Toy Transmutation

They're all dolled-up now.

"Violent dumbass heart so rrrotten, become soft with a heart of cotton! A twisted soul who yelled and swore, cause a rrrrrruckus NEVERMORE!"

— The Wizard, Suction Cup Man

There are people out there obsessed with toys. This obsession gets to the point where they will turn other people into toys for their amusement or collection.

When somebody gets turned into a toy, they could still be very much alive. However, their now inanimate body renders them unable to move around or call for help.

In some circumstances though, they are still very much able to move. When this is the case, they could work on trying to find a way to change back.

This trope is usually exemplified with dolls, sometimes of the voodoo kind or sometimes just a regular raggedy doll. Other may include a motionless action figure. Less conventional choices can still pop up, however. What is always consistent is that the toys will have the physical features of those transformed, such as hair, the face, clothes, etc.

The inverse of Become a Real Boy. Sub-Trope of Objectshifting. Super-Trope to Puppet Permutation. Related to Living Doll Collector.

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Examples:

Animation

• BoBoiBoy Galaxy: A variant. The alien jester Jokertu weaponises playing cards generated by Cardbot to trap his opponents inside them. Whatever and whoever the cards catch is displayed on the front of the card, with star levels indicating their power. Papa Zola uses the main team, all trapped in cards, against Jokertu's deck of dragons to free the heroes. When he backs out on the deal, however, Jokertu tries to summon cards from Cardbot again, but the latter had reformed minutes earlier after being convinced to go against his master by Commander Kokoci, who throws a card at Jokertu instead, sealing him inside it.

Anime & Manga

• Crayon Shin-chan: Figure Wars has a Vengeful Abandoned Toy, Oban, who came to life after being struck by lightning and is now seeking revenge on humans, with the ability to fire energy bolts turning humans into action figures. She starts off with Micchi and Yoshirin Hatogaya, who discarded her in the first place, and goes on an unstoppable rampage turning the Noharas and most of the cast into toys, until Shin-Chan managed to deflect Oban's bolt with a mirror and subsequently destroying her. Everyone turns back to normal after that, thanks to No Ontological Inertia.
• Delicious in Dungeon: For helping Laios and his friends, Thistle transfers Yaad's soul into a doll as punishment, leaving his body an Empty Shell.
• Digimon Adventure: Piedmon's deadliest technique is the Clown's Trick, where he uses a piece of magical cloth to turn opponents into keychain dolls, rendering them powerless and immobile instantly. Even Mega-level Digimon aren't safe from being affected.
• In Digimon Ghost Game, ExTyrannomon had the ability to turn people and Digimon into dolls with his Black Matter attack and manipulates his "master" Kayono into letting him inflict this on people indiscriminately.
• Dragon Ball GT: Master Dolltaki uses the scam cult of Luud to transform other beings who fail to find the Black Star Dragon Balls into dolls to use their life force as sacrifices to empower the fake God of Destruction, Luud; as a long gambit to help Dr. Myuu's creation, Baby, be completed. He also does this to Pan, though he ends up too infatuated to sacrifice her. He suffers this fate himself courtesy of Dr. Myuu, when he activates Luud too early, as punishment, and ends up dying not too long after he is forced to help defeat Luud and free everyone from it.
• Fairy Tail: 100 Years Quest: Haku, a fifth generations dragon slayer, can turn living beings into plush doll. The victims are still able to move, speak and use magic, and they also becomes flammable.
• In the short manga story "The Hell of the Doll Funeral" from Junji Ito Kyoufu Manga Collection, children contract a disease that turns them into dolls. This being Junji Ito, it gets even worse after that.
• One Piece: This is the power of the Donquixote Family member Sugar. Her Devil Fruit, the Hobby-Hobby Fruit, allows her to turn anyone she touches into a toy. This has the side effect of causing any memories anyone has of the original human to vanish, and Sugar can exert full control over her toys and make them obey her. This is a separate process from transforming the person, so if the toy gets away in time they can avoid this part. Shocking Sugar into unconsciousness can dispel her powers, undoing all of the above.
• Pokémon: The Series: In the episode "Haunter vs. Kadabra", Misty and Brock get turned into dolls by Sabrina, the Living Doll Collector, after the group attempts to escape her (pictured above). They remain that way until the end of the episode. She had previously done the same with her mother, and would likely have done it to Ash as well had he not defeated her with the help of a Haunter he befriended.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: Those defeated by the Seven Star Assassin Vampire Camula become dolls holding their souls, which she plans to use to help awaken the Sacred Beasts and also resurrect her deceased kind.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V: The Academia soldiers transform people into cards as an equivalent of killing them. They do this to those who lose to them in a duel or can't fight back against their Duel Monsters.

