Portal Picture

aka: Portal Painting

Paintings are sometimes described as a 'window into another world'. Some series, especially in video games, take this all too literally. A magic painting will contain an entire world or dungeon which the heroes must enter to defeat the enemies within. In some cases, the art style will shift to match that of the painting, emphasizing the otherness of the painting world.

If this gimmick is used more than once, a magic art gallery can be the basis for the Hub Level of a game.

In rare cases, some nefarious ill-doer or oblivious Muggle may attempt to destroy a Portal Picture while another character is inside the painting world. The results vary: if the painting was literally a portal to another world, then destroying the portal will leave the characters Trapped in Another World. The more common metaphysical position, though, is that the painting world is actually formed out of the paint and brushstrokes on the canvas, and by wiping away the painting, the world itself disintegrates.

Either way, the painting may be used as a prison.

Sub-Trope to Anomalous Art. Compare with Portal Book and Trapped in TV Land, for different media acting as a portal. See also Art Initiates Life. When this is done symbolically as a Scene Transition, that's Picture-Perfect Presentation by way of Living Photo. See also The Man in the Mirror Talks Back and The Television Talks Back, which usually leads to this trope.

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Examples

Advertising

• In the 4-part advertisement The Chase (Pepsi), Michael Jackson, being chased by an overzealous mob of fans and reporters, gets cornered in a museum atrium, but is heavily implied to have escaped through one of the paintings, despite there being no obvious signs of magic or some other supernatural influence. He pulled it off again with a television almost immediately after.

Anime and Manga

• C's world from Code Geass is not entered by a picture portal, but the memories stored there are displayed in a portrait gallery or library that can be entered.
• When the party are starving in Delicious in Dungeon, Laios jumps into a living painting to try and eat the food depicted there. He manages it, but when he jumps back out the food disappears and he's left hungry again.
• Sasano Hiroyuki's ability in "Sagrada Reset" allows anyone who rips one of his photographs to enter the picture for a period of 10 minutes.
• The Throne of Yord from Shamanic Princess appears to be a painting, and characters enter and exit a world within it...But the Throne of Yord is evidently anything it wants to be.

Comic Books

• Green Lantern Annual #6 has Kyle Rayner buy a rather garish painting by a Planetary Romance artist, and get sucked into the world it shows. It turns out that the artist himself escaped into the painting, but as his creativity fades, the world is collapsing.
• Played for laughs several times in Mortadelo y Filemón. In one example, Mortadelo hides from the Súper in a picture of a marine landscape, submerged and disguised as Neptune (or Poseidon, take your pick)
• In The Sandman (1989), each of the Endless has a family gallery with which they can summon each other to their domain. Most appear to be picture galleries, but Despair has a Hall Of Magic Mirrors and Destiny a garden of colossal statues.

Eastern Animation

• Dziwne Przygody Koziolka Matolka: The episode "Złoty Szlak" features one in the form of a map.
• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: In Pleasant Goat Fun Class: The Earth Carnival episode 25, the featured carnival attraction is a picture containing a candy world that can be entered. The candy world often experiences earthquakes, forming the educational topic of the episode.

Film

• In Art of the Dead, the seven paintings can not only corrupt the souls of those in contact with them, but once they are fully corrupted, they will be drawn into the painting and trapped there permanently. Wilde can also cause the paintings to reach and snatch people and objects into them.
• Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo has a scene were Deuce, high on "space cakes," enters a painting of a Dutch maid and starts fondling her... only problem is, he was actually fondling his best friend...
• The Dutch Master: A sexually frustrated young woman, Teresa, begins having erotic fantasies about a handsome man in a 17th century painting that she saw in a museum. Eventually she crosses the portal, stepping through the frame and going into the painting's world where she seeks out the man.
• In Harry Potter, portraits cannot be entered, but their inhabitants can move freely from one frame to another, so long as they're close enough. In addition, a person in their own portrait can move to any other of their own portraits at will, and from there into any other portraits that are close enough.
• In Looney Tunes: Back in Action, a chase sequence in the Louvre involves several escapes into famous paintings.
• The Mary Poppins movie had a scene of this sort which took place in a sidewalk chalk drawing. The end sequence is interesting, as the background melts into blobs of color because it's started to rain, causing the chalk on the sidewalk to run, thus ending the characters' visit.
• Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian allows characters to jump into (and out of) scenes in paintings during a chase scene.
• The opening title animation for The Pink Panther Strikes Again has the Inspector tailing the Panther into a movie theater, then into the screen through several parody movie clips — he ends up trapped in the screen as the Panther watches from the seats.
• Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Mrs. Tremond and her mask-wearing grandson surprise Laura in the parking lot of the diner with a framed picture of a door of a room of an abandoned house. Tremond says, "This would look nice on your wall."◊ Laura then hangs the picture on her bedroom wall and has the world's worst acid trip that involves seeing herself standing in the doorway in the picture and then entering the picture...
• Van Helsing has a Portal Picture, it's where Dracula the Big Bad has hidden his castle. Literally. His castle is inaccessible unless you enter through a painting.
• In Wee Sing in Sillyville, Scott, Laurie, and their dog Barney get pulled into the world of Sillyville through a colouring book.
• Played with in What Dreams May Come. What is being painted on paintings is created as reality in the Painted World of the afterlife.
• Olympus is accessible via a mural in Xanadu.

