Bertha: Your eyes look like hard-boiled eggs.
Jon: You don't say!
Bertha: No! Really!
Jon: You don't say!
Bertha: No! Really!
Sometimes, cartoon characters are given large (or small), round/bulging eyes shaped like a geometric sphere or oval, often with tiny little dots for pupils.
This is a fairly common design choice in newspaper comics and cartoons with exaggerated, wacky styles. Other times, a character may be given these eyes for added simplicity in their design, making them come across as more comedic and light-hearted than other characters not drawn this way (as is the case for many comic relief characters in the Disney Animated Canon).
This trope comes in two forms: one where the eyes slightly overlap or touch on the border between them, and one where the eyes are separate from each other.
Alternatively, if a character with separate eyes makes an excited or shocked expression, his/her eyes may touch or overlap. Likewise, if characters with overlapping eyes make these expressions or face the front, their eyes may separate.
Compare Conjoined Eyes, which uses just one eyeball with two pupils. Not to be confused with Wide Eyes and Shrunken Irises or Eye Pop, though a Pie-Eyed character or one with Black Bead Eyes may suddenly gain these kinds of eyes for the sake of the gag when a Wild Take is called for.
Touching/overlapping eyes:
open/close all folders
Asian Animation
- Many of the characters in King Shakir have these overlapping spherical eyes.
- Most of the characters in Simple Samosa have spherical eyes that overlap with each other.
Comic Books
- Isaac Baranoff's Horndog and Here Wolf.
Comic Strips
- Garfield is an example, since he (and most other characters in the strip) has huge eyes.
- Jim Davis always uses this trope on his strips like U.S. Acres.
- Surprisingly, despite practically being a trademark of Jim Davis, the sphere eyes were gained through Art Evolution, as the characters originally had normal circle eyes.
- Most characters in Heathcliff have these too.
- Mother Goose, Grimm and Attila in Mother Goose and Grimm.
- Bloom County: Opus and Bill the Cat.
- Most of the characters in Buckles, such as the title character.
- Sherman's Lagoon is also an example of this.
- The characters in Pearls Before Swine usually have these too.
- This is also used in FoxTrot. It was even parodied in one strip where Paige cuts ping-pong balls in half and puts them over her eyes to give the impression that she's not falling asleep in class.
- Calvin and Hobbes: It happens in one strip, but since the characters are not normally drawn with Sphere Eyes it looks a bit creepy.
Calvin: [wearing the bulging fake eyes] ...Or will I look too interested?
- Adam@Home is another example.
- Citizen Dog also uses these eyes.
- A lot of the characters from Dogs of C-Kennel.
- Plus, it was used for characters in Matt Groening's comic strip Life in Hell.
- Most of the characters in Madam & Eve have these. Somewhat averted with Mother Anderson and Thandi, who are drawn with either two pupils in a single sphere eye or eyes with only a partial circumference.
- Peanuts: Mostly averted with many characters having Black Bead Eyes. However, many of Snoopy's siblings have big round eyes.
Puppet Shows
- Mystery Science Theater 3000: Crow has these, which is why he kinda looks a bit like Lampy.
Video Games
- The Jak and Daxter games usually have this, but everyone's eyes were significantly smaller in Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier.
- Rayman and other characters in his series had sphere eyes in their original appearances. More recent games have them with Conjoined Eyes instead.
- Present in pretty much any Rare-made game you could care to name.
- And by extension, Donkey Kong and his pals in Nintendo's post-Rare games.
- Fur Fighters on the Dreamcast appeared to be heavily inspired by Rareware's games in both its gameplay and its visuals, so many of the characters there, such as Rico and Bungalow, apply.
- Human Peasants (as well as Sheep) in Warcraft III are rather conspicuous for this, in contrast to most other units whom are modeled with regular eyes.
- HeroSmash
- Bubsy
- Cutthe Rope: Omnom.
- Koume and Kotake from The Legend of Zelda games have creepy bulging eyes.
- Kerbal Space Program: Kerbals have a pretty simple geometry. They have cylinder-like heads, and their eyes are spheres sticking out of their faces.
- Super Mario Bros.:
- Rango in Super Mario Odyssey exhibits these, combined with Creepy Shadowed Undereyes.
- Super Mario World would introduce Yoshi, the bulgy-eyed dinosaur who became a regular staple of the Mario series as well as his own game series.
- Koopa Troopas, which have the same eyes as Yoshi.
- From the Mega Man series:
- Ice Man from Mega Man.
- Bubble Man and Heat Man from Mega Man 2 have this eye design.
- Spark Man in Mega Man 3 is another, taking several of his features from Heat Man's.
- Bright Man from Megaman 4 takes his facial design from Spark Man and thus has these eyes.
- Gravity Man from Mega Man 5.
- Plant Man from Mega Man 6.
- Burst Man and Cloud Man from Mega Man 7.
- Search Man from Mega Man 8.
- Dynamo Man from Mega Man & Bass.
- Plug Man, Jewel Man, and the Dummied Out Diamond Man from Mega Man 9.
- All of the mouthless Robot Masters (except Sheep Man, and Blade Man) in Mega Man 10.
- Block Man and Impact Man from Mega Man 11.
Web Animation
- The characters in Simon's Cat.
- Lumpy from Happy Tree Friends, a stark contrast to the Pie-Eyed look of the other characters.
- Alphabet Lore: About half of the letters have these eyes. note In an interesting case, W has spaced eyes, but due to being a pair of Conjoined Twins, two of their eyes touch in the middle.
Webcomics
- Sergeant Schlock from Schlock Mercenary. Justified as he's a Blob Monster, and the eyes are both discontiguous with the rest of his body, and interchangable. Also Uniocs, such as Lt. Ebbirnoth, whose entire head is one giant sphere eye. With two eyebrows.
