Got a prisoner neither bars nor chains can hold? Flatten them down to two dimensions, and stick them in a picture. From such a prison there can be no escaping, theoretically. As an added bonus, these pictures also make great Soul Jars.
Life inside the picture can vary in many ways, starting with how much freedom the prisoner has.
- Soul Jars - The soul is trapped in the painting, but the body is free to move around.
- Human Popsicle - The prisoner is not aware of time passing, but is frozen in one moment.
- A living death - The prisoner is aware of time passing, but can't move inside the picture. Sometimes he can communicate with people in the real world.
- Portal Picture - The picture is a gateway to another world, in which the prisoner is now trapped.
Generally, in the first two cases the prisoner does not age. With portal pictures they usually do, but in the third case both alternatives are reasonably common.
Methods of releasing the prisoner also vary. With cursed pictures, simply looking at them can release the captive, who gets replaced by the viewer. Pictures holding villains are a form of Sealed Evil in a Can, and the prisoners usually can only be freed by sinister rituals. Those holding heroes are more likely to respond to such things as the tears of a true love, or to require epic deeds to be done in the world within the painting.
While oil paintings are traditional, any kind of picture can be used. Another common variant is to use a mirror. With these, people looking in the mirror may see the prisoner in place of their reflection, or dimly superimposed on it.
Sub-Trope to Anomalous Art. If the person is forced to immobility, may become a case of And I Must Scream. This sort of trap has a strong possibility of being the work of a Mad Artist. Compare Crystal Prison.
Examples
- Delicious in Dungeon: Laios travels into several "living paintings" to eat the meals pictured inside, but is not able to gain any nutrients from the painted food. In an extra at the end of the volume, he instead tries to draw a picture of himself on the art. From an outside perspective, this seems to have no effect, but the drawing has actually gained sentience. The drawing tries to get the attention of Laios' friends outside the painting, but they cannot hear it and walk away, leaving the drawing to ponder its existence and wonder how long it will be stuck in the painting. The extra ends with the warning "amateurs should never mess around with magic".
- Fairy Tail: Sho can trap people inside cards. He later teaches Cana how to do this.
- Hell Girl: In "Broken Threads", a corrupt journalist is stuck in an empty photo in a giant magazine long enough for Ai's minions to give him a "The Reason You Suck" Speech before ferrying him away to Hell.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable:
- Yoshihiro Kira ends up in this once Jotaro takes a portrait of Kira and then destroys the camera to which Atom Heart Father was bound. While he can no longer remotely affect reality by interacting with photographs, he can lean out of his prison and manually affect the world, an ability with which he steals Kira's Arrow from the protagonists and uses a thread unravelled from his nightshirt to lasso a crow for mobility. (Unfortunately for him, it turns out that he's now just as flammable as an ordinary polaroid.)
- Terunosuke Miyamoto through his Stand, Enigma, can store anything, from objects to people, into paper that he then folds up. Opening or ripping the paper allows whatever is trapped in it to escape.
- The 12th chapter in the 2nd volume of Mail by Eiji Otsuka has a portrait of a terminally ill girl. When people learned about her condition, most of them took pity on her and would keep on trying to motivate her to live when all she really wanted was to die. Even after she died, the motivation from people was so strong that her spirit lived on, trapped within that portrait. Of course, her spirit manages to escape the portrait from time to time to attempt suicide... usually with the body of whoever happens to be close by.
- Naruto: Sai can do this.
- Photon: The Idiot Adventures: Bulan traps Aun inside a photo. She's still able to punch Papacha through it, and eventually frees herself with brute force.
- Le Portrait de Petite Cossette is all about such a cursed portrait.
- Sailor Moon: Nehelenia can trap people in mirrors.
- Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro: Sanju and Nijuku end up trapped in one when they are replaced by their reflections. While it isn't impossible for them to escape, doing so involves looking through a mirror, which is difficult when their reflections start covering every mirror they find.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!: People's souls often get trapped within playing cards. The card art looked much like paintings of said souls. When empty, they resemble regular Duel Monster cards with a blank picture where the soul will be.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V: This is done via technology embedded in the Duel Disks. It's the de facto way of dealing with an enemy in the Fusion Dimension, done by both factions.
