Sometimes, an organism will have both characteristics of a plant (for example, it photosynthesizes, and has leaves, flowers, and other plant parts) and characteristics of an animal (it can move around at will and 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.
This is a common theme in settings where Elemental Embodiments and Elemental Variations are a major presence. "Pure" Plant/Life/Wood elementals typically take the form of masses of vegetation in animal(ish) form, similar to how other elementals are Animate Inanimate Matter of various sorts. An elemental variant of something else —say, a plant dragon— is likelier to resemble a flesh-and-bone animal with branches, leaves, and so on. Planimal Mons are especially common.
This is traditionally an endemic element of fantasy and science fiction, but also turns up in harder Speculative Biology under one of two basic forms. The first is an animal or animal-like alien with symbiotic plants or plant cells in its tissues, allowing to generate food from light and water instead of relying on risky hunting or on foraging limited resources —not unlike how plants and algae descend from heterotrophic microorganisms that absorbed photosynthetic bacteria that became modern choloroplasts. The other forms is a plant or plant-like alien that developed mobility and some form of senses, allowing it to actively move around instead of being permanently sessile and having to endure whatever scarcity, environmental hazards, and predators come its way. Even a fully sessile plant might still have mobile, sometimes very animal-like seeds or seedlings capable of wandering around and picking a good spot to root in instead of relying on chance and wind.
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, a Sister Trope for sentient humanoid cases, and Plant Aliens, the science fiction counterpart, and Sentient Flytrap for when Venus flytraps are given an amplified aptitude compared to other plants.
Examples:
- 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.
- Qrazy Chocolates:
- The Red Apple Octopus is a cephalopod whose body consists of a whole apple.
- The Chicory Rabbit lives in symbiosis with a chicory plant that has grown onto its tail.
- The Dream Emitter is a tapir that looks to be made out of plants, and grows much like one.
- 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.
- Dogtato Kun: The main character is a dog-potato hybrid. There's also a hedgehog mixed with a sweet potato named "Hedgetato".
- Doraemon: The Skyhorse from the episode "The Skyhorse" is a cross between a horse and a bamboo plant.
- Flying Witch: Makoto, Chinatsu, and Sayo visit the realm of the Plantelle in one chapter. They encounter a variety of creatures that mix animal and plant features, like a deer with wooden antlers, a jackal with a flower bush around its shoulders, and a deer whose droppings are a highly prized rice said to be so delicious that anyone who tastes it would never be able to eat regular rice again.
- 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.
- What If? (xkcd): 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.
- The DCU:
- ''Batman': 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.
- 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".
- ''Batman': Poison Ivy has been known to create these:
- 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.
- Moomin: In "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.
- The Alarmaverse: In The Hesperus Gate, Twilight gets transformed into a monstrous pony-plant hybrid with sharp fangs and tentacle-like branches.
- Conquest in the Name of Advancement!: One of Flame's creations from the Spore universe are human-sized bristleworms with leaves growing out their sides, which they can use for photosynthesis.
- 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.
- The Fallen Miracle: Belladonna was able to use her powers to create a plant-lion monster as a pet and Horse of a Different Color, a process Word of God compares to Sir Pentious' Egg Boiz.
- The Fluffy Folio:
- The Findal is a fey being that looks like a lizard with leaves growing from its head and tail.
- Similarly, the Fungus-Furred Flounder Ferret has plumes of lichen growing from its back, and is green-tinted overall.
- The Herbat is a grass-colored batlike fey that is able to grow plants from its back.
- The Mushroom-Mounted Mop Slug is a fungal variation, being a sluglike fey that has mushrooms growing from its back.
- The Thumbstalls have access to small (though giant compared to the Thumbstalls themselves) living plants that look like beetroots with a quadruped's legs and a face.
- 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.
- Pokémon: Kanto Expansion Pak: Unusually for a Water starter, Totartle becomes part Grass-type after evolving. Its Pokédex entry implies that this is due to the algae growing on its shell.
- Pokémon Untamed:
- The Banagnaw line are two living bananas resembling fish and a fruit peel in the form of an octopus.
- Titanotrop is a sauropod dinosaur with leaves covering its body and a "beard" of ripe bananas.
- The Raven & the Owlet: A cat beast resembling a topiary guards the Emperor's arboretum from thieves trying to steal the rare plants kept in its sanctum.
- Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters: Godzilla and its Servum offshoots are described as having originated as plants, despite possessing metallic tissue.
