Regardless of whether the character's actually becoming a giant or if they're just shapeshifting into something bigger than the available space, it's very easy to end up being unable to leave the room because they can't fit through the door, and from there, damage to furniture, decorations, walls, and the ceiling are all depressingly common. Even characters who are savvy enough to make an escape attempt while they're still small enough to manage it aren't immune to this, as they can end up getting stuck in a door on the way out.
Ultimately, one of the most distinctive and popular effects of this trope involves the character punching headfirst through the roof and out of the building entirely. And sad to say, this isn't the worst outcome. If the character's unlucky enough to be on an upper story when the growth begins, it's entirely possible for their skyrocketing weight to send them crashing through the floor.
Of course, characters don't always need to become literal giants in order to qualify. One variant on this trope features a character starting out shrunken and living in a dollhouse or some other deliberately undersized structure — only for them to be restored to normal size and erupt out of the playset. Another, rarer variant features the building shrinking and not the residents, in which case, at least you won't be troubled by growing any further once you've escaped.
Whatever way you look at it, though, home insurance is a nightmare for Sizeshifters.
May overlap with Shapeshifting Excludes Clothing, a similar trope applied to attire instead of accommodations.
Contrast Literally Falling Through the Cracks, in which characters find local architecture too big to be safe. Compare There Was a Door if a character crashes through the wall instead of a door, although the door may now be too small for the character to use.
Examples:
- Dragon Ball: When Pilaf traps Goku and his friends in a steel-walled room with a thick glass roof intending to cook them alive in revenge for being denied his wish on the Dragon Balls, Goku gets himself and the others out by turning into his giant apelike Oozaru form for the first time in the story, which only happens when he looks at the full moon. It isn't revealed until much later that this is due to him being a member of the alien Saiyan race, who all have this ability.
- Galaxy Express 999: In one episode, the train stops at a planet where robots do all the labour, leaving the humans sitting idly at home getting little or no exercise and eating to fill time. This results in people regularly bursting the walls of their houses and the robots immediately building a new, larger one around them.
- My Girlfriend is 8 Meters Tall: This is what happened to Chieri Ohmine on how she became an 8-meter tall giant as she grows in her sleep (whom she wishes to do after her Childhood Friend Yumeji Kotaki left her) until she bursts through the walls of her house. After she was shrunk down to normal size, as both Yumeji and Chieri confess their love with each other, Chieri then grew back to her 8-meter tall self, bursting huge portions of the school's walls.
- Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt: In "The Diet Syndrome", Stocking finds out she is getting fat and starts dieting. However, her efforts don't work, and she becomes so fat that she ends up filling out the whole house, which Panty laughs at. When Stocking finds out a ghost is responsible for her obesity, she goes into a rage and gets even bigger, bursting out of the house.
- In the Lamput episode "Giant Lamput", Lamput comes into contact with a serum that makes him grow so large that he ends up destroying the laboratory he was in.
- Disney Ducks Comic Universe: In Don Rosa's "The Incredible Shrinking Tightwad", Donald, Scrooge, and Scrooge's Money Bin are all affected by a malfunctioning Shrink Ray that causes them to never stop shrinking until the effect is reversed, and it turns out the Money Bin is shrinking at a faster rate than Donald and Scrooge. When the ducks find the shrunken bin, they have just enough time to go inside, use a radio to call for help, and escape from the bin before it can shrink all the way down and crush them inside it.
- Shazam!: In The Marvel Family #53 "The Marvel Family Battles the Man Who Changed the World", Professor Mason's machine is able to change the Earth's size, leaving people alone. So, when he tries to shrink the world back to normal (since he had enlarged it previously), people begins growing too large for their buildings. A woman bursts through her house's ceiling beause she has become twice taller, a man accidentally brings an apartment building down by leaning on it, and another man nearly wrecks an elevated rail line when he stumbles down.
- Comic Book/{{Superman}: In The Future Superman of 2965, villain Muto uses an Expander Ray on Metropolis, making people grow until becoming stuck in windows and doors or cracking their vehicles open.
- Sizeshifter superheroes like Dr Pym, Ant-Man, Atlas, and Stature will sometimes deliberately grow large enough that they don't fit inside a building, often to destroy it because it's an enemy base or to make a fast exit in an emergency.