- Happy Friends: The Monster of the Week in the 43rd episode of the 4th season traps people in photos by snapping pictures of them with a camera. We get to see how this works firsthand with Big M. and Little M., who are able to talk and move freely in the black void of the photo but can't interact with the outside world.
- All-Star Squadron: In issue #64, the Golden Age Superman villain Funny Face tries to trap Firebrand by transferring her into a cartoon drawing with the same device that he uses to transfer cartoon villain drawings into real people. Note that this was a Post-Crisis revision of a Superman story with the All-Star Squadron substituting for the non-existent Golden Age Superman.
- In Doom Patrol (1987), the heroes have to save the entire city of Paris from being trapped in a magic painting by the Brotherhood of Dada (who are based on an actual artistic movement).
- In the House of Mystery #60 story "The Prisoner on Canvas", a man named Andre Periot finds alien paints inside a meteorite. Anything that is realistically painted with these paints disappears from the real-world to exist only within the painting for as long as the painting exists. To escape the police for assault and theft, Periot paints himself with the expectation that his partner-in-crime will erase the self-portrait. However, Periot remains stuck for a hundred years until the 1950s when a man named Duncan discovers the self-portrait, the paints, and their powers. He figures that the self-portrait traps someone who has answers and so frees Periot with turpentine. Because the two men look alike, Periot explains what he knows and then orders Duncan to paint his own self-portrait because as soon as Periot shaves himself, he can pass for Duncan and take his place. Because their eye colors differ, Duncan is able to trick Periot and paint his portrait instead. He disposes of the paints and hands his story and the portrait of Andre Periot to the police to handle the rest.
- W.I.T.C.H.: In "The Last Tear", the court painter Elias Van Dahl flees to Earth after Phobos orders all images of him destroyed. Elias becomes famous on Earth and even falls in love, but Phobos finds him and seals him away in The Last Tear, a painting of a village where no one had shed a tear in generations and which kept the last tear in a bottle. The artist can't paint properly and the Guardians' powers fail. Will comes up with a plan to have the artist mix the last tear into his paints which works perfectly. They offer to let their new friend come back to Earth with them but he's content to stay in the painting now that he can paint again. Back in their world, the girls admire the painting, now with the artist painting a picture of his long-lost beloved and smiling.
- Iron Touch: Policy of Truth is a painting that turns anyone who lies to it into paint and traps them inside.
- Our Week Off Together!: An Illusion Copy of Amity gone wrong traps Amity in a Magic Mirror so she can steal Luz for herself. Later she also traps King in the same mirror.
- In Portraits and Parseltongue
, Tom Riddle tries to rape Harry after he rejects Tom's advances but ends up being restrained by his own snake. Harry then casts a spell which traps Tom in the partially-finished portrait Harry was painting.
- Respect: Yayoi Kise does this to a trio of bullies, and then the police who come looking for said bullies, and then the police who start looking for those police, and then her mother...
- Black Scorpion:
- The villian Flashpoint has a Magical Camera that lets him take Phantom Zone Pictures.
- Flashpoint's henchwomen Vision uses a camera that can trap people in it, supposedly in a suspended animation way, to help Flashpoint escape his cell in jail, later, she presses the "print" button and the real Flashpoint materializes.
- Flashpoint again uses the Magical Camera to capture Black Scorpion, but when he "prints" her, he "photoshops" some chains to her.
- At the end, Flashpoint and Vision get Hoist by His Own Petard by being trapped in the Magical Camera and being uploaded to a satellite. The last time we see them, they seem to be in a Portal Picture.
- Double, Double, Toil and Trouble: The Farmer twins attempt to free their Aunt Sofia from a mirror she was trapped in by her twin. This is somewhere between the third and fourth versions of the trope.