Literature

• There is a short story called "The Rose Window" where a cleric (also the narrator) in a mild fantasy setting has a large rose window brought to his church from the one where he grew up. Then bad things start happening and members of the clergy start seeing something in the window move at night. Then the cleric comes to realize that something other than his god was secretly being worshiped in the church he grew up in. In the end he plans to smash it and then destroy his journals if breaking the window fixes the problem. The journal entries are what the reader (you) are reading right now.
• The protagonist in George MacDonald's Lilith enters the imaginary world through a painting in the attic on one occasion. The painting portrays the moor where he winds up.
• Site Kilo-29, a secret nuclear shelter somewhere in the US, has, for whatever reason, a giant poster of the 2/19th, a US Army base in Germany where a demonic being nicknamed Tandy (after the guy whose body he likes to wear) hunted and killed the narrator's unit every winter for years. It appears that the poster is not just a portal but also the source of Tandy's power in Kilo-29.
• The Angel tie-in novel Image does this. When a person is under the influence a certain type of magic, they can paint pictures that are portals to the worlds in the paintings.
• The Chronicles of Amber had the "Trumps," which were most commonly the size and shape of Tarot cards, but people skilled in using them could mentally communicate (or combat) the individuals depicted thereon. They also facilitated travel across the dimensions, as either person could offer to bring the other through. Trumps could also depict particular locations, which made them handy escape tools. In the course of the novels, it is revealed that it is not so much the materials of which Trumps are composed as the skills of the Trump artist that gives them their powers: two are scribed onto prison cell walls and become significant plot points later on. Later on, we also find two main characters within a Wonderland (as in Carroll) bar that's being painted onto a wall by an artist. The point between reality and mural moves back and forth.
• in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Aberforth has a portrait of his sister Ariana that functions as a portal between the Hog's Head and the Room of Requirement that is used to supply Nevile, Luna, and Ginny's reinstated version of Dumbledore's Army, allow the trio to get into the castle, and evacuate students.
• One of the Land of Oz books mentioned a picture of a river drawn so well, that when the artist attempted to draw flowers on the other side, he fell in and drowned.
• In Larry Niven's Known Space stories, Gil "The Arm" Hamilton has a limited form of telekinesis and remote tactile sense that manifests as an "imaginary arm". It's limited to the range of his real arm, except that he can also reach into a sufficiently realistic-looking video image and "touch" things near the camera.
• With a Single Spell by Lawrence Watt-Evans, though its portals depict locations elsewhere in the same world, rather than other worlds. Later books in the series show the same magic being used to transport to other worlds and back.
• In the Malazan Book of the Fallen, Ganoes Paran finds ingenious ways to use his powers as the Master of the Deck of Dragons. He has an artist paint new cards to his specifications, then uses them to create portals to transport his army across vast distances, or to bait an enemy commander into another realm.
• "Chapter Two: A Day Out" of Mary Poppins is the inspiration for the chalk-drawing scene in the film, Mary and Bert the Match Man (but not Jane and Michael) enter one of his pavement sketches, where they have afternoon tea and travel to Yarmouth on merry-go-round horses.
• The Midnight Library story "Picture Perfect" has two boys discover a strange painted mural behind some wallpaper of their Grandaunt's house that depicts a different historical period from the pilgrim age all the way to the present. Each section has a child from that era staring out of the painting in terror. Above each period is scribed the latin phrase, "Fatum tuum, nisi celata fuerit pictura, idem erit". One brother becomes obsessed with uncovering the entire mural. When he reaches the very end, he sees an empty scene resembling his grandaunt's house and gets sucked into the painting. He then learns far, far too late what the Latin phrase meant: "Your fate will be the same if the mural is not concealed"!
• In Moominpappa at Sea, Moominmamma misses home, paints picture of it and is able to go into the picture.
• Princesses of the Pizza Parlor: In the fourth book, the paintings in the mansion take the princesses to other parts of the mansion.
• The Sixty-Eight Rooms: The rooms work as this, with the painted outdoor scene backgrounds becoming the real world outside.
• In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, this was how Edmund, Lucy and Eustace got to Narnia: via a painting located in Eustace's house. Quite likely a homage to George MacDonald.
• Xanth series:
  • The entire premise of Crewel Lye is that the main character is reduced in size and transported into the world that is depicted in a tapestry. Another character, (fullsized and outside the tapestry) can follow his progress by watching him in the tapestry.
  • The Sorceress Tapis creates tapestries that function this way. (She's the one who created the tapestry in Crewel Lye
  • A later book also involved a painting which transported the characters into the world of one of the author's other series.
• Inheritance Trilogy has the Blind Seer and artist Oree Shoth, who can create these by accident. Complete with gruesome accidental Portal Cut when they close on someone's middle.

