"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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Fan Works
- Family: The Disney version of Toontown is where the Warners were born and raised.
- Later, Traitor: Dogen's mind — Dogen's Saturday Morning Kaboom — is a cartoonish world set within a malfunctioning TV.
- In Those Lacking Spines, Inept Crossings seems to serve as the home of the many characters who get lumped into bad fanfiction crossover pieces. Appropriately enough, the Trope Namer itself appears as part of this world, and is suffering under the tyranny of Homie X Luxory and Secks.
Film
- Toons mostly live alongside humans in Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022) but there are two notable toon neighborhoods:
- Main Street is a Crapsaccharine World visually based on Disneyland's Main Street USA but is actually a front for illegal toon businesses like G-Rated Drug cheese dealers and Muppet fighting rings.
- The Uncanny Valley is a rundown Toontown inhabited by realistic but creepy CGI cartoon characters.
- Everything in Abrahama City from The Congress is animated due to the inhabitants being on hallucinogenic drugs.
- The Trope Namer from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a suburban Los Angeles district where the Toon community lives. Quite crapsaccharine.
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
- In Son of Zorn Earth is otherwise normal but all the cartoon fantasy characters come from the magic island of Zephyria.
Tabletop Game
- "Toon World", and its more advanced derivative "Toon Kingdom", is a Yu-Gi-Oh! Continuous Spell Card that evokes the idea of the trope. Its original design is that of a spooky looking town within a pop-up book. Almost all Toon cards require "Toon World" to be on the field in order to be summoned and stay on the field, and "Toon World" being sent to the graveyard means instant death for the Toon cards. In the anime, "Toon World" also had the ability to turn any monster Pegasus summoned into a toon.
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. (Mickey's Toontown Fair has since been ceased to exist and absorbed as part of the New Fantasyland expansion.) 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.
- Odds are your friendly neighborhood Six Flags park will have a "Looney Tunes Town" or some variant of it.
- Toon Lagoon in Universal Studios' Islands of Adventure can be seen as an example of this.
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.
Western Animation
- The era of Cartoon Network that ran from 2004 to 2007 had a series of bumpers known as CN City, wherein characters from all the Cartoon Network shows at the time interact with each other in live-action versions of their settings.
- 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 (even if they do know they're two or three-dimensional).
- 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.
- 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.
