Planimal

Vivaldi's favorite Pokémon.

"The shambler tree is the answer to the question: can a tree walk? The answer is: yes it can, but only if it becomes an animal."

— The War Against the Chtorr

Sometimes, an organism will have both characteristics of a plant (for example, ability to photosynthesize, has leaves, flowers, and other plant parts) and characteristics of an animal (the ability to move around at will and it resembles a familiar creature). Scientists don't know how to classify it. We like to call it a Planimal. Fungus-animal hybrids also belong here: even though fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants, fiction treats them as the same thing often enough for them to count for this trope.

May cross over with Plant Mooks if they are treated as disposable cannon fodder. See also Man-Eating Plant and When Trees Attack for carnivorous plants and motile trees, respectively, that may or may not show animal traits and Plant Person, Sister Trope for sentient humanoid cases, and Plant Aliens, the science fiction counterpart.

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Examples:

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• Ads for nasal spray Flonase depict giant plant monsters representing common plant allergies (a tentacled flower monster in one and a turtle-like grass monster in another) menacing a large city, with only one person, who had used the advertised product earlier that day, keeping a cool head about it.

Anime & Manga

• Dogtato Kun: The main character is a dog-potato hybrid. There's also a hedgehog mixed with a sweet potato named "Hedgetato".
• Delicious in Dungeon:
  • The "tentacle" monsters resemble innocuous vines, but according to the accompanying guide, they're actually a type of land-dwelling cnidarian related to jellyfish. Similar to jellyfish, their tentacles are lined with stinging cnidocytes to paralyze their prey.
  • The Barometz (or Vegetable Lamb of Tartary) also shows up in a few chapters. It's presented as a play that grows a huge fruit that almost perfectly resembles a sheep from its shoot (an unripened fruit resembles a lamb inside a giant tomato-like rind). However, the "sheep"'s internal organs are all fused together, its bones are brittle, and the flesh tastes like crab. An omake discusses how vegetarians and meat-eaters disagree on whether it counts as plant or not.
• Doraemon: The Skyhorse from the episode "The Skyhorse" is a cross between a horse and a bamboo plant.
• Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters: Godzilla and its Servum offshoots are described as having originated as plants, despite possessing metallic tissue.
• Hozuki's Coolheadedness: The goldfish plants. Unlike most examples, they do not have the ability to propulse themselves. They are literally chubby goldfish wiggling around atop a thick, leafy stem. They can also grow up to three meters in height and are apparently edible.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable has a cat whose Stand (a sort of psychic extension of the self) revived it as a plant, after its untimely death. The 'cat-plant' is a plant, no doubt about that, but it also has eyes and a mouth, and acts exactly like it used to in its former kitty-cat life. Of course, the best part is probably that it can use air, of all things, to potentially blow your freaking head off.
• Naruto: The Ten-Tailed Beast was once a supernatural/extraterrestrial tree, and while in its incomplete states it appears more animal than plant it has bark-coloured skin, a bulb-like protrusion on its back, can manifest in a tree-like form, project chakra-draining roots, and fire giant wooden stakes. Its third form has Nested Mouths resembling a Rafflesia flower.
• Pokémon: The Series: Every Grass-type Pokémon is this, either resembling a specific type of plant like the Bellsprout line or having plants growing out of their bodies like the Bulbasaur line. In addition, they can use photosynthesis, root themselves to the ground, or release spores.

Card Games

• Magic: The Gathering: This is a common archetype for creatures typed as both Plants and something else and which don't count as full plant people:
  • The Carnivorous Moss-Beast resembles an antlered, hulking animals made entirely out of mosses, branches and fungi.
  • The mossdogs of Ravnica are vegetable creatures resembling gaunt, eyeless canines.
  • The Vinesoul Spider is a Giant Spider made out of green vines.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! features a variety of different planimals from Ent creatures to walking plants.