Live-Action TV

• The Sandman, "The Doll's House": Matthew the raven is given the task of travelling from the Dreaming to the waking world and keeping an eye on Rose. The briefing takes place in a room in Dream's palace with a ceiling painted to resemble a sunny sky full of fluffy clouds. At the end of the briefing, Matthew flies up to and then into the ceiling, which gradually becomes a real sky, and then down to perch on the roof of the building where Rose is staying.
• In the Charmed (1998) episode "The Painted World", a demon is trapped inside a magical painting.
• Dead Gorgeous: In "Love's First Kiss", one of Rebecca's former suitors escapes from a portrait and traps Jonathan in the painting to take his place.
• Doctor Who: In"Fear Her", a girl has the ability to convert people into crayon drawings.
• Used in the last episode of Friday the 13th: The Series. A curse painting allows an obsessed history professor to contact the Marquis de Sade in the past, where the two exchange bodies of their victims.
• A Legend of the Seeker episode had a painter able to out any object or person into a painting just by drawing them on it. In order to get out, the painter had to paint the object or the person on a canvas from within the painting.
• In the Night Gallery episode "Escape Route", a Nazi war criminal on the run from the authorities in South America takes refuge in an art gallery. He discovers that with concentration, he can project himself into a painting and decides to use this to escape from his pursuers, choosing to enter a peaceful painting of a man on a boat. Unfortunately for him, he winds up projecting himself into the wrong painting, and ends up in a horrific painting depicting the tortures of a concentration camp.
• On The Office (US), Michael has left Pam with a list of excuses to give when he doesn't want to take a phone call. Her favorite, which she's saving for a special occasion, is "He's trapped in a oil painting."
• Once Upon a Time falls somewhere between this trope and Portal Book - in Season 4, it is revealed that The Author is trapped behind a door in Henry's storybook.
• An arc on Supernatural Soap Opera Port Charles involved Kevin being trapped in a painting by a magical candle. For him to get out, someone had to light the candle again.
• Red Dwarf did it in "Timeslides". Once the pictures (brought to life with mutated developing fluid) were projected on a screen, they were big enough to step into, for Time Travel fun—though you couldn't go outside the frame.
• In the Puppet Show Rimini Riddle, Aunt Vera owns a portrait painted by the protagonists' grandmother of two young Victorian girls on a beach. When the sister accidentally cracks the glass while cleaning, she finds herself inside the picture, where she meets the girls and a fisherman.
• In the children's program Zoobilee Zoo one of the characters ventures inside a picture made by her friend, one created with magic paint. When she starts hearing a crackling sound, she realizes the paint is beginning to dry, and races to get back out before she somehow gets sealed in.
• This happens in Three Stooges short I'll Never Heil Again with a portrait of Napoleon that makes itself the winner of Moe and Curly's attempt to keep a roast turkey away from one other.