- Ghostbusters II: Vigo the Carpathian used a painting of himself as a Soul Jar.
- Gremlins 2: The New Batch: A gremlin, which is manifested as lightning, is trapped on hold in the phone system.
- Superman Film Series: In the first movies, the Phantom Zone was portrayed in this manner, which is different from the comics. It's eventually revealed that the flat image of a person is just what it looks like when you're being taken to the Phantom Zone, which is itself an alternate dimension.
- The Wiz: Evermean, the Wicked Witch of the East, is also the Parks Department Commissioner of Oz. When the Munchkins "tag" (read: put graffiti on) one of her playgrounds, she retaliates by turning them into cartoonish drawings and trapping them on the structure itself. When Dorothy inadvertently kills Evermean, the spell immediately breaks and the Munchkins are freed.
Munchkin 1: Caught us painting on her playground walls!
Munchkin 2: Turned us into graffiti!
Munchkin 3: And there we stayed — flat, splat, and stuck like that!
- Choose Your Own Adventure: In The Vampire Express, there's a portrait of the vampires from when they were still human. It's kept in a special crate and is effective as a weapon against them .
- Give Yourself Goosebumps: "Scream of the Evil Genie": Wishing to be attractive turns your character into a painting in a museum.
- The Astral Wanderer and the Forest of Tears: Ithika is a psychic entity that feeds on destruction, who tried to orchestrate the death of a sentient universe. As punishment, the universe imprisoned it within a painting.
- Death Trance: Leyaks are Balinese demons who may only be killed by fire or if a really good, really fast artist captures their essence in a pencil portrait and sets fire to it. Leyak hunters embrace the Polaroid camera with the same enthusiasm old soldiers gave to repeating rifles: A tech-savvy Balinese monk can take a Polaroid of a leyak, demonstrate he'd caught the creature's essence in the photograph, then set fire to it.
- Doctor Who Expanded Universe:
- In the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Demontage, there's a device that can trap people in paintings; if they remain there too long, they're trapped permanently.
- A prison mirror is the titular concept of the New Series Adventures novel Martha in the Mirror. The Doctor makes a Continuity Nod to (television spoiler) what he did to Sister of Mine at the end of "The Family of Blood".
- Dragon Star: There's no way of removing the character from the mirror. Breaking it will only result in them being stuck in every single shard.
- In Family Portrait by Graham Masterton, an entire family of sociopaths uses this method, named after Dorian Gray from The Picture of Dorian Gray.
- Forest Kingdom: The Bones of Haven, the sixth book in the Hawk & Fisher spinoff series, has Messerschmann's Portrait, a painting that works as a magical booby-trap. If a person looks into it for too long, they end up trapped in the highly unpleasant landscape of the painting, from which they can only be released if someone else falls for the trap and takes their place. Someone who spends too long trapped in the portrait comes out no longer entirely human, and completely insane.
- The Golden Key (1996): A painter imprisons his first love(/cousin) in a Portal Picture, where time passes much more slowly.
- Good Omens: Crowley traps a hostile demon in the tape from his answering machine.
- Harry Potter: Some paintings are alive but aren't trapped people, thus they are a borderline case.
- Horus Heresy: In The Reflection Crack'd, this is strongly implied to be the fate of Fulgrim after his Demonic Possession, trapped in a picture of himself with an expression of horror forever as a greater demon has taken up permanent residence in his body and left the picture alone in the dark, where presumably nobody will ever find it or know what happened to the real Fulgrim. He eventually escaped. Unfortunately, the effort needed to retake his body drove him entirely into Slaanesh's embrace.
- Magic Kingdom of Landover: The Black Unicorn in the book of the same name is the collective soul of the trapped unicorns, sealed in one of the volumes of magic, while the rest of the unicorns are their bodies trapped as drawings in the other volume. In this case, destroying the books frees and rejoins those imprisoned in them.
- The Picture of Dorian Gray: An early example of the Soul Jar variant.
- Septimus Heap: Queen Etheldredda's portrait is used as a trap for the queen and her pet.