Comic Books

• In Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Dawn is transformed into a porcelain doll by a curse from her ex-boyfriend.
• In French comic book Lady Doll, troubled dollmaker Gaja Perron places herself inside her dollmaking machine after she is led to believe that her lover Sébastien has betrayed her.

Fan Works

• In Ma vie en peluche, a Harry Potter fanfic, Snape gets turned into a plush doll by Voldemort.
• TamaKoichi: After Koichi buys the last of a rare figure as a surprise for his girlfriend, a little girl uses her Stand [Destiny's Child] to turn him into a Tamagotchi so she can grab the figure for herself. This transformation is much more harrowing that most, since if his friends can't turn him back to normal or make sure he is fed and taken care of for 24 hours, Koichi will die like Tamagotchi are infamously known for.

Film — Animation

• In Aladdin, the evil sorcerer Jafar turns Abu the monkey into a cymbal-playing monkey toy, quipping, "Don't toy with me!".
• The animated short film Alma stars a little girl who enters a toy store upon seeing a doll that looks just like her. When she touches the doll, her soul becomes trapped inside it, leaving her conscious but barely able to move. It's heavily implied that all the other dolls in the store are children who met a similar fate.
• In The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, an evil prince gets turned into a nutcracker along with his entire court thanks to his own Be Careful What You Say idiocy. In the end, the Mouse King gets turned into a nutcracker as well.
• The titular villain of Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night does that to kids as a Deal with the Devil to strengthen himself and weaken the Blue Fairy. His main goal is to do that to Pinocchio himself, since turning back the only doll to ever Become a Real Boy is bound to shift the balance in his favor a lot.
• Playmobil: The Movie: Any human that enters the Playmobil world are turned into Playmobil figures themselves, as shown with Marla and Charlie.
• Downplayed in Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure. King Koo Koo turns his subjects into "idiots" - mindless, mechanical toys - when they can't make him laugh anymore, and threatens to do the same to Raggedy Ann and Andy. However, the characters are already sentient toys to begin with (although with some characters, it's hard to tell what they are).

Film — Live Action

• The Theatre Bizarre: Enola Penny is intrigued by an abandoned theatre in her neighborhood. One night the theatre door mysteriously opens and she enters. A puppet host named Peg Poett introduces six short films. As each is shown, the host becomes more human and Enola becomes more puppet-like. And the end of the show, Peg places the now fully puppet in a trunk and closes the lid.

Literature

• Alice, Girl from the Future:
  • In Alice and the Enchanted King, the main villain's entire scheme depends on transforming people into dolls.
  • In The Sorcerer and the Snow Maiden, a retelling of Ghosts Don't Exist for younger readers, Snow Maidens get turned into dolls.
• Chrestomanci: In The Magicians of Caprona Tonino and are abducted by the Duke's wife, who is secretly the White Witch who wants to destroy Caprona. They are completely at her mercy for a while and are even turned into Punch and Judy puppets which are used to entertain the Duke.
• In The Indian in the Cupboard, Omri at first thinks that the titular cupboard transforms plastic figures into Living Toys, but later realizes that it transports real people through time, where they're transformed into tiny versions of themselves.^note It's actually the key, not the cupboard, that's special. In later books, he sends himself (and his dad) back to the 18th century, where they inhabit Iroquois corn dolls. The transformed versions do appear more lifelike than toys, though Omri's dad has no facial features at first since the doll didn't either.
• In Measle and the Wrathmonk, after the wrathmonk Basil Tramplebone shrinks down Measle to one inch tall and entraps him in his toy train set, he finds other victims of his evil magic whose bodies had started gradually transforming into plastic. One of them has almost entirely turned into a plastic toy, except for one of his nostrils.
• In Roverandom, the titular character, a dog, gets transformed into a small toy by the wizard Artaxerxes. Later, another wizard Psamathos gives him back the ability to move, but Roverandom remains a toy nonetheless until Artaxerxes turns him back.
• The very first Shivers (M. D. Spenser) novella, where the protagonist moves into her new home, an old-timey mansion and discovers the attic to be filled with dolls. Late into the story, it turns out these dolls used to be the mansions' previous occupants, servants, and residents, who got turned into toys as result of a curse.
• In Sci-Fi Junior High by Scott Seegert, supervillain wannabee Erik Failenheimer accidentally transfers his mind into a plush toy, and stays that way for the rest of the series.