- Calvin and Hobbes: in one sequence, Calvin unexpectedly finds himself growing enormous and is forced to flee his house before he's too big to leave. He just makes it, though it requires him to climb down the stairs on his hands and knees and almost results in him getting his foot stuck in the front door. Unfortunately, he soon finds himself outgrowing the nearby city, then the ocean, and then the Earth itself — to the point that he grows so big that he loses his balance and falls into space... whereupon he outgrows the entire galaxy.
- In the The Loud House fanfic Attack of the 50 Foot Sister
, Lynn grows into a giant after drinking a serum, resulting in her house falling to pieces.
- In Total Drama: Unfinished Business, Dakota has become Brought Down to Normal from the radioactive mutation that turned her into Dakotazoid, but the process was not perfect, and she can still turn back into Dakotazoid every time she gets stressed or angry. So, since Total Drama is an Immoral Reality Show, in Chapter 19 Chris decides to make Dakota face her fear by putting her in a virtual reality where she's in the same house as her boyfriend Sam, and something happens to make her angry. Sure enough, she starts transforming and growing — but whereas in the real world, Dakotazoid stops growing after a few feet, in the VR, she doesn't stop — and eventually, not only does Dakota grow all the way through the house's ceiling, but she finds Sam has become trapped under her weight, and is in danger of suffocating. Needless to say, Dakota fails to conquer her fear.
- Aladdin: In the finale, Jafar is tricked into wishing to become a genie as well. The Genie reluctantly grants this wish, and Jafar's transformation causes him to burst through the roof of the palace... only to find too late that becoming a genie means he has to live in a lamp and be confined there for eternity.
- Cinderella: When the Fairy Godmother turns Gus into a White Stallion — right after Lucifer has trapped him under a teacup — Gus immediately grows so large the teacup gets pushed off him, though it doesn't break. Lucifer doesn't notice why his cup is empty until he turns around to see the now-equine Gus glaring at him.
- Despicable Me 1: Inverted; Vector uses a Shrink Ray on Gru's ship, causing Gru and the Minions to get crushed inside. Cut to them riding on the top of the much smaller ship.
- Gru: Ugh! I hate that guy.
- King-Size Canary: Taken to extremes; the animals take so much of the "Quick Grow Plant Formula" that they outgrow the planet.
- Minions: One of Herb's inventions makes Kevin grow into a giant, completely destroying the Overkills' castle in the process.
- Monsters vs. Aliens: The movie kicks off with Susan Murphy being hit by a radioactive meteorite just before her wedding. Soon after, right in the middle of the ceremony, she starts uncontrollably growing until she bursts through the church's ceiling as a 49'11" Giant Woman.
- NIMONA:
- While Nimona and Ballister are escaping from the Institute early in the film, the two of them end up trapped in a closet with several knights getting ready to kick the door down. Nimona's solution is to weaponize this trope by transforming into a rhinoceros, not only revealing her shapeshifting powers for the first time but immediately becoming too big for the closet and dramatically exploding through the door — and through the knights who were on the other side of it.
- Soon after, Nimona shapeshifts into a whale in order to ram her way through a squad of knights and the doors behind them. Sliding into a ballroom, she has just enough time to remark on how stable the floor is before the whole thing gives way beneath her, sending her and Ballister on a plunge through four different levels of the building.
- Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken: When Ruby first transforms into her kraken warrior form, she tries to hide in the school library, but as she starts growing, she fills up the whole building until she bursts through the roof.
- The Sword in the Stone: During her Villain Song, Madame Mim delves into a Shapeshifter Showoff Session and demonstrates that "I can be huge! Fill the whole house!" by growing big enough to quite literally hit the roof, shaking several of the beams overhead. However, she actually bends her head over to avoid breaking all the way through the roof.
- Attack of the 50 Foot Woman:
- Oddly averted in the 1958 original, as Nancy somehow grows inside her room with no damage to it or the rest of the house whatsoever. Once she wakes up, however, she bursts through the roof and heads in search of her no-good husband.
- In the 1993 remake, Nancy's first growth spurt causes her head to punch through the ceiling and into her bedroom upstairs.