- Third Time Lucky: And Other Stories of the Most Powerful Wizard in the World: The demon H'sak is trapped by Magdelene inside a shattered mirror for attacking her, where he remains nearly two hunded years. Magdelene banishes him to the Netherworld after the mirror gets stolen and he's nearly used in an evil ritual.
- Too Many Curses: Some of the many captives whom the evil sorcerer Margle keeps in his castle are imprisoned in this fashion, most of them in paintings that mock or menace them (e.g. a dwarf scholar in a library where all the books are on shelves he can't reach). Because the pictures that entrap them all hang in the same gallery, the captives spend most of their time chatting and arguing with one another.
- User Unfriendly: Dorinda uses magic to trap victims inside of portraits and drain their life force.
- The Witches: A girl gets trapped in a picture by a witch. Observers of the painting see her age and change places and poses, but never actually move until she eventually disappears altogether.
- Doctor Who:
- Done in "The Five Doctors" as a means of capturing said Doctors, The Brigadier and Sarah Jane Smith.
- The Creepy Child in "Fear Her" has the power to trap people in drawings.
- In "The Family of Blood", the mirror variant is the fate of Sister of Mine.
- The 50th anniversary special, "The Day of the Doctor", revolves around Gallifreyan pictures which, like the TARDIS, are larger on the inside. Although they're ordinarily only used to make great-looking 3D art, several characters hitch a ride in the spacious interiors.
- Haven:
- In "Double Jeopardy", Lady Justice eventually punishes Lynette by hurling her into a painting. Lynette becomes one with it and freezes in place.
- The Troubled of the Week in "Nowhere Man" and "Exposure" is a photographer whose pictures turn their subjects intangible and invisible as soon as they're rendered. According to the creator of the Troubles it evolved over time, as originally it was tied to finishing a portrait painting. Destroying the portraits restores the victims.
- My Favorite Martian: In "Portrait in Brown", Uncle Martin (the Martian) is using his dimensional separator, when the landlady Mrs. Brown walks into the room and is reduced to two dimensions. To prevent her from injuring herself, Uncle Martin freezes Mrs. Brown and paints a quick portrait around her to hide the fact she's been frozen in 2D. As, of course, Martin (and, all Martians for that matter) is friendly and superior, this is only used as a temporary measure until Martin can effect a cure.
- Night Gallery: In "Escape Route", Joseph Strobe discovers a beautiful, idyllic painting of a man fishing in a lake in a Buenos Aires museum. He's captivated by the image and begins to see himself literally inside of it. As events unfold, the truth comes out: "Strobe" is actually a former Nazi and concentration camp commander, who escaped to Argentina to avoid punishment. When Strobe eventually snaps and murders an elderly Jewish man who's figured out his identity, he flees from the authorities and enters the room with "his" painting, and finally manages to permanently will himself into it... but the fishing painting has been replaced with one showing a crucifixion, and Strobe finds himself doomed to eternally suffer for his crimes.
- Port Charles: One post-Supernatural Soap Opera Retool arc is about one of Allison's ancestors being trapped in a painting until she can be posthumously cleared of a centuries-old murder.
- Power Rangers S.P.D.: Alien criminals are turned into playing cards.
- Sapphire and Steel:
- Assignment 1 features Sapphire almost being killed by Roundhead soldiers while stuck in a painting.
- Assignment 4 is mostly about people who belong in photographs being taken out of them and people who don't belong in photographs being taken into them.
- The Sarah Jane Adventures: In "Mona Lisa's Revenge", lots of people get trapped in paintings, not least of which was Mona Lisa herself back when the painting was originally made. Probably. It's left ambiguous just what was going on with her, and she explicitly wasn't the woman who was actually painted, but the painting seems to have been made as a prison for her.
- Smallville: People get trapped in the Phantom Zone, which looks like their stuck in a two-dimensional plane.
- So Weird: In "Snapshot", while passing through a town, Annie Thelen learns about a camera that steals people's souls, causing them to act like bad kids, be mischievous and constantly play mean pranks on each other. The souls get trapped inside the photos.