Comic Books

• The DCU:
  • Batman: The villainess Poison Ivy has been known to create these:
    • One story in the Anthology Comic Batman Chronicles #9 had her create a plague of strawberry-mice, apparently just to attract Batman's attention because she was bored being cooped up in Arkham.
    • According to the DC Super Pets Character Encyclopaedia, she has a dog-shaped bush named Dogwood.
  • Superman: In The Girl with the X-Ray Mind, Supergirl unwillingly and inevitably turns any animal into a half-beast, half-plant creature after being infected with the "Plant Scourge".
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW):
  • "Day at the Museum": During their expedition, Snap and Mane encounter a family of bush babies depicted as monkey-like animals made out of leaves and branches.
  • My Little Pony: Legends of Magic: Issue #8 and the annual feature lumber bears, animated and aggressive piles of wooden debris in the shape of bears. They can reassemble themselves after they've been destroyed, but only if they're in a forest.

Comic Strip

• In the Moomin storyline "Moominvalley Turns Jungle", there's a carnivorous bush that happens to have eyes and legs. Two Hemulens, one a botanist and the other a zoologist, get into an argument over whether it's a plant or animal.

Fan Works

• The Alarmaverse: In The Hesperus Gate, Twilight gets transformed into a monstrous pony-plant hybrid with sharp fangs and tentacle-like branches.
• Equestria Divided: Animate masses of wood in the shape of animals are common in the Everfree Forest — in addition to the canon timberwolves, there are also the wood spiders and the humanoid ents.
• Kaiju Revolution: Biollante is an ancient being containing DNA from many plants and animals. In fact, it's theorized that she may be some kind of genetic library for all life on Earth.
• Lost Cities: The bizarre plants of the Everfree Forest include spiderbrambles, bushes whose fruit are living, fully-formed spiders capable of spinning webs and catching insects.
• Paragon (Kitsune Heart): One of the planets visited by Steven and Connie on their exploration trip is inhabited by dragon-like plant creatures that breathe fire.

Film — Live-Action

• In Batman & Robin, Poison Ivy tries to create creatures like this so plants can finally fight back against humans. She even shows a first example of her creations to Mr. Freeze.
• Biollante from Godzilla vs. Biollante originated as a rose that was infused with tissue samples taken from Godzilla and the DNA of a human girl, which enables her ghost to possess it.
• Gremlins 2: The New Batch: After drinking a potion from the science lab, a Gremlin turns into a Gremlin/Vegetable hybrid. Which amusingly is used as a walking salad bar by the other gremlins who sometimes pluck an olive off him to add to their martini.
• Supplemental material for Kong: Skull Island and the tie in comic Skull Island: The Birth of Kong states several of Skull Island's creatures are this. There's the Mother Longlegs, a bamboo-legged spider, the Spore Mantis, a giant stick insect mimicking a log, and the Sker Buffalo, a giant water buffalo with symbiotic plant life integrated into its body system. It's implied that they evolved these features as camouflage to protect and conceal themselves from the island's deadliest predators, the Skullcrawlers.
• Apes and wolves made out of plants played an important role in Lady in the Water.
• Troll 2: (Nothing to do with the original Troll) features goblins (not Trolls) which turn people into edible plantmen because they are vegetarians.