- Avengers: Endgame: In the aftermath of Thanos' attack on Avengers headquarters, Ant-Man, the Hulk, and Rocket Raccoon are trapped under the partially collapsed building while Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor fight it out with Thanos himself...right up until their allies arrive in the climatic "Avengers Assemble" scene when Wong asks "you wanted more?" — whereupon Giant-Man erupts through the building's concrete roof, ready for action.
- Cinderella: The Fairy Godmother casts a spell on a pumpkin to turn it into a carriage — while it's still inside the greenhouse. The transforming pumpkin immediately grows so big that both Cinderella and Godmother get temporarily pressed up against the greenhouse walls by its bulk — until the greenhouse breaks apart and they escape alive and unscathed.
- Ghostbusters: By the climax, Rowan, after freeing Kevin from his possession, taunts the Ghostbusters by asking them what form they would like him to take. Patty, in a moment of genre blindness, asks him to take the form of a "cute, tiny ghost". So he does, in the form of the Busters' own ghost mascot — before immediately growing into a gigantic version of that same ghost, because Patty never specified that he stay cute and tiny. Rowan grows so big, that he breaks numerous rows of windows and floors in the hotel he's standing in thanks to his bulk pressing against them. He finally reveals his nightmarish imposing form by punching his way through the hotel wall, and the final battle begins.
- Konga: When the titular ape grows to gigantic size after a final injection with the growth serum from Dr. Charles Decker, he bursts through the roof of Decker's house and then proceeds to break down the rest of the house to get free.
- The Muppet Movie: Towards the end of the movie, Animal takes some of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew's growth pills. He later pulls a Big Damn Heroes when he grows to a large size, crashing through the roof of the building and scaring off Doc Hopper and his gang.
- The Nutty Professor: When Sherman falls asleep in front of the TV after an evening indulging in Heartbreak and Ice Cream, he has a nightmare in which he's in a hospital being operated on, and the surgeon grimly states that "he's getting fatter." Immediately after that, Sherman's body starts literally inflating with fat, and while we don't see the full transformation, we do see the surgeon screaming helplessly as Sherman's growing stomach pushes him so far back against the walls of the operating theatre that he ends up being engulfed and trapped inside Sherman's navel while the still-growing stomach punches through the theatre window. The next time we see Sherman in the dream, he's become an overweight giant rampaging through the city streets, which doesn't bode well for the rest of the hospital he started growing in.
- Shin Ultraman: After being freed from Alien Zarab's trap, Shinji Kaminaga transforms into Ultraman, bursting out of the building he's been stuck in to face the alien doppelgΓ€nger standing right outside.
- Thor: Ragnarok: In the film's climax, Surtur the fire demon is reborn from the Eternal Flame in Odin's treasure vaults, deep below the palace. He promptly grows to the size of a large mountain, bursting through the palace walls and shattering the whole building.
- The Witches: In the finale, Luke hasn't found a means of undoing his mouse transformation despite his victory over the Grand High Witch and is forced to live in a toy house alongside his grandmother's bed. However, Ms Irving arrives and magically restores him to normal, resulting in Luke first resuming human shape, then rapidly expanding as he resumes human size. Before long, his arms stretch through the dollhouse windows and the floor begins to collapse beneath him — until he finally erupts naked through the roof.
- Tunnels Of Fear: You have to make the choice of whether to take a canary with you in the mine, to detect dangerous gases. If you accept the canary, it grows quickly, soon bursting out of its flimsy cage, and suffocates you underneath.
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: Alice drinks from a bottle that makes her grow enormous inside the White Rabbit's house. Although she doesn't completely burst out of the house, she ends up crammed into the room, one arm protruding out of the window, and one leg stuck up the chimney.
- Animorphs:
- Morphing can theoretically allow people to burst out of structures too small for them, but it's not always advisable: if the walls are thick or sturdy enough, demorphing from a smaller form in a confined space can potentially result in the character accidentally crushing themselves to death.
- In #6: Animorphs: The Capture, Jake decides to test drive his new cockroach morph with a quick stealth inspection of his house, only to end up getting stuck in a matchbox-style roach motel while sneaking behind the refrigerator. His means of escaping is to simply demorph, allowing him to easily burst out of the matchbox, but unfortunately, it leaves him with the roach motel's sticky strip glued to his hair.
