Back when the world was a ball of ferns, when a good front lawn was a half-acre of bubbling slime, a giant amoeba split in two. The front half, the end with the brains, called itself Los Angeles. The butt end became Toon Town.
— Eddie Valiant, Who P-P-P-Plugged Roger Rabbit?
Cartoons are not real. They're made with art supplies and brought to life by animators and Voice Actors. It's sad but it's true.
Hey, wait a minute! We seem to have made a wrong turn at Albu-coiky! Now we're in Toon Town, that very special district of Fantasy Land where cartoon characters are people, just like you and me. Sometimes, they exist as a separate and independent species, and sometimes, the place itself transforms humans into Toons. But all details aside, Toon Town is a loony sort of place where Cartoon Physics and the Rule of Funny reign supreme. Expect the Roger Rabbit Effect almost every time.
When an entire planet or dimension is populated by cartoon characters, it is an Alternate Tooniverse.
Not to be confused with the MMORPG, Toontown Online.
Examples:
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Anime
- The Toon World, a deck of cards from Yu-Gi-Oh! created by Pegasus and featuring caricatured duel monsters.
Film
- The Trope Namer from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a suburban Los Angeles district where the Toon community lives. Quite crapsaccharine.
- Looney Tunes: Back in Action: Unlike Space Jam, the cartoon characters just exist on Earth without any inter-world travel.
- Last Action Hero: In Jack Slater's movie world, cartoons mix with human beings in the police station.
- The eponymous Cool World, although it far more resembles Dark City than the bright and cheery (but also crapsaccharine in its own way) Toon Town of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
- The film originally contained a locale called "Sweet Place", where the more family-friendly, Disney-esque toons lived, that played the trope straight. The only remaining references to it are one of Harris' nicknames for Holli and a brief scene in the comic adaptation.
Literature
- Toon Town is casually mentioned, but not visited, in Who Censored Roger Rabbit? by Gary Wolf. Who Plugged Roger Rabbit? (a sequel to the film), on the other hand, spends quite a bit of time there.
Live Action TV
- The Halloween Special of Out of Jimmy's Head briefly sends Jimmy and Golly into a cartoon world made of Milt Appleday's childhood drawings.
Theme Parks
- The official mythos of the Disney Theme Parks states that the costumed characters are the real characters. Then there's Mickey's Toontown and Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin.
- Inside the parks, Mickey's Toontown at Disneyland is considered where Mickey and co. actually live. You can walk through Mickey's house, etc. (And presumably that's where he retires to when the park closes down for the night.) Walt Disney World had a similar area for many years, and to avoid a Continuity Snarl it was technically labeled Mickey's Toontown Fair - sort of a country getaway for the classic Disney characters. Mickey's pad was billed as Mickey's Country House since, you know, his actual house is in Disneyland. The smaller Toon Studio area at EuroDisney is presented as the place toons go to work and film their movies. There's also a Toontown in Tokyo Disneyland that's identical to the one in Calfornia's Disneyland but try not to think too hard about that.
- Toon Lagoon in Universal Studios' Islands of Adventure can be seen as an example of this.
- Odds are your friendly neighborhood Six Flags park will have a "Looney Tunes Town" or some variant of it.
Webcomics
- Love Me Nice takes place in a Who Framed Roger Rabbit setting with Serial Numbers Filed Off. Mention is made of "Inkblot Grove" and the "Toon Quarter", but they haven't been visited in-comic yet; although they're implied to be more like toon ghettos.
Web Original
- The Second Dimension in The Cartoon Man trilogy.
Western Animation
- Animaniacs portrays the characters as Animated Actors created by production studios, though the Warners and Slappy Squirel know that even their 'real world' is still a cartoon.
- An episode of The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo sent Shaggy and Scooby into the worlds of several Newspaper Comics.
- Cartoon Land, from the very early Walt Disney shorts, Alice in Cartoon Land.
- Bonkers was a cartoon, but some people in the cartoon were humans and some were toons. An unusual example where the humans are also animated, just more realistically.
- Cartoon Network had several advertisements between 2004 and 2008 that depicted the channel's characters in a huge live-action city.
- In Sponge Bob Squarepants, the undersea world is animated and the surface world is live-action. This is shown occasionally in the TV show, and more clearly in The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie and The Sponge Bob Movie Sponge Out Of Water.
- The city of Elmore in The Amazing World of Gumball, a place where Everything Talks and can also become a Funny Animal, is often implied to be a unique location on an otherwise mundane Earth: Citizens of Elmore are shown with various forms of animation, the geography of Elmore consists of real life photographs, and in-universe media often shows humans in live-action, something never shown in Elmore itself. The series's creator even cites Who Framed Roger Rabbit as an influence for the show's use of Medium Blending, liking the idea of cartoon characters being in real life. Other episodes blatantly contradict this, making mention of anthropomorphic non-humans being from places far outside of Elmore. Either way, Rob is the only who knows that they're fictional, and no one thinks of themselves as cartoons.
- The town that Mickey and the gang live in Mickey Mouse Works and House of Mouse is implicitly Disneyland's Toontown, with Mickey, Minnie and Donald's houses being the ones seen in the park. Goofy's is different because of Rule of Funny.