Literature

• Amarant: The Flora and Fauna of Atlantis: A major theme throughout the story; most of the "fauna" are actually motile seed- or pollen-carrying stages of plants.
• Expedition: The Grovebacks of Darwin IV. In the original book, the trees that grow on their bodies eventually die once the grovebacks rise out of the ground and migrate, but the documentary adaptation changes this to make the trees and the groveback have a symbiotic relationship: the groveback provides the plants with water and transport, while the plants share their sugars with their host.
• In The Future is Wild, 200 million years from now, garden worms store photosynthetic algae inside long fern-like appendages on their backs. They emerge from damp caverns to bask in sunlight, letting their algae generate sugars.
• Hothouse: The far-future plants have in many cases developed mobility, nervous systems, eyes, limbs and other such organs and structures. They have long since outcompeted the majority of the animals, and the bulk of the world-jungle's fauna consists of a variety of plants evolved into the niches formerly held by animal life.
• Humanx Commonwealth: Furcots (from Midworld and Mid-Flinx) are huge, green, bear-like hexapods that live as Bond Creatures with humans. They emerge from seeds and gain nourishment by photosynthesis.
• Impossible Creatures (2023): Borometzes are green lambs who grow on stalks.
• Iron Council: The vinhogs are giant swine with grapevines growing out of their backs. They're herded for wine.
• The Iron Teeth: There are large stick bug-like beasts that mimic trees and attack animals or people who get to close. They fit this trope because part of their disguise is that they have actual symbiotic plants growing from them.
• October Daye: Rose goblins look like a cat made out of a rosebush, with thorns instead of fur. Toby accidentally adopts one and names it Spike. Her normal cats are not amused.
• The Plant That Ate Dirty Socks: The titular plants are fully mobile and have displayed learning tendencies.
• Scranimals by Jack Prelutsky is a children's poetry book featuring a whole menagerie of these, which live on their own island out in the sea. Among its offerings are Broccolions, Mangorillas, and the detested Radishark.
• As it turns out in Speaker for the Dead, every native animal on Lusitania is one of these, and they undergo metamorphosis, turning from plant to animal.
• Star Wars Legends: The Illustrated Star Wars Universe reveals that the large-rooted mangrove-lookalike gnarltrees of Dagobah has a stage in its life-cycle in which one of its roots splits off to become the mobile, predatory knobby white spider, which is still a plant, not a spider but does vaguely resemble one. Eventually, once it's eaten enough, the spider plants itself in the ground and becomes another gnarltree.

Live-Action TV

• Extraterrestrial (2005): The stinger-fan trees of Aurelia are technically animal-like organisms that can photosynthesize. They still possess circulatory systems, with hearts in their trunks, and creep along the ground on mobile, tentacle-like roots as they jostle for access to sunlight.
• Farscape: A few pop up. Zhaan is a Plant Person but has a lot of animal traits; one food her people cultivate is explicitly partly like a plant and animal.
• The Future is Wild: 200 million years from now, the garden worms have developed appendages filled with algae. The algae photosynthesize to produce nutrients for the worm, while the worm provides mobility.
• Return of Ultraman. One Kaiju of the Week was Leogon, a hybrid of animal and plant created by a brilliant but misguided scientist. Interestingly, the guy who wrote the episode would later produce the first draft of the script for Godzilla vs. Biollante mentioned above.
• Tremors the Series is the Trope Namer. The Planimal was a plant/root/thing, but also has a circulation system. It was a mixture of DNA from the Pitcher Plant, Venus Fly Trap and some sort of lizard. As the root part suggests, it is not motile — the problem is that the root-system has sacks that spray a much stronger variant of pitcher plant digestive juices in response to vibrations, resulting in a single taproot being surrounded with what is essentially a biological minefield. That, and it being about to reproduce when it is found. It can also scream.

Myths & Religion

• The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary. It's actually just a cotton bush... and a fern rhizome. It's a complicated story. Wired has a fairly good article on it.
• The Wixárika people of northern Mexico worship a deer god, Kauyumari, whose dead body turned into peyote cacti. Rock art depicting a similar figure has been dated to circa 2000 BCE, making this trope officially Older Than Dirt.
• Among the Fearsome Critters of American Folklore is the Cactus Cat, a creature that's half-cactus and half-wildcat. It gets especially fearsome when it gets drunk on fermented cactus juice.

Tabletop Games

• Call of Cthulhu: The At Your Door campaign for Cthulhu Now features an infected farm taken over by alien weed, which reanimates the dead animals by inhabiting the bodies with vines that wrap round the bones to take the place of tendons and sinews and allow the dead animals mobility.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Sporebats, as their name suggests, look something like bats but are actually fungi, who reproduce by shedding spores over their kills. This means that carnivores find sporebat flesh revolting, but herbivores will happily eat them.
  • The 3rd Edition Manual of the Planes describes an optional "Elemental Plane of Wood", complete with animals (and other creatures) made out of wood, sticks, and leaves.
• Pathfinder: Furcifers resemble giant chameleons with rows of flowers growing down their backs, which are as much part of their bodies as their scales and claws. They use these to produce a narcotic pollen with which to lure prey, and to secrete powerful enzymes to digest food. They also reproduce through pollination and begin life as sessile, carnivorous flowers that eventually grow reptilian bodies.
• Warhammer 40,000: The Orks are a genetically engineered Super-Soldier race created from a combination of vertebrate, fungus and algae DNA. As a result, they have green skin, a spore-based reproductive process that means that any planet they're on will be perpetually infested by them, and they can potentially convert a planet's entire biosphere into an Orkoid fungal environment given enough time and population.