- During #9 Animorphs: The Secret the kids morph into termites and come under the control of the termite Hive Queen. Cassie manages to fight the queen's influence and kill her, then frantically starts demorphing only to painfully fill the tiny chamber pretty much immediately. Ax cuts her free.
- In #12: Animorphs: The Reaction, Rachel turns out to be allergic to her newfound crocodile morph, resulting in her suffering fits of Involuntary Shapeshifting. In one case, she finds herself unwillingly morphing an elephant while she's in her bedroom on the second floor of her house, quickly filling the room, destroying the furniture, getting pressed against the ceiling, and finally crashing through the floor.
- In the Paul Jennings short story Burp!, the Big Eater protagonist discovers a spell that can transfer his weight to anyone he chooses. He quickly abuses its power to get revenge on anyone he dislikes, gorging himself in advance for maximum humiliation of his victims... only to realize too late that the spell will only last four years before all the weight will be transferred back to him. In a matter of minutes, he gets so obese that he bursts out of his clothes and fills up the whole room, ending up trapped inside with one leg sticking out the window; for good measure, his ballooning weight is too much for his heart and he dies soon after.
- The Dunwich Horror: Throughout the story, the Whateley house is routinely modified behind closed doors, with Old Wizard Whately and his son Wilbur progressively knocking out more interior walls, until finally the house is just one huge empty space inside. The reason, it turns out, is that the house is secretly playing host to a growing monster, and the Whateleys need to repeatedly renovate the house to give it more room as it grows.
- George's Marvellous Medicine: After sampling the title character's improvised medicine, George's grandmother begins rapidly growing until she simply bursts through the ceiling. As such, George's mother is decidedly shocked when she returns home to find grandmother's head visible through the roof of the house.
- Princesses of the Pizza Parlor: "Princesses in the Darkest Depths": It's one way to for Mr. Chitters to escape his cage:
the squirrel swelled in size, bursting from his cage
- Doctor Who: In "Wild Blue Yonder", the Doctor and Donna are faced with the not-things in a spaceship, creatures from outside the universe who are attempting to take on their forms. At one point, the not-things chase them, getting bigger and bigger until they are stuck together in one of the corridors, hence allowing the Doctor and Donna time to escape.
- Denji Sentai Megaranger: It's rare for this trope to appear in Super Sentai, since the Make My Monster Grow sequences mostly occur outdoors with fully open spaces; however, one episode of this series features Guirail taking a Super Serum with some nasty side effects and ending up mutating and forcibly enlarged, bursting out of a warehouse/underground complex. This was adapted to Power Rangers in Space in the episode "Flashes of Darkonda".
- Red Dwarf: In "Back In The Red Part 1," it's quickly discovered that the nanoobots rebuilt Red Dwarf on a massive scale, to the point that Starbug is left cruising around the corridors like a fly. Fortunately, the gigantism doesn't last long, and Red Dwarf soon begins shrinking back to normal size...but unfortunately, this happens while Starbug is still trying to get back to the docking bay. As a result, they end up getting stuck in a corridor, losing first their engines, then their midsection, before finally crashlanding in the dock.
- Ultra Series:
- Several kaiju start off either human or pet-sized, before reverting to their 30-meter-tall monstrous forms, more often than not leading to the building they're in getting destroyed from the inside. Notable instances include Kingstron (initially a lump of flesh hiding in an apartment's wall before it grows, MAT barely managed to evacuate the apartment before Kingstron enlarges itself and destroys the whole place), Brocken (possessing a human, who then runs into a nearby building after he's exposed and shattering the structure), Salamandora (who starts off as a bunch of cells before regenerating to kaiju-size from within a warehouse), Bios (originally a computer before it assimilates with various plants and machinery and bursting from the lab it's hiding in), and several others.
- Every once in a while, the Ultramen perform this when transforming in especially desperate moments. Good examples include the original Ultraman growing to burst out of a building to save Hoshino from Alien Zarab (a scene recreated in the aforementioned Shin Ultraman) and Ultraseven outgrowing the Planet 4 HQ to save both himself and Soga from a robotic executioner.
