Reincarnated as a Non-Humanoid

I think; therefore, I vend cans.

"Everybody knows in a second life, we all come back sooner or later
As anything from a pussycat to a man-eating alligator
Well you all may think my story, is more fiction than it's fact
But believe it or not, my mother dear decided she'd come back
As a car..."

— The Expository Theme Tune to My Mother the Car

Reincarnation stories are popular, either as a way to end a story or start it it can be an interesting avenue for an author to turn to for plot hooks. Generally though, when a human character reincarnates — even if they change sex, or get magic powers, or end up in a fantasy or sci-fi world instead of a mundane one generally they stay human... or at least close enough to humans.

This trope is for when things get...weirder. Maybe our plucky protagonist has awoken in a High Fantasy or Standard Japanese Fantasy Setting world as a low-level monster, or perhaps they've returned to life in their own world as an AI, an animal, or something similar.

See A Dungeon Is You for the trope where a person is reincarnated as a closed-off area full of puzzles and monsters like in a video game or Tabletop RPG. Often is a form of Magical Species Transformation.

Compare and contrast Metamorphosis, a one-way transformation that doesn't involve death; and Haunted Fetter and Haunted Technology, where a spirit inhabits a creature or object without being reborn into it (although there is some overlap, so spirits which used to be humans and still retain some or all of their memories when they do this count for this trope too).

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• The Case of Me, a Pro Golfer, Being Reincarnated as My Little Sister's Putter: The title really says it all. A golfer gets struck by lightning and reincarnated into his golf club, which his sister takes up to carry on the family legacy.
• Reincarnated As The Strongest Wand: Is about an adult male Magical Girl anime otaku dying whilst saving a young girl from a speeding truck and being reborn in a magical world as a wand. When the person who summoned his soul to that world as a wand leaves him on a shelf he thinks he'll be stuck there, but during a monster attack a young woman picks him up to use him to defend herself and in a panic he decides to turn her into a magical girl.
• Oda Cinnamon Nobunaga is about Oda Nobunaga, the famous Japanese warlord, being reincarnated as a dog (specifically a Shiba Inu) in modern Japan. So have a bunch of other historical figures as well.
• Tuxedo Gin: Teenage boxer Ginji reincarnates after a gang of thugs beats him to death the same day he had arranged to go on a date with the girl of his dreams - Minako. He has to come back as an animal and becomes a penguin as Minako loves penguins.
• Yuri Kabe is about a Yuri Fan who gets reincarnated as a wall in a lesbian's apartment.

Comic Books

• Billy the Cat: Protagonist Billy is a Bratty Half-Pint who in the first story is killed in an accident and reincarnated as a cat. The reason he became a cat is so he can atone for being mean to cats when he was still a human kid.

Fan Works

Crossover Fanworks

• In the Infinity Train: Blossomverse, should a passenger die on the eponymous Infinity Train, this becomes their fate if they were never able to drop their numbers down to 0. Examples include: Soma from Black Butler turning into a mechanical version of himself, an Apex kid named Sean turned into a giant humanoid called the Phantom, and Grace Monroe dies and turns into a mute music note.