Theater

• In Little Shop of Horrors, Audrey II is a plant crossbred from a butterwort and a Venus flytrap, but has vocal chords and apparently, a full digestive system in its stalk. The film adaptation justifies this by making it an extraterrestrial.

Toys

• A handful of Transformers have had this going on.
  • Beast Wars: The Predacons Saberback and Sling from Beast Wars Neo have third modes that give them plant traits, with Sling’s sail opening up to reveal a flower, and the same happening with Saberback’s tail.
  • Transformers: BotBots has a number of plant-based characters with animalistic robot modes, such as Rootwing (bonsai), Venus Frogtrap (guess...), Slobber Rock, and Stinkosaurus Rex.

Video Games

• Against the Storm: The Coral Forest biome contains trees shaped like coral and mussels; cutting down the latter has a chance of yielding meat.
• Beastieball: The Beastiepedia entry of the reptilian Sprecko describes that its whole body is covered in a sort of fungal growth, which also renders it rather sticky.
• Bug Fables:
  • Tanjerin and Cerise are "fruity bugs", fictional beetle-like bugs that resemble fruits and berries (depending on what they ate back when they were grubs), and they have leafy accessories. According to backers who designed them, their accessories actually grow from their body, making them part-plant.
  • Wasp King, the Big Bad of the game, turns himself into a wasp mimic fly-plant hybrid after eating the last leaf of the wilted Everlasting Sapling, gaining unimaginable plant-based powers, but also becoming vulnerable to ice, and after defeat, the sapling's powers turn him into an inanimate tree once he runs out of power.
• The Falcon Elm from CreaVures, which is a giant bird rooted in the ground like a tree, with several bough-like wings.
• Spore plants in Fallout, one of which became sentient. They return in Fallout: New Vegas alongside the "Spore Carriers", infected humans who have become mindless brutes covered in moss with various plants growing off of them.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Recurring monsters Ochu and Malboro are mobile, toothy plants; the Malboro even breathes like an animal, by inhaling and exhaling through its mouth.
  • The Elder Wyrm from Final Fantasy XII is a dragon resurrected as a guardian by the forest using magical plant life that fused with its body. This dual nature allows it to both spit fireballs and release clouds of spores that cause a nasty array of status effects.
  • There are two pairs of "woodwraiths" in Final Fantasy XIII that act as Dual Bosses. Woodwraiths are bestial plant creatures with bodies made of bark, moss covering their backs in place of fur, hollow stumps in place of horns, and heads that look like ridged plates with lots of tiny pale eyes. Each pair consists of a larger beast covered in green or yellow moss and a smaller one covered in blue moss.
• The development blog for The Floor is Jelly describes the catflower as an "unfortunate species" as it hates rain but yet needs to reside in a climate where it constantly rains to survive.
• Guild Wars 2 gives us fern hounds, leafy dogs that grow as companions to the sylvari. Many of the Mordrem, minions of the Plant Elder Dragon Mordemoth, similarly take the form of various creatures made out of plants, or having their corpses puppeteered by plants. This is no coincidence, as the Pale Tree from which the sylvari are born is in fact a rogue, benevolent Mordrem construct.
• Some of the Plant Mooks in Kaze and the Wild Masks take animal-like forms, such as pineapple crabs, dragonfruit porcupines, and starfruit starfish.
• In Kirby: Triple Deluxe, there are a couple of plant-animal hybrid enemies. The insectoid Big Bad ultimately becomes one too, merging with the Dreamstalk to become a colossal wasp/flower hybrid. One of divine power that can entangle and drain the entire world of life.
• Legend of Grimrock's Herders aren't technically planimals, since they're sentient (or at least aggressive and mobile) mushrooms, but it's close enough.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Kikwis of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword look like a mix between a flowering plant, a beaver, and a Kiwi.
  • The Koroks from The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker are vaguely person-shaped wooden figures with leaf masks. Apparently, they used to be the much more human-like Kokiri from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
  • The Deku Scrubs from Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask are small wooden humanoid creatures that live just under the surface of the ground and will either sell you something or spit Deku Nuts at you.
  • The Deku Baba which appears in the 3D games is a carnivorous plant similar to the Piranha Plant from the Mario series.