- The Umbrella Academy: In the Grand Finale of season 4, Ben and Jennifer fuse into a grotesque monster that keeps growing and growing the longer it exists, eventually bursting through the roof of the building they were in.
- In the music video to Me OlvidΓ© Ti by Los Retrovisores, a woman — apparently the lead singer's ex-girlfriend — grows into a giantess while asleep in bed. As she grows, she busts out of the roof of her apartment building before tracking down the lead singer and eating him.
- The Muppet Show:
- In the Lynda Carter episode, Miss Piggy appears in a skit as Wonder Pig, parodying Carter's show Wonder Woman (1975). She finds that Annie Sue has gone into shock, making clucking sounds, because she had caught sight of a giant (and real) chicken, which then starts walking around on top of the house, pecking at the roof. Miss Piggy changes to Wonder Pig, grows to giant size until her head pops through the roof, and shoos the chicken away.
Miss Piggy: Beat it, you dumb cluck!
- In the Brooke Shields episode, the Muppets take a shot at adapting Alice in Wonderland. Brooke, who plays Alice, eats some cake to make her small enough to follow the White Rabbit through a door. When she needs to be taller for the next scene, Floyd, as the Caterpillar, advises her to take a bite of the mushroom he's sitting on. It works too well, thoughβeven when she's gone up to her dressing room, she doesn't stop growing, and she fills the whole room.
Brooke: Help, help! Get me out of here! I'm still growing!
- In the Lynda Carter episode, Miss Piggy appears in a skit as Wonder Pig, parodying Carter's show Wonder Woman (1975). She finds that Annie Sue has gone into shock, making clucking sounds, because she had caught sight of a giant (and real) chicken, which then starts walking around on top of the house, pecking at the roof. Miss Piggy changes to Wonder Pig, grows to giant size until her head pops through the roof, and shoos the chicken away.
- Dungeons & Dragons: Enlarge person and similar spells can cause their target to outgrow their environment. This never causes harm to the creature, but 2nd and 3rd Editions let them attempt a Strength check to burst through their confinement; otherwise they just stop growing when they run out of room.
- In Final Fantasy XVI, Titan devours a Mothercrystal in a last-ditch attempt to defeat Ifrit. This results in him growing explosively, demolishing the temple he and Ifrit were fighting in before merging with the nearby mountain to become Titan Lost.
- Henry Stickmin Series: In Fleeing the Complex, Henry can try to escape from a prison cell by consuming an "eat me" cookie. He ends up growing to giant size and getting crushed between the walls of the cell, which leads to a fail.
- Home Safety Hotline: The Trolls are naturally 12 feet tall, but they can deflate themselves to a much smaller size to infiltrate houses. If they are approached by a human in this latter form, however, they can rapidly reinflate themselves to their max size and demolish the house in the process. You can hear this happen over the phone to one client with a troll problem if you gave him the wrong advice.
- New Super Mario Bros. 1: Subverted. Using a giant shroom in a castle will have Mario briefly grow — only to shrink back down if he touches the ceiling with the giant shroom being put in reserve.
- Skylanders: This trope appears in Swarm's backstory. Once a prince of an insect warrior hive, Swarm suddenly had a massive growth spurt, making him too large to fit in his hive and forcing him to break the most important rule for the royal family: no leaving the hive.
- Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island: This occurs when Bowser enters his One-Winged Angel form, with the castle roof being destroyed by Bowser's hulking size. Yoshi uses the remains as platforms during this second phase.
- Slay the Princess: The Apotheosis makes her grand appearance by bursting straight through the cabin and the top of the hill it's built on, accentuated by Chunky Updraft. Much of of the chapter is spent as a Colossus Climb, with the player using her powerful gravitational pull to slingshot around and onto her body.
- 1/1 Heroine: When the Giant Woman heroine Yuu-chan approaches the castle of the Dark Queen Momocchi, the latter confronts Yuu-chan by growing herself to giant size, only to accidentally wreck her own castle and kill all of her minions in the process. The narration proudly announces that Momocchi is now homeless, and her character class changes from "Dark Queen" to "NEET".
