes (2001) has Leo, a human, and Ari, an evolved/advanced Chimpanzee. They kiss at the end right before he goes back to Earth.
• In the original Planet of the Apes (1968), Taylor also asks Zira for a kiss, but more as a good luck charm since she's already engaged to Cornelius.
• Racing Stripes: Stripes, a zebra, is in love with Sandy the horse and they have a foal together.
• The Soviet film Red, Honest, Smitten, based on Hurra för Ludvig Lurifax by Jan-Olof Ekholm, takes the Interspecies Friendship between a fox cub and a chicken from the original and turns it into Puppy Love. However, the interspecies thing is heavily toned down, because due to the severe budget limitations the director, Leonid Nechayev, specialised in making movies running on Obscured Special Effects at best, so the fox and the chicken are played by a red-haired boy in reddish clothes and a girl in a blond wig and a yellow dress.
• Red Riding Hood: Werewolves and their normal human partners (often unbeknownst to the humans).
• In Return of the Jedi, Boba Fett (human) can be seen flirting Rystáll Sant, a half-human, half-Theelin dancer.
• The entire plot of The Shape of Water is built around a human woman falling in love with a fish person.
• Ship of Monsters involves a Mars Needs Women plot about the women of Venus kidnapping men across space so they can repopulate their species. They aren't too picky judging by how monstrous their would-be mates were—including a furry spider-like monster, a short martian with an enormous brain, and a skeleton. Finally there's the hero Lauriano who falls in love with Gamma.
• Slither: The alien parasite falls in love with the human Starla after absorbing her husband, trying across the course of the movie to make her understand its natural need to assimilate and grow. This includes bringing her alone to him alive despite killing everybody else and putting on romantic music to talk to her with. The feeling is not mutual, and she only ever returns his affections to defeat him.
• The Sorcerer and the White Snake: The romance between a centuries-old snake-woman and a human scholar. It's based on an old piece of Chinese Literature with the same name.
• Splash is a man-meets-mermaid Romantic Comedy.
• In Star Trek (2009) half-human, half-Vulcan Spock is in a relationship with human Uhura. And of course there's his parents.
• Tank Girl: Tank Girl and Booga are a human and a Mutant-kangaroo-that-was-formerly-a-dog.
• Ted and Tami-Lynn.
• In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014), Michelangelo has a crush on April O’Neil. However, it is not acknowledged by April. Michelangelo tells his brothers that he has dibs on April after they meet her, and he refers to her as his girlfriend when he realizes that she is the hogosha. Mikey is always trying to flirt with her and be romantic, though her safety is his biggest concern when they are in danger.
  • This carries over from the earlier live-action film, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), in which Michelangelo also has a crush on April, kissing the television screen when she is doing a news broadcast and asking Splinter if they can keep her when Raphael brings her, injured and unconscious, to their lair. By the end of the film, however, the crush has dialed back somewhat (he calls her "sis" in one scene).
    • It's implied in the Out of Our Shells tour continuity that it's Raphael who has the crush on April. When the five appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to promote the concert, this exchange seemed to scar a few children in the audience:
      Oprah: Guys, let me ask you this - do you sometimes wish that April was a turtle?
      Raphael: Oprah, I've been trying to talk her into an interspecies relationship for months now!
  • In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III, Michelangelo is shown to have a hint of infatuation for a Japanese native, so much that he wanted to give up his old life and remain in feudal Japan to be with her, but it didn't happen.
• TRON: Legacy has an interesting example of this trope. While there's no sex and barely any kissing, it's quite clear that Sam Flynn (human) and Quorra (ISO) fell in love with each other in the second half of the film. What woke up Kevin from his meditation on the Solar Sailer? A conversation between the two about sunrises and Quorra's beauty. Kevin smiles, because they found love in the least likely place.
  • Things could actually go pretty well, since Quorra became flesh and blood at the end, thus being a sub-trope of Robo Ship has been averted. It was actually quite refreshing to see that in spite of all this, they kept things so subtle that they avoided what could have easily gotten the characters Strangled by the Red String. Since it was pretty obvious what the audience would be thinking by that point, the writers knew better than to throw it in their faces.
• The Underworld franchise has two interspecies romances as major plot points, the first (chronologically) being between lycan Lucian and vampire Sonja (which produced a lycan-vampire hybrid that unfortunately never got to be born), the second being between vampire soldier Selene and vampire-lycan hybrid Michael (although his hybrid nature was brought about by mingling viruses, not through sexual reproduction; he was born human). Selene's falling for Michael also makes her an Example of Defecting for Love.
  • Interestingly enough, the Fantastic Racism in this franchise is fairly well explored and deconstructed, particularly considering that both vampires and lycans are essentially mutated humans (due to an inheritable blood disease). The fact that a hybrid between the two races results in a creature that has the power to annihilate them both if it so chooses becomes an — if not the — major revolving plot point for the series.
• In David Lynch's short film What Did Jack Do?, Lynch plays a detective investigating Jack, a capuchin monkey who can talk, who is suspected of murder. Jack's proposed motive is jealousy, since the victim was apparently involved with Jack's lover, Toototabon — a chicken. Whether she can talk is unclear.
  • Jack is also implied to have been involved with an orangutan named Sally in the past.
• The plot of What Planet Are You From? involves an advanced human-like alien played by Garry Shandling assigned to mate and impregnate a woman then bring the baby to his planet. His planet's people are emotionless, reproduce by cloning, and their erect penis makes a mechanical noise.
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Roger and Jessica, who is a Rabbit by marriage only. Also, it's pretty clear that Eddie Valiant wasn't expecting her to literally be playing patty-cake with Mr. Acme. Does human/toon romance count as this trope if the toon is human(oid)? There's also apparently at least one other instance which doesn't appear onscreen; Doom tells the weasels that they'll Die Laughing "just like your idiot hyena cousins".
• Wings of Desire has Damiel (angel) and Marion (human).
  • Its American remake, City of Angels, has Seth (angel), and Maggie (human). It doesn't end well.
• Wolves: John, a pureblood werewolf, is married to the human Clara, who jokes that she likes men with lots of chest hair.
• Zoo is a documentary about an interspecies romance that went horribly wrong.

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