Live-Action TV

• American Horror Stories: In "Dollhouse", while the competition is still running, the women merely have to wear doll costumes. As a reward for winning, Van Wirt has Coby encased in a plastic doll body that gives her just enough freedom of movement to perform her new duties.
• Angel: In "Smile Time", Angel goes to the studio of a popular show after learning they are stealing the life forces of children, where he triggers a spell that transforms him into a puppet.
• Black Mirror: "Black Museum". When Jack is tired of Carrie always sharing his mind, he transfers her consciousness into a stuffed monkey for their son that can only communicate by saying "Monkey loves you" and "Monkey needs a hug." It is made very clear that this is an And I Must Scream situation for her.
• Doctor Who:
  • In the first challenge in "The Celestial Toymaker", Steven and Dodo face two Monster Clowns, Joey and Clara, full of childish tricks and a dangerous game of Blind Man's Bluff. The clowns are made to replay the game when it is clear they are cheating, and the second time round Joey loses his footing on an obstacle course and the challengers are transformed into twisted dolls on the floor.
  • One of the weapons of The Master is the Tissue Compression Eliminator, which shrinks people into figurine-like forms, killing them in the process.
  • In "Night Terrors", people in an apartment are transported and shrunk down into a dollhouse, where they are converted by living Creepy Dolls.
• The Shoebox Zoo are human wizards turned into animate toys by their Evil Mentor.
• In The Sooty Show, one episode involves Sooty using his wand to turn Sweep into a toy dog and his toy frog into a real one, because Sooty was angry at Sweep for being noisy.
• The Twilight Zone (2002): In "The Collection", Miranda's night of babysitting turns to cold terror when she realizes that the child‘s eerily lifelike doll collection may explain the mysterious disappearance of the previous sitters.
• Two Sentence Horror Stories: In "Teatime", a babysitter is preyed upon by a terrifying little girl and her collection of customised dolls. The episode ends with Sam being given a living doll that resembles Angela. It's unknown whether this means that Angela has been made into a doll, or she created the doll as a way to continue terrorizing Sam.
• Ultra Series
  • Ultraman Ginga: The Spark Dolls, which look like action figures, are actually many Ultras, Aliens and Kaiju forcefully transformed into the toys, most of them come from the Multiversal Dark Spark War fought between Ultras and evil Aliens/Kaiju, where the Dark Giant, Dark Lugiel ambushed both factions and transformed them with his Dark Spark before doing a Mutual Kill-of-sorts with Ultraman Ginga, resulting in both regressing to Spark Dolls.
  • Ultraman X: Daichi's Gomora is a Spark Doll most of the time in order to prevent it from causing destruction. In Episode 19, "Living Together" Gomora is temporarily given back his original physical form before being forced back into his Spark Doll due to getting corrupted by Dark Thunder Energy.
• In an episode of The Worst Witch, Mildred gets shrunk, and another witch tries to grow her back, but that turns her into a rag doll instead.

Video Games

• The indie game, 9 Childs Street have you exploring an abandoned, haunted house inexplicably filled with dolls. It turns out those toys used to be children, as results of a deranged toymaker's curse.
• Bad Monday Simulator: In the second and fourth endings, Sansfield turns Nermal into an inanimate plushie.
• Dragalia Lost: Scylla, the raid boss for the "Doomsday Getaway" event, has an attack in which she turns some of the adventurers in the arena into dolls.
• In Hidden City, many of the Puppeteer's artefacts have such unfortunate consequence.
  • In the "Ghost Train" case, the Puppeteer creates a toy trainset that somehow turned the passengers of a real train into bronze figurines.
  • "Another's Soul" reveals that the Puppeteer has created a mechanism that could give energy to a mannequin to animate them. This energy can only be obtained by taking a human's soul, and the human will become a doll as the mannequin becomes more human-like.
• In It Takes Two (2021), May and Cody have their minds transferred into dolls, and spend the entirety of the game traversing through their (now-gigantic-to-them) house in the hope of finding a method of returning to their human bodies.
• Kingdom Hearts III: Upon entering the Toy Box world, Sora, Donald, and Goofy are turned into toys in order to blend in with the world and protect the world order.
• In the second and sixth Samurai Shodown games, either player, regardless of what character they're playing as, can turn themselves into a chibi doll as a sort of taunt.
• League of Legends had the pre-Continuity Reboot Annie, the Dark Child, who ensorcelled a monstrous shadow bear and turned it into a harmless teddy bear named Tibbers, with her ultimate ability being to summon him again in all his destructive glory to tear apart her enemies^note Post-reboot, it's been retconned into just being an actual teddy bear that she can transform into a giant beast.
• Subverted in TinkerQuarry. In the ending where Clint betrays the party, he kidnaps Adeline, planning to make her his wife. But since Clint is a toy soldier, he's not pleased with Adeline's human body, so he stitches a doll body, intending to transplant her soul into it. However, Adeline escapes before he can perform the transplant.