  • A recurring enemy in the games is the Peahat, which, while not quite as animalistic or humanoid as most, is both mobile and more than a little dangerous, except in Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword where they're harmless mobile Clawshot targets.
• Lorwolf: The Basidio and Colpach companions have this design. Basidios are toads with poisonous fungi on their backs and Colpach are felines with branches growing out of their heads and backs.
• Master of the Monster Lair: A number of enemies, including the spple viper, fireflower, shroomlizard, cursed pepper, taterbomb, etc.
• Middle-earth: Shadow of War: Whenever the Spirit of Carnán manifests outside of her forest, she take the form of a tougher variation of a Mordor animal made of bark and plantlife.
• Minecraft
  • Creepers are actually some type of leafy plant monster. According to the creator of the game, they would feel 'crunchy, like dry leaves'.
  • Mooshrooms are funganimals (half-cow, half-mushroom). You can "milk" them with a bowl for infinite free mushroom soup, or with a bucket for regular milk.
• The Plant species in Monster Rancher manages to cover both flavors of Planimal, perhaps unsurprisingly. The base monster is a sentient plant, while monsters with the Plant subtype will have plantlike coloration and leafy accents on their bodies.
• The Mother series has a number of these.
  • EarthBound Beginnings has Woodahs and Big Woodahs (both being trees).
  • EarthBound has two kinds of Mobile Sprouts, Demonic Petunias, two kinds of Hostile Oak and two varieties of walking mushroom.
  • Mother 3 has two kinds of Beanling, Cactus Wolves, Muttshrooms, Yammonsters (regular, Baked and Grated), Pigtunias, Tiny Forests, two kinds of Tree, three types of walking mushroom, and Walking Bushies.
• In Nexomon, quite a few Plant-type Nexomon look like animals with floral traits. For example: Petril, the game's Plant-type Starter Mon, is a bipedal reptile with two leaves growing from its tail, a facial crest made of tree bark, and a neck frill made of large pink flower petals.
• Odin Sphere has Baromett plants, which grow sheep. Probably inspired by the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary mentioned under 'Mythology'.
• Palworld has a few pals that appear to be a cross between a plant and an animal, such as Lifmunk and Tanzee. Notably, the game also answers the question of planimal meat, as some of them like Caprity (a berry bush goat), Broncherry (a cherry sauropod) and Mammorest (a tree-mammoth) drop their meat when killed and can be cooked into dishes. Cooked Caprity meat is mentioned to be both berries and meat at the same time, while Broncherry meat is stated to have nutrients gained from photosynthesis.
• Pikmin is full of these:
  • The Pikmin themselves are little plant people — essentially, they're humanoid, ambulatory root structures with leaf-, bud- or flower-tipped stems growing from their heads. Their exact metabolism isn't specified, but they at least eat like animals do.
  • Numerous enemies fit this as well:
    • The Creeping Chrysanthemum is much like the Pikmin — it's technically a plant (a member of the daisy family, specifically), but its roots have developed into true limbs, allowing it to dig itself free of the ground and lumber after its prey.
    • Regular and Desiccated Skitterleaves are insects crossed with leaves (living ones and dead brown ones, respectively) — unlike many insects which simply mimic leaves for camouflage, their bodies and limbs appear to be outright made of leaves and stems.
  • The Pellet Posies are a very plant-leaning case — they're regular flowers (by the game's standards) in most respects, but Olimar notes that they have muscle fibers in their stems.
• The Planimals in Plants vs. Zombies are basically plants crossed over with the animals in their namesake. There's only one example in the first game, that being Cattail.
  • Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time introduced quite a few more. There's Snapdragon (and by extension, Cold Snapdragon), Toadstool, Guacodile (an avocado-crocodile hybrid), Parsnip (a parsnip-crab hybrid), the tofu turkeys launched by Turkey-Pult, and the grass tiger spawned by Tiger Grass.
  • Plants vs. Zombies: Heroes, in addition as containing Snapdragon, Guacodile, Cattail and Toadstool, has even more Plants that fall into this category, such as Bananasaurus Rex, Hibernating Beary, Pear Cub, Grizzly Pear, Dandy Lion King, Laser Cattail and Dark Matter Dragonfruit. All of them are from the "Animal" or the "Dragon" tribe.