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfics

• D Reincarnation: A My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic / One Piece crossover where the characters of One Piece are reincarnated as members of the MLP:FiM cast, for example Monkey D Luffy is reincarnated as Pinkie Pie.
• Friendship is Optimal: A fanfic that starts with a company creating a creating a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic MMO called Equestria Online with a ridiculously powerful A.I. version of Princess Celestia: Celest-A.I. However eventually said A.I. develops a way to upload people's consciousness into the game... if they are willing to destroy their human body in the process.
• Living The Dream (Kickass222urmom): On December 21st, 2012, God enacts the Rapture and destroys the Earth. However, a young man by the name of Lance Greenfield is given a second chance to live in any world he desires. He chooses Equestria and lives his new life as a zebra-pegasus named Girokon.
• My Little Wesker: A My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic / Resident Evil crossover about criminal mastermind and long term RE antagonist Albert Wesker waking up as a Pony in Equestria much to his own horror.
• My New Life as a Pony: A human called Bradley Sengood sacrifices his life one day to save a pregnant mother and her child from a runaway car. To reward his selflessness a being called Faust, offers him the chance to be reincarnated and live a life of heroism like he'd always dreamed. Bradley accepts, and finds himself reincarnated as an anthropomorphic pony, named Flash Sentry.
• Oversaturated World: From Group Precipitation: "That Time I Didn't Get Reincarnated as Anything", about Reincarnate in Another World and other Isekai, with the title referencing reincarnation into another form, because "anything", except not. Which Trixie wants. As Fluttershy explains Isekai and analyzes Trixie's want for it, at the core, it's basically this:
  "It's an anime subgenre where someone gets whisked away from their mundane life and enters a fantastic world, with varying amounts of adventure, romance, and wish fulfillment."
  [...]
  Fluttershy narrowed her eyes. "You just want the harem fantasy, don't you?"
  [...]
  As the cafeteria crowd shifted focus to the Illusions' antics, Pinkie said, "Are we sure Trixie doesn't already have a harem?"
  "Trixie likes guys!" cried Trixie.
• Who Is This Lord Tirek You Speak Of?: After a human named Conrad dies saving a kid from getting run over by a truck, his soul somehow ends up in the body of Lord Tirek, the most infamous centaur in Equestria. While Conrad's trying to make sense of what is happening to him, the rest of Equestria believes that one of the worst villains to exist has returned from the dead.

Pokémon fanfics

• Black Victory: Human is resurrected by Arceus in a world without humans as a Victini, a darker take on the Pokémon: Mystery Dungeon concept.
• Rotten Luck: A human guy from the Pokémon universe named Jonathan is late for his first-ever date and goes into an old antique shop and buys a strange statuette as a gift for his date. However, before he can even get to the date he is run over whilst pushing a child and their Zigzagoon out of the way of a speeding car. He wakes up as a freshly hatched Ralts that somehow still has the strange statuette.

Film — Animated

• The Boy and the Beast: In the final battle, Kumatetsu reincarnates as a sword before merging with Kyūta to help him fight against Ichirōhiko.
• Sitka from Brother Bear, at the very beginning of the movie, dies as a result of a fight against a mother bear while protecting his younger brothers Denahi and Kenai from said bear, and is turned into an eagle spirit.
• Moana: Gramma Tala has the manta as an Animal Motif in life, appears as a spectral manta Spirit Advisor after her death, and is finally reborn as a flesh-and-blood manta to explore the oceans once again.
  Tala: When I die, I want to come back as one of these... or else I've chosen the wrong tattoo.

Film — Live Action

• Fluke: After dying from a horrible car crash, a man named Tom is reincarnated as a dog in an attempt to reconnect with his widowed wife and son.
• At the end of the film Goodbye Charlie it is revealed that the titular womaniser Charlie who died at the beginning of the film and was brought back as a woman has been brought back a second time as a dog.
• Jack Frost (1997): After dying in a traffic accident (the prison transport he is in crashes with a truck full of experimental chemicals which melt his body), serial murderer Jack Frost blends with the local snow. He comes back as a snowman and goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the people who arrested him.
• Jack Frost (1998): After dying in a car accident, singer-songwriter Jack Frost is reincarnated a year later as his son's snowman and gets the chance to reconnect with him after being a workaholic in life.
• In the 1980 film Oh! Heavenly Dog, Browning (Chevy Chase) is a Private Investigator who stumbles across the body of a young woman and is stabbed to death. When he wakes up in heaven, they tell him he's "marginal material," and they can only decide on his final destination through one last assignment: to go back and solve his own murder. As a dog.
• The Three Stooges had an episode, "Horsing Around", about their sister Bertie being reincarnated as a horse.

