There often are times when people eat. For most a few times a day.
There are other times when people absolutely stuff themselves. This hopefully doesn't happen as often. But when animated characters do it, it goes right to their stomachs and increases their size and figure in a similar manner to filling a balloon. This new-found girth usually goes away pretty easily, but can stay around for a while. A usually-minor form of this, known in slang occasionally as the "food baby", is Truth in Television. Usually used for comedy, but is also a somewhat prominent Fetish that pops up in fanfics and fanart.
Also, there are times when people don't have anything to eat for a long time, and then they play the trope exceptionally straight. It's called kwashiorkor
. It's also a symptom of liver failure. Anyone displaying this trope in real life would therefore likely be in need of medical attention.
This trope is especially popular in Zany Cartoons to the point where attempting to list every example would probably end up with its subpage being longer than all the other subpages together. Compare with Inflating Body Gag, when it's the body inflating by itself. A Gigantic Gulp drink is often a cause of Balloon Belly. May lead to Temporary Bulk Change. Its logical conclusion is "Pop!" Goes the Human. Compare Dinner Deformation, Trampoline Tummy, Traveling-Pipe Bulge, and Weight Taller.
Example subpages:
- Anime & Manga
- Comic Books
- Fan Works
- Film
- Literature
- Live-Action TV
- Music Videos
- New Media
- Newspaper Comics
- Video Games
- Webcomics
- Western Animation
Other examples:
- One of Nickelodeon's Nickmas bumpers features Angelica as "Grinchelica" in a parody of How the Grinch Stole Christmas!. She steals all the chocolate from the other Nicktoons and unlike the Grinch, when she realizes what she's done, she decides she doesn't care. She and her cat Fluffy eat an enormous amount of chocolate and get very fat, with Grinchelica looking like a big ball.
Narrator: And all the toons in Toonville say, Grinchelica's tummy grew three hundred sizes that day. (Grinchelica pats her tummy, now bulging out from under her jacket. Her face then turns green and she lets out a loud burp.)
- A commercial for Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island features a big guy chowing down at a restaurant as his belly continues to get bigger, clearly referencing Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (minus the puking), right down to the end when his stomach explodes from licking one last dollop of whipped cream from his finger.
- A famous series of ''Chicken of the Sea'' ads show a seemingly slim, beautiful woman walking to an elevator with a bunch of men fawning over her, only for her to reveal the big, bloated gut she's been sucking in once the elevator doors close.
- A 2004 commercial for Gas X has the bellies of three women suddenly blow up like balloons while they're at a theater. One woman is able to stop her swelling with the titular product, but the other two stay bloated up.
- A PSA for ABC warns kids about "the Munchies", making you want to eat when you're bored or depressed, as the Munchies make one boy eat until he gets fat. He learns to find other things to do, including exercise, so he doesn't think about eating all the time and soon loses the weight.
- Happy Heroes: In Season 2 episode 13, Big M. and Little M.'s bellies become larger than usual after they eat a lot of meat prepared for them by a cat.
- This often happens to characters in Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf whenever they eat too much.
- In episode 12 of Yamucha's-Kung Fu Academy, Miko, Nao and Jubby become bloated from eating a bunch of apples.
- In Deadlands, one of the many varieties of indigenous bloodsucker is the Shtriga, a Central European witch who feeds on blood to power her magic and preserve her youth. She is characterized by her gluttonous appetite, which sees her consuming so much blood that she ends up having to vomit some of the excess, and even after that her stomach is left so swollen and taut that she can easily disguise herself as being a pregnant woman. Her stomach is so important to her that killing her requires staking her through the stomach.
- Pathfinder: One archetype for the Witch class, the Gingerbread Witch, has the ability to swallow any target in their size category or smaller. If the swallowed target is the same size or one category smaller, the Witch's stomach distends greatly, causing the rules for carrying heavy loads to apply to them. Curiously, the target is not harmed inside the witch's belly and can theoretically remain there indefinitely.
- In Despicable Me: Minion Mayhem at Universal Studios, footage of Gru's failed tests of the Minion Gun at one point show one volunteer being turned into a bloated-looking Minion.
- Long Live the Queen: In the death where you eat poisoned chocolates, Elodie will Go Out with a Smile as she sits there with a bloated gut and a green face.
- Happy Tree Friends: In "Take a Hike", Nutty sucks out all the honey from a beehive and instantly becomes obese. This results in him being unable to outrun a bear and getting killed by it.
- Kphoria animations always play this trope whenever a character eats another one.
- Lucas the Spider ends up with a balloon butt after he and Findley the Fly (then known as "Bzzt") polish off a plate of chocolate-covered strawberries in the "I'm Starving" episode of the web series. Then again, being a spider, his stomach is in his butt.
- Plan 3: Hosuh grows quite a gut while eating the tangerines provided by the Fate lord’s minions.
- The Green Azumarill:
- In an early short titled “The Bonk! Bamboozle (feat. Reptilian!)”, Evil ends up with this after consuming many Bonk! cans.
- In the 2018 Christmas Special titled “Green Azumarill How To's: How to Set Up the Perfect Christmas Setting”, in the dramatization of an unfinished Christmas setting, the last things that were ruined were the presents, in which Green reveals he ate them, which resulted in Green getting this.
- In the St. Patrick’s Day 2021 special titled “Green Azumarill gets a Shamrock Shake”, Green orders a Shamrock Shake from McDonalds, and when he likes it, he keeps asking for more, eventually resulting in this happening to Green.
- Some animals that swallow their prey whole can develop this after a big meal. Snakes, for example can swallow prey larger than their own head, resulting in a large bulge in their midsection that can take weeks to digest. Many species of deep-sea predatory fish are known for having the ability to swallow prey that's larger than they are, which as one can imagine causes their stomachs to become seriously distended.