- While it's never used as a prison (that we know of), the Quantum Mirror from Stargate SG-1 could be considered a variation of Type 4. It's a mirror which serves as a doorway to Alternate Universes. Stargate Atlantis implies that, given infinite probability, there should be universes devoid of life.
- Warehouse 13: Lewis Carroll's mirror turns out to be one of these.
- Witches of East End: An ex-boyfriend of Freya has been trapped in a painting for decades. He escapes and takes Freya with him into another painting to imprison her there. But she escapes and the witches put him into another painting and bury it.
- The Worst Witch: Agatha and Miss Gimlett trap Ada in one of these when they take over the school. After Miss Hardbroom finds out and attempts to rescue her, she gets the same treatment. Eventually the tables are turned, and both end up trapped in the same picture as punishment.
- In PVRIS' music video for "Anyone Else"
, each band member visits a room with a painting that comes to life and traps them in the frame.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- The Mirror of Life Trapping can imprison multiple victims who look into it.
- The Scalamagdrion, a.k.a. Ningulfim, is a dragon-like creature that lives in an enchanted illustration and attacks anyone that stares at it for too long.
- Exalted: One of the Sidereal Marial Arts charms, Vanished Within The Glass of Obsidian Shards of Infinity Style, draws your target into a mirror dimension where they are unable to interact with anything.
- Warhammer 40,000: Poor Fulgrim is trapped in one of these, while a Daemon uses his physical shell.
- Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay has a (cursed) painting known as The Blessed Ones, which shows an idyllic landscape with beautiful and lifelike figures apparently enjoying all the comforts of paradise, and each attended by a strange ethereal spirit. It is said to grant eternal life to its owner if they perform a particular ritual. The fact that many of the painting's former owners have disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and that many of the figures share a strong resemblance to said former owners is pure coincidence, and the claims that each person depicted shows every sign of enjoyment but a look of terror and pain in their eyes is pure rumour. In fact, the daemons of the painting can leave it if blood is spilled on the canvas, and will drag the blood's owner into the painting to join the others.
- BIONICLE: Teridax does this to Miserix by forcing him to shapeshift into a Picasso-type picture, combined with a Mind Rape that convinces Miserix that he's dead and unable to move. He gets better.
- The 7th Guest: A couple of Spooky Paintings inside Stauf's Mansion. The first one shows hands trying to push through the picture but to no avail; and the second, of Stauf himself, has a puzzle of restoring his face to human features, and once that's solved, he attempts to attack the player while clinging to the painting's background. The basement maze's background music playing overtop truly makes it Nightmare Fuel.
- Castlevania: Rondo of Blood: There is a phantom painting that flies around a room. If the player touches it, they become instantly trapped in the painting itself. The man in the painting then rips you apart, and you fall to the ground in many two-dimensional paper-like pieces.
- Dishonored: The non-lethal means of defeating Delilah in The Brigmore Witches is to replace the painting which will allow her to steal Emily's body with a painting of a tree in the Void. When her ritual is complete, she is sucked into the Void for eternity. As the sequel shows, it didn't stick, so you can do that again by tampering with her ritual of creating "The world as it should be" and trapping her in her own painting. Apparently, the second time she's imprisoned for good, as the painting doubles as a Lotus-Eater Machine.
- Disney's Math Quest with Aladdin: Bizarrah imprisons Jasmine in a mosaic that you need to break her out of with the chisel you got in the palace dungeon... after you solve a pair of tile puzzles, of course.
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: A side-quest requires you to rescue an artist who inadvertently trapped himself in one of his paintings via the use of a magical brush.
- The Fool's Errand: The High Priestess can trap people inside tarot cards.
- Illusion of Gaia: The insane artist Ishtar traps people in their own portraits. By the time Will makes it to his studio, he finds that the artist has painted a self-portrait, thus committing himself to the same fate but leaving Will with the instructions and method of how to rescue Kara from a similar fate.