- Bob from The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!
- Some species in The Mansion of E.
- Everyone in The Fuzzy Princess.
Western Animation
- Matt Groening uses this trope often by doing this to the majority of characters in The Simpsons and Futurama.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: The titular sponge has huge sphere eyes, as do most of the other characters.
- Most characters in South Park.
- In the Disney Animated Canon, some of the comic relief/cartoony characters, most notably Sebastian in The Little Mermaid and Mushu in Mulan, have sphere eyes.
- Even animal characters in some non-Disney hand-drawn animated films, such as Batty Koda from FernGully, have these too.
- Lampy from The Brave Little Toaster, though it is inverted with Toaster and Kirby.
- A common design choice of creator C.H. Greenblatt. Much of the characters in Chowder have these kinds of eyes, as do the ones in Harvey Beaks note and Jellystone!.
- The titular character of Roger Rabbit.
- The main cast of VeggieTales.
- Eek! The Cat: The titular feline also has huge eyes, similar to Garfield.
- Joe Murray uses this style for all three of his series: Rocko's Modern Life, Camp Lazlo and Let's Go Luna!. Most of the characters have eyes that overlap, except for the protagonists in all cases.
- Waffle from Catscratch is the only character who has these kinds of eyes consistently, whereas the other characters typically only gain them when expressing certain emotions.
- The majority of characters from The Angry Beavers.
- Almost every character from Regular Show.
- Virtually every human character in Gravity Falls.
- Mr. Bogus
- Phineas and Ferb: Phineas, Ferb and Dr. Doofenshmirtz. Occasionally, Candace as well.
- Diogee from Milo Murphy's Law.
- The frogs and tadpoles from Amphibia. The other amphibians and humans get these eyes at certain times.
- Almost all of the characters in The Loud House, with the exceptions having Black Bead Eyes.
- Middlemost Post: All the characters have oval-shaped eyes attached to each other.
- All the characters in Big City Greens.
- Ed, Edd n Eddy: Double D, Eddy, Rolf and May Kanker have these eyes consistently, while other characters may occasionally get them through certain expressions.
- The Fairly OddParents!: The characters' eyes are circles and ovals, and most the time they are connected.
- The Ghost and Molly McGee: Scratch and the other ghosts have these sort of eyes. The living humans have separate eyes of varying shapes, but this can change if they become ghosts themselves.
- Many of Aardman Animations' characters.
- Everyone in Animal Crackers.
- Rocky and Bullwinkle: Bullwinkle.
- Fear from Inside Out has huge, round eyes that capture a sense of fearfulness in his appearance. Anxiety also has these eyes in the sequel.
- Wander and Sylvia in Wander over Yonder have these eyes by default.
- Sometimes appears in The Proud Family and its revival series, usually with Oscar.
- If a Hanna-Barbera character doesn't have Skintone Sclerae or Black Bead Eyes, they will likely have big oval eyes located very close to each other; typically the main characters, especially animals. Examples include (but aren't limited to) Fred Flintstone, Yogi Bear and Scooby-Doo.
- Pinky and the Brain: Pinky has these eyes by default while Brain gets them at certain times.
- Edgar & Ellen: The titular siblings have big, round eyes that make them easily distinguishable from the other characters in their book and television series.
Separated eyes:
Anime and Manga
- The sextuplets of Osomatsu-san and its predecessor Osomatsu-kun. No surprise there since Osomatsu-kun had its run during the 60s.
Asian Animation
- In Happy Heroes, a lot of the human characters, including the Supermen, typically have spherical eyes that are separate from each other.
Toys
- The Trash Pack, The Grossery Gang, and Shopkins, all blind bag toylines by Moose Toys, are given perfectly round separated eyes. In the case of The Trash Pack and The Grossery Gang, they are simply given small dots for pupils, to bug out the eyes more, while Shopkins are given highlighted pupils and irises, along with eyelashes irregardless of gender, to give them a cuter look.
Video Games
- Shantae: Risky's Revenge: The Steam-Powered Oceanic Tinker Tub has giant, larger-than-Shantae sized eye orbs at both sides of its prow, to look forward.
Web Animation
- Mint from Object Terror naturally has these eyes while everyone else has Black Bead Eyes.
- The Amazing Digital Circus: The majority of the characters have these eyes. Though only Caine's overlap, which is justified given his design.
Western Animation
- The characters from Gumby.
- Many of the works by Seth MacFarlane, like Family Guy, American Dad!, and The Cleveland Show feature this. Humans and most other characters typically have separate eyes, though a few (such as Brian Griffin) have overlapping eyes.
- Rick and Morty characters also have these eyes.
- Almost everyone in Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends has spherical eyes. Most of them, including all the humans, have the eyes separate from each other, but a few (including Bloo, Coco, and Cheese) have connected eyes.
- The Watterson family in The Amazing World of Gumball have unconnected eyes. In the first two seasons they switched between ovoid and spherical depending on the expression. From the third season on, they're always spherical.
- Lampshaded in "The Lesson", where a delinquent student squeezes Gumball's head.
Darwin: Dude, STOP! His eyes are touching each other! - Characters in Adventure Time, some depending on their expressions and others as their default look.
- Many of the supporting characters in We Bare Bears. The main bears, however, tend to switch between these and their default Black Bead Eyes.
- Most characters in Steven Universe.
- The human characters in Star vs. the Forces of Evil have spaced, usually oval-shaped eyes, though it can vary for the monsters.
- Danny Phantom: The characters have more spaced out eyes, in contrast to other Butch Hartman cartoons.
- The centaurs in Centaurworld.
- Buddy from Looney Tunes.
- All the characters in Clarence have spherical eyes. With a few exceptions like Chad and Mr. Reese, most of their eyes are separated.