    • The Colossal Fossils set adds more dinosaur plants: Tricarrotops and (although technically not a dinosaur) Lima-Pleurodon. The Triassic Triumph update adds even more dino-plants with Veloci-Radish Hunter, Veloci-Radish Hatchling, Apotatosaurus and Aloesaurus. Non-dino Planimals introduced in that period include Corn Dog, Snake Grass, Bird of Paradise and Marine Bean.
  • We're not even getting into things like the Unicorn Chomper from Garden Warfare 2 or the various Planimals from the China-exclusive spinoffs.
• In Pokémon, pretty much every Grass-type falls into this to some degree, and although many lean more towards being some sort of Plant Person, animated plant or Nature Spirit, some examples stand out above the rest.
  • All of the Grass-type starters are some sort of planimal or another. In some cases, they lean much more heavily towards being animals than plants (Chesnaught and Dartrix, for instance, are essentially just and armadillo and an owl that manipulate plants) but in other cases, the plant side is more obvious (such as the large, showy flower growing on Venusaur’s back).
  • Breloom is a boxing kangaroo-dinosaur hybrid… thing… with heavy fungal elements.
  • Abomasnow is technically an animated evergreen, but it looks far more like a yeti than a plant.
  • Pansage and Simisage are monkeys with what appears to be grass and leaves instead of fur.
  • Sawsbuck is one of the best fits: it's a deer whose antlers are living branches, gaining and losing foliage and flowers with the seasons.
  • Skiddo and Gogoat are otherwise normal-looking goats with manes and tails of living foliage.
  • Fomantis and Lurantis are unusual cases. While they’re clearly based off of orchid mantises, which mimic flowers to ambush prey, they’re pure Grass-types, and don’t have the Bug-type. The implication is that, unlike the other, animal-leaning examples, they are actual plants that began to mimic animals instead of the other way around.
• Resident Evil 2 has the Ivy monsters, man-eating plants that have a vaguely humanoid shape. Supplementary material states that they are created by using the T-Virus to combine both plant and animal DNA.
• Sylvannos from Rivals of Aether, the Atherian forest personified, is a Savage Wolf Animalistic Abomination with a leafy mane, a flower tail, and feet made from tree bark.
• Shovel Knight features the Troupple King and his retinue of lesser Troupples - half trout and half apple.
• SimEarth let you raise carnivorous plants to sentience and create a civilization, even high-tech space-faring plant life.
• The Sega CD adventure game The Space Adventure has Parrot Grass. An alien spy disguises himself as Parrot Grass late in the game.
• Spore allows you to make anything. This allows you to make creatures that resemble Planimals, but since it's impossible to give them an actual plant-like biology, it's never more than an aesthetic difference.
• The Super Mario Bros. series features a variety of planimals, most prominently Piranha Plants, most of which are not full planimals, but Man-Eating Plants. Some specimens, like Petey Piranha or Dino Piranha, however, are full on planimal, having leaves and petals in addition to fully-mobile animal forms.
• Super Scribblenauts allows you to add "wooden" to anything. You can also use "plant" as an adjective for anything and create carnivorous plants and treants.
• Most Nature-type Temtem fall under this:
  • Hidody looks like a sprout crossed with a caterpillar.
  • Orphyll and Nidrasil are snakes with collars of leaves around their necks.
  • Bigu and Babawa look like snails with leaves growing out of their heads.
  • The Spriole line look like deer made of leaves; Deendre's Tempedia entry even calls it a plant-animal hybrid.
  • Vulffy looks like a fennec fox with leaves growing out of its ears.
  • Tyranak has a few feather-like leaves on the back of its head and tail.
• Most of the martian wildlife in the Ultima Spin-Off Martian Dreams are ambulatory, sapient plants, while the animal kingdom consists solely of subterranean worms. Even the civilized Martians were some variation of gourd. Humorously, they refer to the visiting humans as "worms", not as an insult, simply because it's the closest thing they can recognize us as.
• The World Neverland franchise has Ihms, its Series Mascot. The Ihms look sort of rabbit-like in their animal phase. However, when they die, they turn into trees, and those trees grow fruit that become more Ihms.
• Puyo Puyo:
  • Onion Pixie and Oniko are both pixies (we assume from the first one's name) with onions for heads.
  • Woodtles, one of the RPG mode enemies from Chronicle, are turtles contained in tree stumps.
• The Japanese casual browser game Vegemon Farm has hundreds of Planimal type creatures.
• Lashers from World of Warcraft are flowers that walk around on tentacle-like vines and whip enemies with a pair of thorny vines that serve as their "arms".