Music

• The classic video for a-ha's "Take On Me."
• Elton John steps into a wall-sized poster on the cover of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

Newspaper Comics

• This Little Nemo comic features the eponymous character climbing into a bill-board being painted by some painters that features the ocean to go swimming. Unfortunately for Nemo, he becomes part of the painting (actually a water-safety PSA) and he becomes frozen in place in the picture as a boy in deep water without a life-jacket. Of course, it's All Just a Dream like many of the other messes Nemo gets into.

Other Sites

• RPC Authority: RPC-478's power before it became depowered was to transport people into the world it depicts.
• SCP Foundation
  • SCP-105 ("Iris") is an 18-year old girl with the ability to turn photographs into portals to the area in the photograph as it is at that time.
  • SCP-1674 ("Camera Obscura") is a large painting of an overcast rocky taiga (steppe-like) area. Anyone entering SCP-1674 will end up in another world that resembles the painting.

Tabletop Games

• Call of Cthulhu:
  • Dreamlands boxed set, adventure "Pickman's Student". While dreaming, the PCs have to pass through several paintings into various parts of the Dreamlands.
  • Masks of Nyarlathotep, adventure "A Serpent in Soho". The PC's can enter a painting and go back in time to when the Serpent Men ruled the Earth.
• Dungeons & Dragons, Dungeon magazine #45 adventure "Prism Keep". In the title castle is a magical picture of a beach at sunset. The picture acts as a Gate to a distant land. Anyone who touches the picture is transported to the beach.
• A number of the Nano Fiction pieces in Nobilis are about these, such as "the Box."