Literature

• I'm a Behemoth, an S-Ranked Monster...: After dying whilst Dungeon Crawling, a knight is resurrected as a monster that is native to the dungeon he died in. Whilst he has the capacity to be an extremely powerful magical beast, his initial form looks a lot like a house cat and he winds up being adopted by a hot elf woman who finds him.
• Butareba: The Story of a Man Turned into a Pig is about a scrawny virgin 19 year old otaku who passes out and presumably dies of food poisoning whilst eating raw pork liver and wakes up in a fantasy world as a pig. He's rescued from being slaughtered by by teenage girl who is a member of the telepathic Yethma slave race, her telepathy allowing her to communicate with him.
• The Catlady, a children's book by Dick King-Smith, is about an old woman called Muriel who lives alone with her cats, who she insists are reincarnations of people she once knew. According to her, this includes deceased members of her family... and the late Queen Victoria!
• In Christine, there is speculation that this is how the eponymous car got her murderously possessive girlfriend-like personality. Several people connected to the car had died violently over the years and it was possible it was possessed by their vengeful spirits, but Christine's true nature is never explicitly confirmed.
• The Discarded, Half-Eaten Apple Core New Life: A guy dies during an invasion of aliens which want to consume all life. His soul ends up attached to a discarded apple core, when a planetary defence system kicks in it locates him and is baffled by his species, and goes looking up "apple" and "core" in dictionaries until it finds meanings it can work with, so he ends up as a Dungeon Core (Apple Electronics).
• Discworld:
  • Equal Rites: Discussed when a wizard dies. His ghost asks about reincarnation, so Death warns him that he'd have to start small and work his way up — "AND WITH YOUR KARMA AN ANT IS TOO MUCH TO EXPECT." He still tries it and ends up reincarnated as a tree.
  • Maskerade: The opera house's rat catcher is reincarnated as a rat upon his death. Because, as the Death of Rats tells him, REINCARNATION BELIEVES IN YOU.
  • The Truth: The book's villains, Pin and Tulip both get this after death.
    • Mr. Tulip, who had Hidden Depths and true (though empty) belief and waited to reincarnate until he felt true repentance for his actions, comes back as a woodworm in William's antique desk, happily enjoying fine works as he did in his previous life.
    • The unrepentant Mr. Pin is reincarnated as a potato in his former likeness and is destined to fry.
• Dog & Scissors: Kazuhito Harumi is a high school boy who is obsessed with Light Novels, his favourite author is Shinobu Akiyama. One day, he is killed in the middle of a robbery and resurrected as a dachshund dog - who just so happens to belong to said author - though her real name is Kirihime Natsuno and, unfortunately for him, she's a sadist who likes to torture him.
• Evil Dragon Reincarnation: An average Japanese guy dies in a car crash and is reincarnated in another world as a member of a dragon race that are all evil except for him. He does have a humanoid alternative form, but it is much less powerful than his new draconic base form.
• The Heralds of Valdemar are chosen by Companions, horselike telepathic creatures with human-level intelligence that bond with people to fight whichever Big Bad is currently menacing the kingdom of Valdemar. It's eventually revealed that when Heralds die, they can choose to be reincarnated as new Companions.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Exaggerated for Black Comedy with Agrajag, a cosmic Butt-Monkey who's been reincarnated across time and space into innumerable forms that keep getting unknowingly killed by Arthur Dent - a fly he swatted, an oyster he ate, a fish he caught but didn't eat, a bowl of petunias he accidentally dropped from orbit...
• Isekai Onsen Ni Tensai Shita Ore No Kounou Ga Tondemosugiru: A young man dies on the way to visit an onsen (hot spring hotel) in rural Japan. He wakes up reincarnated in fantasy world as an onsen himself.
• Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny has technology-based reincarnation, as part of the world's rulers having set themselves up as the Gods of Hindu Mythology. On occasion, a person will be reincarnated into the body of an animal, rather than into a new human body.
  • Tak is punished by being given the body of an ape.