- The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello: The creature which attacks Jasper is equal parts giant insect and carnivorous plant.
- 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.
- Godzilla vs. Biollante: 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.
- Kong: Skull Island: Supplemental material 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.
- Lady in the Water:
- The Scrunt, a wolf-like monster hunting Story, resembles a wolf with grass for fur that can hide itself by flattening its body against the ground.
- The Tartutic, malevolent creatures that serve as enforcers of the Blue World's laws, resemble apes made out of dried branches and wood.
- Troll 2 features goblins (not trolls) who turn people into edible plant-men because they are vegetarians.
- Fighting Fantasy:
- City of Thieves (1983): The topiary animals in the botanical gardens come to life and attack you when you pick one of the Lotus Flowers needed for the salve.
- Crystal of Storms: The marauding dragonfruit tree is a Pun-Based Creature based on a dragon that bears dragon fruit and can attack humans.
- Amarant: The Flora and Fauna of Atlantis: A major theme; most of the "fauna" are actually motile seed- or pollen-carrying stages of plants.
- The Day of the Triffids: The triffids are plants, but with animal attributes such as the ability to walk about on their lower branches and some degree of cognition.
- Dungeon of Undeath: Bower boars have symbiotic vines that attune them to life magic and act as Combat Tentacles. Evelyn the Necromancer dungeon keeper is able to preserve this effect in a dire zombie bower boar that serves as an absolutely brutal boss fight.
- The Ending Chronicle: 4th-Gear's inhabitants take the form of animal-like creatures made out 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.
- 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.
- Infinite Farmer: Tulland fertilises swamp ache trees with wolf corpses, then empowers them with his skills, and is lucky enough to trigger a useful mutation, where the trees start growing wolf-like fur that can be carefully peeled off and used to make things like a carrying pouch. The Infinite recognises it as a new species, the wolfwood fur-bark.
The swamp ache was a useless, low-quality tree. This is a useless, low-quality tree that also grows a moss that closely approximates wolf-fur. It is not, as you might expect, a wild difference.
- Iron Council: The vinhogs are giant swine with grapevines growing out of their backs. They're herded for wine.
- The Iron Teeth: Mimics are large stick bug-like beasts that mimic trees and attack animals or people who get too close. As part of their disguise, they have actual symbiotic plants growing from them.
- 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 plants have fully prehensile vines, become entirely mobile when they learn how to pull themselves around on their skateboards, and have displayed learning tendencies throughout the series. Book 8 later introduces a kongabonga plant (a fictional species from Brazil) which proves to be just as capable of moving and learning.
- Rust and Humus: Many plants of the primordial jungles developed mobility, limbs and other complex body parts. Most of the early kinds were visibly plant-like in structure, but some strains eventually became true animals outright. The birds originate from mobile seeds that developed wings, eyes, and feathers, while reptiles descend from serpentine carnivorous plants.
- 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.
- The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School: Among the weird sights that Amy sees in the Purple are living wolves with bodies made of wood.
- Speaker for the Dead: As it turns out, every native animal on Lusitania is one of these, and they undergo metamorphosis, turning from plant to animal.
- Star Wars Legends: The knobby white spiders of Dagobah, first described in The Illustrated Star Wars Universe and re-described in several reference books and stories later, are a stage in the life-cycle of the large-rooted mangrove-lookalike gnarltrees. The trees grow knobs along their roots that eventually split off and become the mobile, predatory form that vaguely resembles a Giant Spider. Eventually, once it's eaten enough, the spider plants itself in the ground and becomes another gnarltree.
- Worm: The Mad Scientist Blasto creates hybrids out of multiple biological samples, using plant DNA to fill in the gaps.
- 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, 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 photosynthesize to produce sugars and nutrients for the worm, while the worm provides mobility.
- Monarch: Legacy of Monsters: The bamboo-spider Mother Longlegs of Skull Island returns in the series premiere's Distant Prologue, chasing Bill Randa. In the first season's penultimate episode, Cate has a frightful encounter with a "Bramble-boar" which nearly gores her.
- Return of Ultraman: One Kaiju of the Week is 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 is the Trope Namer. The Planimal is a plant/root/thing, but also has a circulation system. It's a mixture of DNA from the pitcher plant, venus flytrap 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.
- 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. If this combination rings a bell - Whimsicott is based on the mythical lamb.
- 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.
