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.
Alternatively, if a character with separate eyes has an excited or scared expression, his/her eyes will change into this style.
This trope comes in two forms: one where the the eyes slightly overlap or touch on the border between them, and one where the eyes are separate from each other.
Compare Conjoined Eyes, which uses just one eyeball with two pupils.
Not to be confused with Wide Eyes and Shrunken Irises.
Touching/overlapping eyes:
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Comic Books, Newspaper Comics and Webcomics
- 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.
- Opus from Bloom County.
- And don't forget 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.
- Exactly the same happens in Calvin & Hobbes, 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.
- The Groening-inspired character designs of Isaac Baranoff's Horndog and Here, Wolf.
- 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.
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.
- The Mobian characters in the Sonic the Hedgehog series certainly count
- Rayman and other characters in his series have sphere eyes.
- 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.
- Kerbals have a pretty simple geometry. They have cylinder-like heads, and their eyes are spheres sticking out of their faces.
- Rango in Super Mario Odyssey exhibits these, combined with Creepy Shadowed Undereyes.
Web Animation
Western Animation
- Matt Groening uses this trope often by doing this to the majority of characters in The Simpsons and Futurama.
- SpongeBob SquarePants also has huge sphere eyes.
- 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.
- Chowder
- Roger Rabbit.
- The main cast of VeggieTales.
- Eek! The Cat also has huge eyes, similar to Garfield.
- Human characters in Adventure Time, if an emotion calls for them.
- Rocko's Modern Life (however, it is inverted with the title character)
- Catscratch
- Buddy from Animaniacs.
- Norbert from The Angry Beavers.
- Regular Show
- Gravity Falls has a very similar style.
- Mr. Bogus
- Most of the character designs on Phineas and Ferb have this. Of note is the fact that they tried to transition the look over into their live stage show, with... unfortunate results.
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.
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.
Western Animation
- Pokey the horse from Gumby.
- Many of Seth McFarlane's works like Family Guy, American Dad!, and The Cleveland Show.
- The Fairly OddParents!: Their eyes are large ovals but they are not connected together.
- Many of Aardman Animations' characters.
- 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 ovular and spherical depending on the expression. From the third season on, they're always spherical.