- Inscryption: This is the player's fate should they lose both their lives, as the opponent uses his camera to trap you inside of a new card for the game. This is also how the other three Scrybes are trapped during act one: P03 is trapped in the Stoat card, Grimora in the Stink Bug, and Magnificus in the Stunted Wolf. You have to steal Leshy's camera and subject him to the same fate in order to reset the game and free the other three.
- Kingdom Hearts: Luxord can imprison people within cards or dice, and Zexion can imprison people in his Lexicon.
- The Legend of Dragoon has a picture that trappes a princess inside of it in Act 2.
- The Legend of Zelda:
- In The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, Yuga turns Zelda and the Seven Sages into paintings. He is able to turn himself into a non-imprisoned painting that can move along walls, an ability Link can also use.
- In The Legend of Zelda CD-i Games, Ganon is defeated by getting imprisoned in a book. In Faces of Evil, it makes sense since you beat him by throwing the Book of Koridai at him, but in Wand of Gamelon, the book just comes out of nowhere after you zap him with the eponymous MacGuffin.
"Nooooo! Not into the pit! It buuuurns!"
"Aargh! The chains! Nooooo! You haven't seen the last of me!"
- LEGO Marvel Super Heroes: Dormammu trapped Doctor Strange in a portal picture, and the other heroes have to rescue him.
- In Look Outside, if you fight Lyle, he'll fight back and reveal a power of his: to transfer people's souls into photos he's taken of them. Failing to prevent the photo from developing will have him do just that, leading to a Non-Standard Game Over. A certain piece of dialogue implies this is not the first time he's done this.
- Magical Battle Arena: For her Desperation Attack, Sakura Kinomoto uses her Star Wand on her opponent and seals them inside a Sakura Card.
- In the early Myst games, a carefully-rewritten Linking Book will become one of these (a "Trap Book"). Later games, starting with Myst III: Exile and formally established in Myst IV: Revelation, Retcon this into Prison Ages — sort of like Type Four, but there's no actual picture in which the prisoner is visible, and they're basically ordinary Ages in which there is no Linking Book back.
- In Ominous Objects: Family Portrait, the villain traps the main character's wife and children in several portraits which can only be entered by using special paint.
- SoulBlazer features a scientist trapped in his own painting (a type 4), an abstract piece titled "The World of Evil". A couple of his town models have also been made into portals, but no one particular is trapped in them.
- Super Mario Bros.:
- Super Mario 64 uses the fourth type extensively, however, Mario is never trapped. Bowser used the paintings as zones to control the Stars that powered Peach's castle. Its DS remake, however, played with this trope by having pictures of the captured playable characters holding the bosses that have the keys to their actual prisons, not the characters themselves.
- Luigi's Mansion: Happens to Mario and numerous ghosts in the game, although in Mario's case he is in a Soul Jar.
- Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon has this as well, with Mario and Toads being trapped in paintings by King Boo. He also wants to do this to Luigi and Professor E. Gadd, but it thankfully never happens.
- Luigi's Mansion 3 has Mario, some Toads and Princess Peach caught in paintings by King Boo. He also manages to capture E. Gadd (though he's rescued fairly quickly) and, if you get a Game Over, Luigi himself finally gets caught! The most extreme example, however, happens in the final phase of the Final Boss, where King Boo gets so fed up with Luigi that he produces a picture frame large enough to swallow up the whole hotel, himself included, if you don't beat him in four minutes.
- Mario Party DS: Koopa Krag, an elderly Koopa, was trapped into a book by Kamek prior to the events of the game. His grandson asks Mario and his friends to defeat Kamek to revert the spell and free the troubled character.
- Portraits of the level boss in Yo! Joe! Beat the Ghosts will try to backstab you when you pass near them.
- One 5 Second Films sketch features a newspaper cover with a picture of a confused dork and a header reading 'Get help!' cries trapped loser. A gleeful passerby tries to pick up that newspaper, only to get sucked in, changing the picture to that of him berated by trapped loser and the header now saying Loser to sucker: 'I said get help!'.