- Beyond the Pale: Leshaks are plant creatures that resemble apes in appearance and intelligence.
- 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:
- Dandylions are fey resembling green lions with vines and dandelion fluff making up their manes.
- 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.
- Woodlings, creatures that have bonded with nature to the extent of developing plant-like traits such as bark-like skin and leaves in their hair or fur, look like this or Plant People depending on their original species — an Animal, Dragon, or Magical Beast will make a Planimal, while a Fey, Giant, Humanoid, or Monstrous Humanoid will make a Plant Person. Their special qualities include a host of plant traits — the various immunities that 3E Plant creatures enjoy, a slam attack, Damage Reduction that can be overcome by slashing weapons, natural camouflage in wooded environments, and a vulnerability to fire. Despite all that, they aren't considered full Plant creatures themselves and retain their base creature type.
- Dungeons & Dragons 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
◊.
- Planescape: Viper trees are a form of Abyssal flora resembling trees made out intertwined adders; their "seedlings" are three-headed adders which roam as predators for a while before rooting and sprouting new "branches. While a viper tree can survive off of soil, it also preys upon small animals that pass by, or larger ones if a grove is able to cooperate.
- Ironclaw: Book of Monsters features a wide variety of them, ranging from the livestock-like aurochs radish and tusk melon to the shapeshifting pine clone, somewhat comical punching onion, and downright spooky tomb tree.
- 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 animal 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.
- The Briar Hydra
is a tree-like beast with roots for feet and wooden necks and heads.
- The Blooming Stinger
is a plant scorpion with flytraps for claws and a stinger growing from a bloom at the end of its tail.
- The Carnivorous Moss-Beast
- 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.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! features a variety of different planimals, from Ent creatures to walking plants.
- Little Shop of Horrors: Audrey II is a plant crossbred from a butterwort and a Venus flytrap, but apparently has vocal chords and a full digestive system in its stalk. The film adaptation justifies this by making it an extraterrestrial.
- Transformers: 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.
- 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.
- Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus: Tentaihana are a unique type of yokai that have a floral affinity (body of the flower from which it blooms), and a faunal affinity (representing their abilities and temperament).
- 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.
- Bugsnax: Some of the Bugsnax resemble fruits or vegetables with eyes and legs, although they're apparently neither plant nor animal.
- Coral Island: One of the more advanced offering rewards is Sawee, a mythical pet that hatches from a seed and looks like an ambulatory green onion.
- CreaVures: The Falcon Elm is a giant bird rooted in the ground like a tree, with several bough-like wings.
- Dungeon Munchies: Uncontrolled evolution, scientific experimentation, and the Lord Protector's tinkering have spawned animals that have plant traits, such as flowers and moss growing right on their hides.
- Endless Ocean: Luminous: The seventh UML is a gigantic (as in, 6.6 meters long) Costasiella kuroshimae sea slug named Amamotsumi that has grown so big that the pylon-like growths on its back used to store algae have been replaced with actual shrubbery.
- Fallout: Spore plants, 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.
- Farmagia: Downplayed. All monsters in Felicidad come from plants grown from special seeds (Fang plants resemble stalks of corn, Arkie plants resemble gourds, etc.), but none of them have any plant-like attributes apart from the Turnie, which are wholesale turnips with faces.
- 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.
- Final Fantasy XII: The Elder Wyrm 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.
- Final Fantasy XIII: There are two pairs of "woodwraiths" 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.
- Flight Rising: The Gladekeeper is covered in leaves and has several large branches instead of wings. Several familiars found in the Woodland Path, such as the Stranglers and Dryads, also appear to be these; Rainsong Jungle has boars made of branches and foliage; and high-level foraging can rarely get you one of two sentient pansy familiars.
- The Floor is Jelly: The development blog 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: Fern hounds are 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.
- I Was a Teenage Exocolonist: Many of Vertumna's creatures. For example, the bushbub is a giant tortoise whose "shell" is a bush that helps them camouflage. Bushbub berries are edible, but harvesting them is not easy.
- Kaze and the Wild Masks: Some of the Plant Mooks take animal-like forms, such as pineapple crabs, dragonfruit porcupines, and starfruit starfish.
- 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 Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: The Kikwis 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 from the 3D games are carnivorous plants with fleshy, animal-like mouths and tongues. A variant from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, the Baba Serpent, can crawl around like a snake if cut from its base.