Webcomics

• Annyseed bumps into a rather assertive and agitated talking plant, whilst wandering through Hazels herb garden.
• The little pig inside of Zigena from Tower of God has a flower that blooms on its back. It grows jewels.

Web Original

• Hanazuki: Full of Treasures has in addition to the Moonflowers, a Chicken Plant. She has a flower on her head, and is rooted into the ground, but lays eggs.
• Universe Falls: The Series: In episode 6, Peridot is inspired by meeting Mabel's pet pig Waddles to get Steven to create "Waddlesmelon", a pig-like watermelon creature not unlike the Melon Stevens. The real Waddles looks half-jealous, half-weirded out.
• What If?: Discussed and subverted in "Green Cows". There wouldn't be much point to engineering a photosynthetic cow: it'd still need to consume almost as much food as regular cows.
• In Worm, the Mad Scientist Blasto creates hybrids out of multiple biological samples, using plant DNA to fill in the gaps.

Western Animation

• Big Hero 6: The Series has Mayoi, bio-engineered Adorable Evil Minions resembling axolotls with green "fur" that is actually fungus. They can photosynthesize as well as eat food, letting them grow massive quickly.
• Darkwing Duck has Dr. Bushroot, who turned himself into a half-plant, half-duck in a failed experiment.
• In The Herbs, the animal characters all have features modeled after the herb they're named after. Thus, Parsley has parsley leaves for a mane, Dill has a sprig of dill on his tail, Tarragon has spines formed from leaves of tarragon etc.
• I ♡ Arlo gives us the Bog Lady from the Season 1 finale "The Uncondemning", a wicked swamp goddess who manipulates plant life and can't stand Arlo leaving the swamp for New York. According to Ruff, she has moss hair and leaf skin.
• In Ewoks, the Raich from the episode named after it and the strangletorn plant from The Three Lessons appear to be planimals.
• One episode of Krypto the Superdog has Krypto and the Bathound facing off against a half-dog/half-plant villain named Dogwood who tries to bring the trees to life so they can rebel against humanity. Strangely it's not mentioned if he's associated with Poison Ivy, one of Batman's foes and a Plant Person.
• Moss Man, from several incarnations of Masters of the Universe; his abilities let him function as anything from an expert spy, disguised as any native plant, to a Bigfoot-like urban legend, to a near-divine being, as the plot dictates.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Timberwolves, first seen in "Family Appreciation Day", are wolves made out of actual timber found among the inhabitants of the Everfree Forest. They're essentially piles scrap wood and fallen branches in the form of lupine creatures, and can put themselves back together if smashed to pieces.
  • "Too Many Pinkie Pies": When Pinkie distracts Twilight while the latter practicing a spell to turn an apple into an orange, the off-target magic transforms a frog into a frog-legged orange with a wide slice for a mouth and passing bird into a winged orange.
  • "Apple Family Reunion" has literal fruit bats, frugivore bats that resemble actual fruits with wings, feet and a head with leaflike ears, fly in a flock resembling a rainbow and inhabit fruit trees.
• Disney Junior's The Octonauts brings us "Vegimals," a group of semi-anthropomorphic vegetables, with a turnip called "Tunip" as their leader. They communicate using cheeping and trilling noises and can whip up a mean "fish biscuit" (not made of actual fish, but tastes fishy.)
• Rupert made use of this trope in "Rupert and the Hedgehog", where the titular hedgehog was a topiary of a hedgehog that was brought to life when Rupert Bear's friend Bill Badger used too much of the Professor's growth formula on it. Rupert later manages to subdue the hedgehog with the aid of a peacock topiary brought to life.
• Spliced has the Swineapple; it's part pig, part pineapple. In the episode "Roots", Entree meets a mutant named Slouch that's part potato, part sloth, and resembles a living couch. Taking a tip on laziness from him, Entree stays in one spot so long he starts growing roots that do his eating for him before sprouting a fruit-bearing tree out of his head for shade. He truly is the ultimate livestock (plant)animal.
• Steven Universe:
  • In "Super Watermelon Island", Steven discovers that the Watermelon Stevens he created way back in the season one episode "Watermelon Steven" have formed their own civilization, and somehow have bred watermelon dogs, chickens, and horses.
  • In "Gem Harvest", Steven deliberately uses his Green Thumb powers on a pumpkin seed, resulting in a pumpkin that behaves like a dog.
• One episode of SWAT Kats, entitled "Destructive Nature", featured Dr. Viper creating a bunch of "Plantimals" to try and turn Megakat City into swampland.