- In the Courage the Cowardly Dog episode "So in Louvre Are We Two", all the artworks of the Louvre come to life, and Mona Lisa ends up switching places with Muriel.
- In Darkwing Duck, Splatter Phoenix can use her paintbrush to enter paintings and alter them from within. She traps Gosalyn in a surrealist painting by throwing her into it and sealing her inside. Subverted when Gosalyn figures out from Darkwing and Launchpad chasing Splatter Phoenix that she can move between paintings too.
- Double Dragon (1993): If a villain screws up once too many, the Shadow Master will make him part of his mural, trapped as stone and half merged into the wall. Previous victims are still seen there.
- Gravity Falls:
- A slight inversion occurs in "Fight Fighters" when Rumble McSkirmish attempts to look directly up, despite not having a looking up animation, and ends up falling flat like a picture onto the ground himself. He proceeds to get up off-camera.
- Played straight in "Weirdmageddon 3: Take Back the Falls" when Bill traps Wendy, Soos, Old Man McGucket, Robbie, Gideon and Pacifica inside tapestries.
- Looney Tunes regularly inverts this trope, with characters jumping in and our of paintings and running around inside them.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: The backstory for the first episodes involves one of the two queens, sorry, princesses ruling Equestria turning into the evil Nightmare Moon and being imprisoned on the moon by the other one. While it's never detailed what form her entrapment takes, what we can see is that as long as she's imprisoned, the moon shows a distinctive "Mare in the Moon" pattern of craters in the form of a unicorn head, and when she's released, it disappears. So for all that's shown, she could just be existing as a vague picture on the moon, which has to be one of the physically biggest examples of this trope around.
- Robot Chicken parodies this in a quick sketch in which an explorer takes a polaroid of a native, trapping him in the photo.
- The She-Ra: Princess of Power episode "Portrait of Doom" involves an enchanted set of paints which causes the subject of each painting to lose his/her energy, then to be transported to a mystical, prison-like portrait that's housed in Hordak's fortress. Both the paintings in the Rebel camp and the portraits in Hordak's fortress are required to undo the enchantment.
- The Smurfs (1981): In one episode, Painter obtains a vial of liquid from an evil wizard, which improves his paintings but traps whatever he paints in the picture.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Frankendoodle", SpongeBob creates an evil drawing of himself with a magic pencil. He defeats the doodle by slamming it between a book, causing it to become just an illustration on the page.
- Super Friends: At the end of one Challenge of the Super Friends episode, Green Lantern captures Lex Luthor by turning him into a hundred-dollar bill. He is now flat and green.
Green Lantern: If it's money you want, Luthor, try this on for size! [zaps him with his ring]
- Underdog: Simon Bar Sinister invents two devices to do this in two separate stories.
- The first is the Valentine Vault, which can turn victims into living valentine cards. After using the hero's girlfriend Sweet Polly as bait, he's able to turn Underdog into one. However, Simon makes the mistake of not disposing of him when he has the chance, wanting to display Underdog like a trophy (or maybe dartboard) and then sadistically leaves him for the unconscious Polly to find when she wakes up. When she does, it turns out that while Underdog can't move, he can still talk, so he instructs her to give him the Super Energy Pill from his ring. When she does so, he breaks free of the picture and hunts down Simon and his goons, resulting in them falling victim to the device themselves when they try to flee.
- The second time, it's a camera that can turn people into pictures. After Simon uses it on the police force, Underdog wrestles it away from him and figures out that he can reverse the process simply by putting the lens on the camera backwards.
- W.I.T.C.H. (2004): In "Framed", the artist Elias Van Dahl gets trapped in his own painting by Phobos. Later, Phobos tricks W.I.T.C.H. to become stuck in the same painting. They meet up and team up with Elias to escape from the painting's pocket dimension. Among other incidents, while fleeing mooks by rafting down a river, the group runs aground on canvas and has to paint more river. There's also a standoff where Will threatens to drop the Heart of Kandrakar into paint thinner.