  • Kali voluntarily takes the body of a white tiger to hunt at times.
  • Mention is made of a poet who wrote verses not to the liking of the gods. He was transferred into a jack-bird.
  • When Sam comes to the city in order to talk to Brahma, he's warned that people are evaluated for their karma and can be transferred into dogs as punishment; he should be very wary of any strays spying on him. Later, one of the Masters of Karma who was threatened into helping Sam suffers the same fate, howling as he watches his human body be destroyed.
• The Long Earth: Lobsang the Artificial Intelligence claims quite sincerely to be the reincarnation of a Tibetan motorcycle repairman who died the moment he was activated and has been accepted by the United Nations as such. In his opinion, the gel that houses most of his computing power is sufficiently brain-like to have attracted a human soul.
• Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon: A man who really loves vending machines is crushed to death diving trying to protect one from being smashed. He wakes up in a fantasy world as a vending machine himself and can only communicate using stock phrases like "Please insert coins" and "You might win an extra item!" in his recorded settings. He is discovered by a super-strong adventuring teenage girl who decides to take him on her adventures, strapped to her back.
• Reincarnated as an Apple: This Forbidden Fruit Is Forever Unblemished!: After being hit by a truck full of apples, the protagonist gets a New Life in Another World Bonus of magic powers, but is also transformed into the thing that killed him: an apple.
• Reincarnated as a Sword is about a man who reincarnated in a magical fantasy land as a sapient sword. He becomes wielded by / the teacher of a young slave Cat Girl who he tries to help escape poverty.
• Reincarnated as a Dragon Hatchling: In a world full of dangerous monsters, an unnamed protagonist finds himself reborn at the very bottom of the food chain as an immobile, powerless egg. Even just hatching will require leveling up by fighting monsters-the same monsters who'd love to eat him as a snack. But with the help of the mysterious voice in his head, he's determined to grow into the most powerful creature in the world!
• Reincarnated As A Virus is, as the title implies, about a man who is reincarnated as a virus. He meets other viruses who have their own minds, wills, wants, and needs, too.
• So I'm a Spider, So What?: The protagonist is a high school girl who is reincarnated as a spider Mook in the lowest stratum of a deadly labyrinth filled with snakes, toads, monkeys, and dragons, and must fight and level up to survive and get stronger. Her entire class was killed and has reincarnated, another classmate of hers comes back as a cute dragon creature - and was stuck as an egg for several years till she hatched, too. Although it turns out that while the protagonist did reincarnate, she was never a human girl to start with; she was a simple house spider that the "high school girl" (who is actually a goddess) she thinks she is put a copy of memories into for her own entertainment and to screw with some of her fellow gods.
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime is about a nerdy salaryman named Satoru Mikami dying in a knife attack protecting a colleague. He reincarnates in a new world as a Cute Slime Mook and slowly starts to get more powerful and become a respected leader known as Rimiru Tempest. Fairly early on he gets the ability to take on a humanoid form, but his true form is still that of basically an adorable puddle of goo. It's pointed out that Satoru's situation is fairly unique among reincarnators, who tend to remain human when reborn in the new world.
• Tree of Aeons: A bus full of teenagers and one indie game dev crashes; the teens are reincarnated in a magical world as heroes. The indie game dev protagonist, Matt, however, isn't eligible for this and his reincarnation is randomly selected to be a sapient tree.
• Woof Woof Story: I Told You To Turn Me Into a Pampered Pooch, Not Fenrir! After salaryman Ryouta Okami keels over and dies from exhaustion, he wishes he could have a comfortable next life as a pampered pet pooch. Unfortunately, the goddess overseeing his reincarnation is used to wishes from nerds and gamers and instead of a simple ordinary dog, she brings him back as a Fen Wolf who is huge and has various powers.