- 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 companions are toads with poisonous fungi on their backs, while Colpach are felines with branches growing out of their heads and backs.
- Lycanite's Mobs: Arisaurs are plant-like dinosaurs. They drop meat, which is lampshaded by the bestiary and the tooltip of the raw meat.
- 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.
- Monster Chef: Some monsters are a mix between animal and plants, and thus are farmed for vegetable ingredients. For example, the iceberd (a green bird that resemble lettuce leaves) produces lettuce and the pumpkat (a black cat with a pumpkin head) gives pumpkin.
- Monster Rancher: The Plant species 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.
- Mother: The series has a number of these.
- EarthBound Beginnings has Woodahs and Big Woodahs (both being trees).
- EarthBound (1994) 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.
- My Singing Monsters:
- The Dandidoo is a long-necked bird monster with dandelion-like “puffs” around its head and for its tail feathers, which can be blown away.
- The Sporerow is a squat, vaguely frogmouth-inspired monster with a pelt of feathers that resemble plant foliage. It also has numerous bamboo-like pores sprouting from its body, housing miniature fungal beings known as Shroomites who assist the Sporerow in its music.
- Blasoom, the Celestial of the Plant element in the Monster World, resembles a psittacine bird with leaves for feathers, a root-like foot, and a massive, Arum-like flower sprouting from its head.
- Neva: Neva and the other wolves possess antlers which resemble tree branches when fully grown and gain leaves when they use their purifying power.
- New World: The Angry Earth include elk and bears composed of tree branches and rock.
- 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'.
- Ooblets: Ooblets look like everything from plants to animals to fungi to, as the game puts it, "somethings", but they all grow from seeds in the ground.
- Outernauts: Hortabug is a caterpillar with a leaf on its head that is actually just a Common-type, while Cactinee a cactus/bird hybrid, but it's only Flora-type, not Flying-type.
- 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 (at least, its Pikmin 2 incarnation is; in Pikmin 4, it was redesigned to resemble a frog).
- Regular and Desiccated Skitter Leaves 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.
- Plants vs. Zombies: Some plants are Pun-Based Creatures 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're 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 to containing Snapdragon, Guacodile, Cattail and Toadstool, the game 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.
- Pokémon: While most Grass-types lean more towards being some sort of Plant Person, animated plant or Nature Spirit, others are mor clearly plant-animal chimeras:
- 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 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Reverie: The Cattail Bunny is a rabbit with cattail leaves growing from its body.
- Rivals of Aether: Sylvannos, the Atherian forest personified, is a Savage Wolf 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 lets you raise carnivorous plants to sentience and create a civilization, even high-tech space-faring plant life.
- 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.
- Super Bullet Break: Several of the "Mascot" characters are this:
- Springtime Flutterby is a butterfly with cherry blossom wings.
- Falltime Fox is a fox with tree leaves on its head and as a tail, who is said to be green in summer but turn red during autumn.
- Rosebuck is a deer mixed with a rosebush, with flowery antlers and stated to survive on water and sunlight like a plant.
- Super Mario Bros.: The 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.
- Sword of the Berserk: Guts' Rage: The mandragora transform animals as well as people into plant monsters, causing them to become covered by root-like growths, and Guts has to fight many of these on the forest path.
- Temtem: 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.
- Ultima: Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian Dreams: Most of the Martian wildlife are ambulatory, sapient plants, while the animal kingdom consists solely of subterranean worms. Even the civilized Martians are 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.
- War Dragons: Arborus is a large, green plant-dragon with woody, stem-like wing structures.
- Wild Hearts: Many kemono have plant-like elements thrown in as well as animalistic elements, sometimes veering more towards the former than the latter.
- World Neverland: Ihms, the Series Mascot, 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.
- World of Warcraft: Lashers are flowers that walk around on tentacle-like vines and whip enemies with a pair of thorny vines that serve as their "arms".
- 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.
- A.I. Brainrot Animals: A common sight between many of the creatures is being a mixture of animal and plant. For example, Brr Brr Patapim is a hybrid of a proboscis monkey and a tree, Burbaloni Luliloli mixes together a capybara and a coconut, Chimpanzini Bananini is a fusion of an ape and a banana, and Lirilì Larilà is an elephant crossed with a cactus.
- 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.
- Annyseed bumps into a rather assertive and agitated talking plant whilst wandering through Hazel's herb garden.