Web Animation

• The Annoying Orange: In "Ask Orange #3", the first question Orange answers is one asking him if he would like to be a toy. Upon saying he would, Liam appears and turns him into one.
  Orange: Whoa! I'm like Pinocchio in reverse! I've always wanted to be a real toy.
• Spooky Month: The advertisement for the second edition of the Skid and Pump plushies features a witch turning Skid and Pump into stuffed toys, with Lila implied to suffer the same fate.
• The Wizard in the Suction Cup Man plush ad accidentally turns the titular main character into a plush toy. By the end Suction Cup Man returns to normal... only to turn around and annoy the Wizard, who then proceeds to turn him back into a plush on purpose.

Webcomics

• In El Goonish Shive, Nanase's fairy doll spell works similar to this. When she first creates and inhabits a fairy doll its body is made of anatomically correct flesh aside from the wings and tail. When she ends the spell, it becomes an inanimate doll made of synthetic materials and her consciousness returns to her real body until she uses the spell again which reverses the process.
• Yamara: When Fëa of Ping Forest is turned evil, she casts a "Flesh to Plush" spell on Yamara, turning her into a plush doll with a pull-string on her back that allows her to to speak. However, in doing so, Fëa unintentionally transforms the powerful magical artifact Yamara was holding (and that Fëa was planning on stealing) into a cheap plastic trinket that accompanies the doll.

Web Original

• In Neopets, the Aisha Pogo Stick is said to be an Aisha who got turned into a toy.
• The basis of the "Please don't turn me into marketable plushies" meme, which pokes fun at the merchandising of pop culture characters by having the characters themselves object to being turned into toys.

Western Animation

• In Alma, touching the doll that looks like her instantly transforms Alma into the doll.
• In Atomic Puppet, Captain Atomic was a world-renowned superhero who lived his life being able to handle situations with his brute strength and endless charm. Blinded by success and fame, he's suddenly transformed into a powerless living sock puppet by his jealous sidekick Mookie.
• DuckTales (2017): In "The Other Bin of Scrooge McDuck!", Magica DeSpell transforms Webby into a doll styled after the latter's 1987 cartoon design in order to "thank" Lena for freeing her and then controlling her to attack her before finally burning the doll to ashes all to torture her niece for her amusement... However, it turns out to be simply a nightmare hallucination caused by a magic dreamcatcher in the bin.
• The Owl House: In "For the Future", the Hexsquad, upon returning to the Demon Realm, learn that The Collector has done this to much of the population, and now uses them as their playthings to amuse themself.
• In Power Players, the Power Bandz allow Axel to turn into a superpowered action figure dubbed "Action Axel".
• In the Star Trek: Lower Decks episode "Kayshon, His Eyes Open," new security chief Kayshon get turned into a hand puppet during his first away mission. According to Dr. T'Ana, this isn't even the first time she's seen this sort of thing and has a treatment that will fix him up in an hour.
• Total DramaRama: In "Us 'R' Toys", Chef brings in some old toys from his childhood, and he, Duncan and Gwen each get magically sucked into one of the toys and need to find a way to get back into their own bodies.
• Yogi's Treasure Hunt: Befalls the entire regular cast in the episode "The Greed Monster" when they get captured by the eponymous monster and are put through her toy-making machine at the behest of selfish Tagalong Kid Nathan, with Yogi and Boo Boo becoming teddy bears, Huckleberry Hound becoming a wind-up dog toy, Quick Draw McGraw becoming a rocking horse, etc. When Nathan becomes the next Greed Monster due to his selfishness and stinginess with his toys outweighing that of the previous Greed Monster (who turns back into a human girl), he puts her through the machine too, turning her into a doll. While everyone is still animate and able to talk in toy form, none of them are able to get themselves back to normal, return the world's toys to their respective owners, and save the day until Nathan has a Jerkass Realization and does so himself.

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