Live-Action Television

• My Mother the Car is a short-lived series from the 1960s about an attorney whose mother died, but still wanted to protect him, so she reincarnates/has her soul placed into a car - a supposedly 1928 Porter (a modified Model T Ford).
• Canadian Sketch Comedy show SCTV parodied My Mother the Car with a segment called "Tibor's Tractor", a supposed soviet sitcom in which former First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and ringleader of agricultural reform, Nikita Khrushchev, is reincarnated as a tractor.

Music

• Don Edwards' "Coyotes" is a song about an old cowboy who feels out of place in the modern industrial era, now that the days of the Wild West are long over. He remarks that the only ones left from the old days are "those damned old coyotes and me." Eventually, he dies and is implied to be reincarnated as one of those coyotes.
  One morning, they searched his adobe
  He disappeared without even a word
  But that night as the moon crossed the mountain
  One more coyote was heard...
• Lemon Demon's "Cabinet Man" is a really grisly take on this, where a guy turns himself into an arcade cabinet by replacing one's inner circuitry with his own organs, thus becoming a sentient video game.

Religion & Mythology

• In Vedic religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, etc...), reincarnation as an animal is a common consequence of accumulating too much karma in one life. Which is also why most of those religions advocate vegetarianism; the animals you're eating could have been someone you knew in a previous life.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons has had a long tradition of allowing dead characters to be resurrected as random species, though the specifics have varied from edition to edition. Prior to 3.5 Edition, the results were about as likely to be animals as humanoids, with a chance for even more exotic results.
  • Original Dungeons & Dragons: The spell reincarnation brings back a character as a random creature of their alignment (law, neutrality, or chaos). For instance, a lawful human would have an equal chance of reincarnating as a human, halfling, patriarch (cleric), treant, unicorn, pegasus, hippogriff, elf, werewolf, roc, dwarf, or a centaur.
  • Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition: Rather than being based on alignment, reincarnate has the player reincarnate as a random creature based on the results of a d100 roll, with most of the options being animals (as reincarnate is a druid spell). Unlike in OD&D, you can only be reincarnated as either a playable race or an animal, not a monster.
  • Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition: As in AD&D, the results of reincarnate are based on a d100 roll and can only be an animal or a playable race. Unlike previous editions though, in 3E it's explicitly stated that a reincarnated player retains their previous intellect and retains their class abilities (with new stat modifiers from their new body); before it was left to the DM's discretion.
• Pathfinder, originating as a fork of D&D 3rd edition, has random reincarnation spells. In Pathfinder 2nd edition Reincarnate is a ritual that brings one back as a common ancestry for the region where the ritual is performed on a d20 roll of 1-14, but an uncommon or rare ancestry on 15-20, which can include living dolls, shapeshifting spiders, or fragments of cosmic energy that have accumulated shells of mineral or plant matter.

Video Games

• In Pokémon both Yamask and Phantump, ghost types, are said to be former humans. Phantump is specifically said to be the ghosts of children lost in the woods who have possessed tree stumps. Some of the Yamask PokéDex entries are especially depressing.
  Each of them carries a mask that used to be its face when it was human. Sometimes they look at it and cry.
• The Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games generally start with the protagonist waking up and realizing they are now a Pokémon in a world without humans, you don't see the world they come from but they had been human. Although some of the possible Pokémon are humanoid and stay that way through their evolution lines (such as Riolu in Explorers), others are quadrupedal and stay that way (such as Chikorita), and even some of the bipeds can't really be considered humanoid (such as Squirtle).

Webcomics

• Cyanide and Happiness: Has a strip where a man finds a genie and wishes to be reincarnated as Jessica Alba's panties. Whilst he gets his wish, things don't exactly go to plan.

Websites

• Nobody Here: In "Dodo", Jogchem states that, when he dies, he'd like to come back as a dodo to confuse people.

Western Animation

• Robot Chicken: One sketch features a man named Doug who gets killed in an archery accident. He gets sent to Purgatory, where he has to spin the Wheel of Re-incarnation to find out what he will be reincarnated as. Doug spins the wheel and hopes he will land on Keira Knightley's Underwear, which he finds out is a popular choice. Much to his dismay, he ends up getting reincarnated as a Huggytime Bear named Doug-A-Lot Bear. At the end of the sketch, it is revealed that Doug merely had a Near-Death Experience.
• The Simpsons:
  • The music video "Deep Deep Trouble" has Bart go to hell and be judged to find a punishment suitable for him. He's initially relieved when he gets reincarnations... until it's revealed that he returns as a snail.
  • In "Round Springfield", it's revealed that Bart hopes that he'll get reincarnated when he dies. What as? The butterfly, because it is the creature that people expect the least. Cue Imagine Spot:
    Principal Skinner: (while school burns down in the background) I didn't burn down the school, it was the butterfly. THE BUTTERFLY!
    Chief Wiggum: Man's crazy. Boys, get the tasers. (Camera pans up to butterfly with Bart's head holding gasoline container and laughing maniacally.)
  • "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase": One of the fake spin-offs is The Love-matic Grampa, a parody of My Mother the Car and other 1960s fantasy sitcoms. Having "got lost along the way" to Heaven, Abe Simpson's spirit now inhabits the "love tester" machine at Moe's Tavern and gives the bartender tips on how to win over women.
  • In the second segment of Treehouse of Horror XVI, "Survival of the Fattest", Mr. Burns spots Apu hiding in the bushes and shoots him. Before he dies, Apu states he will be reincarnated due to being Hindu, and comes back as a rabbit that pops out of his human corpse, only to walk into a bear trap (and immediately pleads for help from Jesus).

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