- The Black Brick Road of O.Z.: Leslie's "wooden zoo" consists of animate plants in the form of various animals.
- Girl Genius: When Agatha is calibrating Prende's Lantern to deactivate the Mechanicsburg Time Stop, she starts out at a vegetable store, where she tries it on a bean.As soon as the bean is released from the time stop, it opens multiple eyes and a mouth full of teeth and begins snarling at her For a moment, she's horrified that the Lantern did that, until Gil points to a sign on the stall saying Mechanicsburg "snap beans" are great for getting rid of garden pests.
- Tower of God: The little pig inside of Zigena has a flower that blooms on its back. It grows jewels.
- Serina: The bubblelumps are osteoplumas (near-microscopic metamorph birds) that have incorporated chloroplasts in their bodies from the phytoplanktonic algae they eat as larvae into their gut tissue, allowing them to photosynthesize:
- The sunspeck is a large (relatively, at 5 mm), basal member of the family found in near-surface ocean waters whose males don't even need to eat because of their ingested chloroplasts. The females on the other hand, still do actively hunt algae despite also being photosynthetic, presumably because they need the extra nutrients to create eggs.
- The tangleup leans heavily towards the "plant" end of the trope, as after reaching adulthood in 9 days, they group together before digesting or reabsorb their brains, most of their nervous system, and their eyes, becoming essentially an algal colony living inside a flesh bubble. While individual tangleups are a mere millimeter across, the largest colonies living in the calmest seas can reach up to 70 feet long and 9 inches in diameter, comprise more than a billion individuals, and lay a trillion eggs in its lifetime. They're also effectively immortal as long as an entire colony isn't devoured completely, as they'll recover their numbers in only a few weeks if left alone.
- Snaiad: Before the current vertebrates, the dominant clade of Snaiad were "plant-animal symbionts" that are now extinct. There are also red plants in addition to the more traditional green plants, with the red variety being more closely related to animals.
- Big Hero 6: The Series: Mayoi are 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.
- Centurions: In an attempt to find Centrum, Terror sics a small army of cyborgized plant monsters on New York City in "Attack of the Plant-Borg". They threaten civilians and crawl over skyscrapers (as well as the Statue of Liberty) until the Centurions stop them.
- Darkwing Duck has Dr. Bushroot, who turned himself into a half-plant, half-duck in a failed experiment.
- Flowers and Trees: A pine tree looks and acts like a quail, leading its chicks/seedlings to safety during the fire.
- Frankelda's Book of Spooks: Ceimut in Frankelda and the Prince of Spooks, the chief of the Clan of the Primitive Spooks, is a giant creature resembling a mixture of a ceiba tree and a mammoth skeleton.
- Ginger and the Vegesaurs is an Australian All-CGI Cartoon set in "the Late Crunchiest Period", in which the Earth was apparently dominated by creatures that are hybrids between prehistoric animals (mostly, though not exclusively, dinosaurs), and fruits and vegetables. The main character, Ginger, is a Tricarrotops, who is generally accompanied by a trio of baby Pea-Rexes.
- 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.
- Krypto the Superdog: One episode 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.
- Masters of the Universe: Moss Man. 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.
- 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 makes use of this trope in "Rupert and the Hedgehog", in which the titular hedgehog is a topiary of a hedgehog that's brought to life when Rupert Bear's friend Bill Badger uses 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.
- Skull Island (2023): Several new plant-animal hybrids are introduced in this series, which is supposed to be part of the MonsterVerse (Kong: Skull Island) depiction of the titular isle. The Aloe Turtle and Rock Bug are Descriptively-Named Species, the Grass Hedgehog is a giant, feline-hedgehog creature covered in giant grass blades in place of hair and spines, and there are snakes camoflaged as vines in one scene.
- 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:
- "Super Watermelon Island": Steven discovers that the Watermelon Stevens he created way back in the first season episode "Watermelon Steven" have formed their own civilization, and somehow have bred watermelon dogs, chickens, and horses.
- "Gem Harvest": Steven deliberately uses his Green Thumb powers on a pumpkin seed, resulting in a pumpkin that behaves like a dog.
- SWAT Kats: "Destructive Nature" features Dr. Viper creating a bunch of "Plantimals" to try and turn Megakat City into swampland.
- Underground Ernie The ending gag of "Caught Purple-Handed" has the "purple teatime tree" hop out of its pot and start walking around on two of its roots, with the third root forming a visible "tail".
- 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.