Video Games

• In Atlantis II, stepping through a painting is a mandatory part of the Ireland quest. It's not immediately obvious that you can do that, though.
• Nellie visits six worlds by jumping into portraits in the hidden object game Treasure Seekers 2: The Enchanted Canvasses, in order to rescue her brother Tom, who is trapped in the last world.
• Haunted Manor 3: Painted Beauties has several paintings you can enter.
• Text-adventure Multi-Dimensional Thief has a painting in the south-west corner of the map, the title plaque reading "Kansas", which then leads to a setting referencing the Wizard of Oz. Once you clear that, the painting switches to a starscape titled "The Night Sky" - which is some distance above a planet.
• In Avencast: Rise of the Mage, the player character discovers a set of portraits painted by a condemned mage, which transport him back in time to prevent the mage's execution.
• The second Azada game does this with the illustrations in Expy versions of several literary classics.
• The main character in Blue Lacuna has the ability to draw a picture of a previously unvisited reality and then travel to it by entering the picture.
• Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin had this as one of its gimmicks, allowing players to explore very different settings from the 'typical' environs of Dracula's castle.
• Some of the MacGuffins in City of Heroes are exactly this. Being MacGuffins, we never see them in action.
• In the Interactive Fiction game Curses, images projected by the slide projector are Portal Pictures.
• In Dark Souls, there is a giant painting of a rope bridge in the snow inside a large building in Anor Londo. If you have the right item (the Strange Doll found in your cell upon returning to the tutorial level), you can touch the painting and be sucked inside to the Painted World of Ariamis.
• In the Death Gate adventure-game, a skilled mage can use a painting to create a pocket dimension.
• In Devil May Cry, there are several strategically-placed paintings that serve as gateways floating in the air when you return to the castle. Pretty convenient, as several doors have disappeared.
• A plot point in Dragon Quest V, where a painting of a real-life scene allows the protagonist to travel to it... even going back in time.
  • In Dragon Quest VII, one of these is key to reversing the "Groundhog Day" Loop a town is unknowingly caught within. However, it's only accessible when the heroes figure out how to trigger a complete time freeze.
  • Dragon Quest VIII requires the party to pass through one to access its Secret Level, the Troll Maze.
• The primary setup for Drawn is Iris' ability to create these.
• In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, there was a side quest involving the "Painted World."
• Frogman's painting from Emerald City Confidential is a portal to his secret files on his illegal activities. The painting allows him to hide his books in plain sight.
• In both Epic Mickey games, there are film projector screens showing old Disney shorts on them. These screens showing the cartoons act as bridges of sorts from area to area.
• In Final Fantasy Record Keeper, the Record Realms are accessed by entering a portrait depicting a scene from a Final Fantasy game.
• In Final Fantasy VI, the optional quest to find Relm in the World of Ruin involves fighting your way through an art gallery in a wealthy man's house. Most paintings come to life to attack you, but some can draw you into it, effectively acting as a portal.
• The heroine of the Grim Tales series has the ability to enter photos or drawings that have something to do with her family.
• In Ib, the titular character enters the painting world through a painting titled "Abyss of the Deep" and can leave it through another painting much later on.
• Explicitly invoked in Kingdom of Loathing, in the Haunted Art Gallery. The painting is apparently an Escher drawing, which has links to other artworks ...
• A central point to Legacy of the Ancients, where your character's begins the adventure by discovering a Galactic Museum filled with these. You do most of your traveling trying to get jewel coins to unlock and use the exhibits.
• In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, this is one of the basic gimmicks for the boss fight against Phantom Ganon in the Forest Temple. Occurring during the first phase of the battle, Phantom Ganon leaped in and out of Spooky Paintings with his horse and Link had to determine which painting he will pop out of so he can strike with his arrow. Link needs to scan each painting carefully for the real Phantom Ganon so he isn't fooled by one of his clones, which will immediately turn around and run off at the last second when it reaches the picture frame while the real one comes out and delivers a devastating electric attack. After this phase, Phantom Ganon's horse vanishes, and it becomes a Tennis Boss fight.
• Invoked in The Longest Journey, where April's dimension-traveling abilities seem to be tied to her painting talents. The first time she travels to another world without external assistance, she paints the place she wants to go until it turns into a Shift that takes her there.
• The Maid of Fairewell Heights: Marshmallow enters the landscape picture world by being painted into it.
• The linking books in Myst. The books have a picture window at the beginning which shows the user the world they will be linking to. Overlaps a bit with Portal Book since the book must have a description of the world it's linking to written in it, although it generally links to a place, not a story.
• In Mystery of Mortlake Mansion, the real-world mansion's pictures all become these in the "shadowy" version, with all of them looking into the same realm. Indeed, one set of pictures on the same wall in the shadowy hall all look out onto the same scene, as if they were simply panes in a large window.
• A movie-based example happens in Obsidian, where after a video of Max's memories reaches his nightmare of the Mechanical Spider, that segment jumps off the screen, fills your view, and thrusts you into that dream world.
• Persona 5: In Madarame's Palace, the party can hop into paintings, using them to sneak around foes and reach alternate areas.
• Rayman Legends has the "magic art gallery" version: All of the levels are accessed by jumping into paintings, as are all of the playable characters.
• In The 7th Guest, this is the only way to enter and exit the Art Gallery. Access to it involves traveling through a rug that turns into a portal leading there, and a painting of the Music Room acts as the exit, with the frame expanding and becoming the room itself. Course, this just fits right at home with other, more bizarre transitions elsewhere in the house.
  • Since all the passages have changed over time, the sequel subverts this by using the canvas of the painting as a door in the wall behind the frame.
• Shadow Hearts: From The New World has its Bonus Level of Hell (okay, Purgatory) in a painting.
• Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers has a part where you need to enter different paintings in a virtual art gallery, in which Tomoko's soul has been trapped.
• In Snoopy vs. the Red Baron, you enter levels by flying through billboards in the Hub Level.
• One of SoulBlazer's early dungeons was contained within a painting.
• Super Mario Bros. series:
  • Super Mario 64 used paintings as the gateways to most non-hub worlds. Other gateways were located inside a model mansion in a small cage, an invisible portrait that only appears in the mirror in front, a seemingly normal wall, two small pools of water, a clock's face, a bunch of small wells, a trap door, and holes.
  • In Super Mario Sunshine, Shadow Mario painted his M symbol on various landmarks all over the place and these became portals to levels.
  • In Luigi's Mansion, Mario was captured in a portrait, and when you finish a big boss fight, you turn all of the major bosses you faced into portraits, the frame color depending on how well you did.
  • Super Mario Odyssey brings back the paintings from Mario 64, this time as shortcuts between the various kingdoms. They're also used to refight certain bosses (from towers in the Mushroom Kingdom), to rebattle Bowser again (in the chapel on the Moon) and as part of the Brutal Bonus Level Culmina Crater (specifically, to access the part where you play as a captured Bowser).
  • Also happens very briefly in Poshley Heights in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.
• Viewfinder:
  • This trope features this as a central game mechanic. Any image you find lying around can be used to rewrite reality when placed in front of you, allowing for such phenomena as getting to otherwise inaccessible areas or grabbing objects within. You can even take photos that do the same with fixed cameras found within levels, and later a portable camera of your own!
  • In the endgame, there's a variant where you can use timed fixed cameras to take selfies and then use those selfies to teleport somewhere else. In that case, you swap places with your silhouette the instant you place the photo.