- Something About: The scene where Bowser grows to face Mario and Yoshi parodies and exaggerates the aforementioned example from Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. At first, Bowser bursts out of the castle roof ...before eclipsing the planet, solar system, and Milky Way, all while the music increasingly accelerates to a ridiculous pace.
- El Goonish Shive: In the fourth Q&A section, one page
was dedicated to answering some common size-changing questions. Among them was what happened if someone grows, the answer to which was that anyone growing would be surrounded by a tight force-field effect that would protect them from being crushed if they happened to be in a building or a tight space, making sure they give way before the growing person could be harmed. This actually makes sense with the later revelation that magic itself has a will of its own, and said Will wants people to use magic, so it frequently implements safety features like that for that purpose — no one would want to use magic if it could easily kill you by accident.
- The DeviantArt user FoxHawke has written at female muscle growth one-shots that operate like this:
- In Overwatch: The Cavalry's Grown, an experimental treatment on Tracer's chronal accelerator makes the British former pilot's body start growing exponentially taller and more muscular while she's stuck inside the bathroom. As her growing body starts depriving her of room, Tracer starts panicking, and she only grows more panicked when she eventually bursts out of the Overwatch headquarters and still keeps growing, until eventually she grows into such a muscular giantess that she doesn't even fit on the planet anymore. A forlorn Tracer is set to resign herself to no longer being able to interact with her friends on the team, and especially from her girlfriend Emily — but then the fic ends with Emily revealing that she also got Winston to expose her to the same energy that made Tracer so big in the first place, because she loves her girlfriend so much that she'd willingly become an eternally-growing muscle giantess alongside her, just so Tracer won't have to be alone.
- In Charlie's Energized Muscles, shortly after the events of Bumblebee, Charlie Watson discovers a container full of Energon cubes, and after touching one of them, the cube's energy begins mutating and transforming her body, making it slowly but surely increase in height and musculature. Charlie only discovers what's going on when she bumps her head against the ceiling and realises she's running out of room. She then has to crawl out of the building through the front door, while knocking more furniture and knick-knacks over, and once she reaches the door, she's so bulky that getting out of there is literally a tight squeeze. Luckily for Charlie, however, she not only escapes outside of the building without destroying it entirely, but once she's free, she finally stops growing, unlike the aforementioned Tracer and Emily, so she's still gigantic and muscular, but not exaggeratedly so. And then, Bumblebee returns to try consoling her, ensuring that Charlie doesn't feel alone at her newfound stature.
- In Marvel NOW: The Queen-Sized Wasp, original Wasp Janet Van Dyne discovers after fiddling with some of the Pym Particles that she gained her Sizeshifter powers from, that she can not only make the height of her body increase, but the size of her muscles with it. This becomes a problem for Janet the first time she tries this out, because she's in the bathroom at the time, and her rapidly expanding body soon ends up taking up too much of the room, so Janet has to actively will herself back to normal size — a task easier said than done, seeing as the act of even thinking about growing makes her grow, and each time her muscles and body become exponentially bigger, to the point that she ends up surpassing both Thor and the Hulk. Finally, in order to show off the full range of her abilities to her teammates, Janet has to go outside the Avengers' base, to make sure she doesn't destroy the building — a wise decision, since once she grows to her tallest and most muscular, she ends up becoming a veritable skyscraper of a woman.
- SCP Foundation: In SCP-6670
, Jemna Parker/SCP-6670's gigantisism makes her undergo an extreme growth in size while trapped inside the walls of her bedroom. As a result of this, she eventually becomes so large that she causes the ceiling of her mother's bedroom to collapse, with Jemma falling down from her bedroom above her mother's. This eventually leads into Jemma accidentally crushing her mother to death, while most of Melanie's bedroom ends up being filled with Jemma's flesh by the time the Foundation discovers her.
- Alfred J. Kwak: Alfred isn't really becoming a giant, but the effect is pretty much the same when he has a nightmare where he suddenly grows a lot, becoming too big to fit inside his father's house (Alfred is a duck, his father Henk is a little mole). He also gets into that in real life, barely fitting out of Henk's front door when he's becoming an adult.
- Clifford the Big Red Dog: The intro for the 2000 cartoon adaptation shows that Emily Elizabeth's love for Clifford made him grow beyond the size of their city apartment, to the point where his head and tail are sticking out of the building itself.