Real Life

• On a scientific note, such organisms are referred to as bitrophs, combining features of animal heterotrophs and plant autotrophs. An in-depth discussion of their plausibility and evolution can be seen here.
• Scientists have discovered a sea slug (Elysia chlorotica) which eats certain algae and absorbs the chloroplasts, allowing it to perform photosynthesis.
• Several types of Cnidarians (jellyfish, corals, sea anemones and their relatives) host symbiotic algae that provide them with sugar via photosynthesis in exchange for protection.
• Certain algae have been known to make their way into salamander eggs so they can feed on the embryo. Instead, the algae can become part of the salamander, giving the salamander algae in its DNA.
• While they are not true Planimals, a diverse number of animals use camouflage to resemble vegetation. Likewise, many plants, especially orchids, mimic animals, mostly their insect pollinators.
• While not exactly a true planimal, the leaf insect very closely mimics a leaf, right down to having "leaf veins" on its body and brown patches resembling the wilted edges of dying leaves!
• Behold, Euglena. It's a single-celled organism that photosynthesizes like an alga, but swims around like a protozoan. Before the kingdom Protista was created and it was realized organisms could be something other than an animal or a plant, botanists, and zoologists used to fight over this little thing to determine whose field of study it belongs to. Even now Euglena is usually found in the first chapters of both zoology and botany books.
• Speaking about protists, Mesodinium chamaeleon is a protist that combines both plant and animal biology, being able to eat plants, and then use the chlorophyll granules from the plants to generate energy.
• "Planimal" cells are a common way to teach basic cell biology to middle-school students, by including features (like cell walls and chloroplasts) exclusive to plants and other features (like lysosomes) exclusive to animals in the same illustration. It simplifies matters and provides a decent teaching tool.
• Sloths may also count, as they have a symbiotic relationship with moss, which grows in their fur. The moss gains mobility (albeit not that much), while its green color gives the host camouflage.
• Some scientists have proposed that in a few hundred millions of years, as the Sun's luminosity increases causing the levels of atmospheric CO2 to diminish so much that plants will begin to disappear as they'll be unable to make photosynthesis, both animals and plants could last longer associating with fungi and perhaps with each other—but this would just be a temporary respite before their final extinction.
• The early ancestors of eukaryotes may have gone through a period similar to this trope, when proto-eukaryotic cells first incorporated photosynthetic purple sulfur bacteria into their structure. Subverted over millions of years, as the once-plantlike sulfur bacteria lost their photosynthetic capabilities, became incapable of independent life, and evolved into the energy-processing organelles called mitochondria.
• The algae species Chlorococcum amblystomatis is a noted symbiont of the spotted salamander. It grows in the eggs of the salamander, recycling the carbon dioxide released from the embryo into oxygen and sugar (and also colouring them light green). It's speculated that the algae lays dormant in the salamander's tissues as it grows up until it produces its own eggs and spreads the algae further.

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