Web Comics

• Erma: Erma can warp with comic books.
• Gunnerkrigg Court: In "Schoolyard Myths", while wandering the old library, Annie and Kat come across a painting which has a set of footprints leading into it.
• minus. does it several times. Here, for example.

Web Original

• SCP Foundation: Iris Thompson, a.k.a. SCP-105, has the ability to use any photograph in this way; when she holds a photograph, it changes from a fixed image to a real-time view of the target, which she can reach through to physically manipulate objects in the target location. Originally, she could only reach through photographs taken using her personal Polaroid camera (designated SCP-105-B), but she's since demonstrated this ability with photographs taken using other cameras, with doing so being easier for her the faster the image develops after being taken. The effect extends to photos taken and displayed electronically (for instance, on a smartphone's screen), although this apparently feels like pushing through wet sand (and, indeed, she scratches up her hand badly enough to draw blood at least once while doing so).

Western Animation

• The Angel and the Soldier Boy was an incredible animation with no words, just music by Clannad. During one sequence a toy soldier and angel follow Pirates onto a ship that jumps into a painting of a sea scene.
• In a Dream Sequence in the Arthur story "D.W.'s Name Game," D.W.'s deer friend Walter tells her that Thesaurus "dwells beyond the woods." D.W. says that that's a long way away and asks him if he has a picture. He pulls one out and D.W. jumps into it, then breaks the fourth wall to comment "You didn't want to watch me walk through the woods, did you? That would be soooo boring."
• Blue's Clues. In nearly every episode, the main characters "Skidoo" into a painting, book, drawing, or even wrapping paper for educational puzzle-solving. In The Movie, they even went into a sheet of music.

"Blue Skidoo! We can, too!"

• Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings was a 1970s British animated series (featured in the US on Captain Kangaroo, and later on the Nickelodeon series Pinwheel) which applied this trope to a chalkboard by way of a small boy's imagination.
• An episode of Courage the Cowardly Dog had the paintings and various exhibits in a museum brought to life after being affected by the full moon.
• A Darkwing Duck villain, Splatter Phoenix, has a paintbrush that allows her to enter paintings, alter them, or create surreal helpers based on various art styles.
• The Mickey Mouse short Thru the Mirror, a Shout-Out to Through the Looking Glass.
  • The 2013 short Get a Horse! has the movie screen itself as a barrier between a black-and-white cartoon world and our modern CGI world.
• In the Muppet Babies (2018) episode, "You Oughta Be In Pictures", the monkey from Sunday Afternoon at the Grand Jetee steals Fozzie's lunchbox, and the babies jump after it, hopping from one painting to another.
• When traveling inside someone's head in The Owl House, strong memories are depicted as lifelike paintings hanging on trees in a dense forest. Visitors can then view the memories by traveling through the painting. This property actually gives away the fact that the memories Luz sees inside of Belos' mind at the beginning of "Hollow Mind" are not an accurate depiction of past events as they're all stylized and solid to the touch.
• The Chameleon from Super Secret Squirrel did this with stolen paintings for recreation, until the titular protagonist subjected him to and trapped him within modern art.
• W.I.T.C.H.: In "Framed", Will, Taranee, Cornelia and Hay Lin are pulled into a painting which served as the prison for an artist whose work had offended Phobos. Irma and Caleb come to their rescue by entering the painting's world through another copy in Phobos's castle.
• This was done more than once in Looney Tunes by Roadrunner making it through Wile E. Coyote's fake tunnels.

Real Life

• One of the many legends about the Chinese painter Wu Daozi says that he did not die, but entered one of his astonishingly realistic murals and vanished forever.

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