- Duckman contracts a rare blood condition after eating a strange combination of foods in "The Amazing Colossal Duckman" that causes his blood to literally boil every time he gets upset, which is very frequent. This results in him continually growing throughout the episode until he becomes too big to stay in his own house (or anywhere for that matter) and is forced to go into exile until a solution can be found that will return him to his normal size.
- Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai: When Claw the gremlin leader makes herself grow giant with the Knife of Creation, she bursts out of the nightclub she was in.
- The Incredible Shrinking Day: At one point while he's stuck in Sarah's dollhouse, Eddy starts to burp out a few bubbles, causing the shrinking potion he'd been tricked into drinking to wear off ever so slightly, and he grows back to a portion of normal size. While no actual damage is done to the structure, he still becomes big enough to fill the room and accidentally knocks down a dresser that was blocking one of the dollhouse's inner doors (and thus opens an escape route for Edd, who was in the room with the dresser) before the potion's effects reassert themselves and he shrinks back down.
- Jackie Chan Adventures: In "Little Valmont, Big Jade", Jade creates and drinks a potion that she thinks will make her grow up faster. Instead, it makes her grow larger. In rapid succession she gets too large for the hotel room she's in, then too large for the hallway, and by the end she's a giant ten stories high.
- Jelly Jamm: In "The Great Student", a formula tips over and gets poured on Rita's head, causing her to become huge enough to pop the roof off of Mina's observatory.
- Johnny Bravo: In the episode "Jumbo Johnny", Johnny starts abusing some gain shakes that make him gain weight overnight, causing him to get fat. At one point, he drinks a bunch at the same time and he starts to grow taller until he completely destroys his house. It is only then that he decides that maybe the shakes are not working as intended.
- Lilo & Stitch: The Series: In "Frenchfry", Frenchfry makes extremely addictive foods that cause people to grow enormously fat. Lilo approaches Pleakley's room to warn him and opens the door, revealing that Pleakley has become huge enough to fill up the whole room and his fat bursts through the wall.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
- In "The Cutie Mark Chronicles", during Twilight's flashback, her entrance exam to Princess Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns involves hatching a dragon egg. When her magic overreacts, she not only hatches the dragon (a baby Spike) but makes him grow to adult size, causing his head to break through the roof of the castle tower. This causes Celestia to notice the issue and intervene.
- In "The Secret of My Excess", Spike feeding into his greedy side during his birthday causes him to have multiple growth spurts. One of them causes him to outgrow Sugar Cube Corner.
- The New Scooby-Doo Movies: In "The Frickert Fracas", Grandma Frickert created a formula for chicken feed that makes the chickens grow to human size. When one rooster eats a large dose of the formula, it immediately begins growing until it breaks through the roof of its coop — which is a bit of a problem since Scooby and Shaggy are hiding in it at the time.
- Rick and Morty: In βThe Whirly Dirly Conspiracyβ, Summer tries to win back her boyfriend by using Rick's Morphizer-XE to increase her bust size, only to end up accidentally growing her entire body to gigantically uneven proportions and getting stuck in the garage. When Beth attempts to undo it, the "normalize" setting only makes Summer's proportions normal, causing her to grow even bigger until she's a normally proportioned giantess, reducing the garage to kindling in the process.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: Inverted in "Home Sweet Pineapple" when thirsty nematodes suck the juice out of SpongeBob's pineapple home, causing it to shrink around him and Gary.
- Steven Universe: Future: In "Growing Pains", when Dr Maheswaran asks Steven if heβs had any recent stressful experiences and he thinks of his proposal to Connie, his earlier 'swelling' escalates to him suddenly becoming giant; while he doesn't fully break through the ceiling, he does crack it and break the light, and he's forced onto all fours to fit in the room.
- The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!: In "Mario Meets Koop-zilla", this happens to Dr. T. Garden's laboratory after King Koopa eats his newly-invented Super Sushi, turning him into the aptly-named Koopzilla. It happens again later when Mario eats some Super Sushi as well, turning into a giant to face off against Koopzilla himself.
- Dr. T. Garden: Oh, not again! I just had that ceiling fixed!

