Wall Run

aka: Wall Running

Caution: Do not run when wall is wet.

If you want to climb over a building but cannot fly, you could try several options. If you are a good climber, or a bug, you could Wall Crawl up it. If you are agile enough, you could Wall Jump from wall to wall to slowly but eventually get to the top.

But in this trope, they just run up it! They either have the superhuman strength or speed or ability to simply run up a smooth, flat, vertical surface at high speeds, even if logically they shouldn't be able to.

See Driving Up a Wall for the vehicular equivalent.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Attack on Titan, Sasha runs down Wall Rose and saves Samuel from falling to his death.
• In the anime adaptation of Chivalry of a Failed Knight, the protagonist, Ikki, briefly runs along a wall/glass panels while being shot at.
• In an episode of Code Geass, Suzaku runs up a wall while dodging bullets and kicks a machine gun turret off the ceiling.
• In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, Subaru's Device allows her to rollerblade on walls by activating the Absorb Grip spell.
• Kill la Kill's Kiryuin Satsuki can not only run, but walk briskly up a wall while kicking ass.
• In K: Missing Kings, Kuroh and Yukari have a sword fight on the outside of a skyscraper like this. Kuroh appears to fall at first, but Yukari just uses his powers to stand on the side of the building, and Kuroh does the same after a moment.
• Gunslinger Girl. Petra does this to take out a terrorist guarding the corridor to the Turin Nuclear Plant's control room. As an older second generation cyborg she has longer legs than the other cyborg girls and so uses this to her advantage.
• Ranma ½: Ranma can run up vertical things like power-line poles or horizontally on walls.
• Rebuild World: Akira eventually uses his Gatling Good M421 minigun to Recoil Boost to this effect, even running on a ceiling at one point due to firing powerful CWH anti-armor rounds full auto with a similar weapon. Later sets of Powered Armor he gets also have a Sticky Shoes feature allowing him to do so without wasting ammo, for instance, jumping out a skyscraper window, doing a Blade Brake, then running back up to surprise his pursuer.
• Near the end of Re: Cutie Honey, Honey displays this ability by running down a vertical wall with Natsuko in her arms after the latter resuscitates her. "These boots can run anywhere!"
• Time Stop Hero: Swordmaster Leafa runs along a wall to avoid lava.

Comic Books

• The Flash: The Flash and Impulse can run fast enough to run up vertical surfaces.
• Quicksilver: Quicksilver is sometimes depicted as being fast enough to do this, though it's not a typical ability of his.
• Spider-Man'': Spider-Man can do short bursts of wall-running while webswinging.
• Wonder Woman: Wonder Woman and Cheetah can run along a wall's surface for a bit, but since Wondy started being able to fly in the Silver Age she's not had a need to in a long time.

Fan Works

• Amazing Fantasy
  • Izuku and Peter are able to do this thanks to their Wall Crawling abilities. Peter is first seen doing this in a flashback, while Izuku does it to demonstrate his new powers to his mom.
  • The Prowler has the ability to manipulate her own gravity, letting her easily run up walls. She can even apply this to her motorcycle, riding along the sides of buildings while chasing after something. Peter lampshades this and declares that he should sue her for copyright infringement.
• In An ordinary life, Eiko has a Quirk that gives her a perfect sense of balance, allowing her to do this. It is still realistic, so she needs to go fast enough if she wants to do it.
• Hero Academia Dx D: Kiba Yuuto has a Quirk that lets him change his gravitational orientation, but only when he's walking on a surface like a wall.

Films — Animation

• Astro Boy (2009): Astro sprints up a skyscraper while trying to avoid capture, using momentum from his flight.

Films — Live-Action

• In Justice League, Flash uses his Super-Speed to run on the walls of the shaft the Justice League is battling Steppenwolf in and hit the tip of Diana/Wonder Woman's sword to send it back in her hand.
• In Five Deadly Venoms, the lizard style of kung fu allows the user to not only run up walls, but to stand up there indefinitely, waiting for the right moment to strike. The fourth Venom, who specializes in Lizard Style, and the sixth, who knows a smattering of all five styles, but is a master of none, both use this a lot at the climax of the movie.
• The Matrix:
  • The Matrix: In the opening sequence, Trinity evades a cop as he's shooting at her by running up and then along a wall of the room they're in before taking the fight to him. She also does this during the Government Lobby shootout later on in the film. Since this happens inside the Matrix, both instances are justified as Trinity being a redpill.
  • The Matrix Revolutions has the Club Hel fight scene, with Mooks doing Combat Parkour on the ceiling, upside down (justified as them being A.I. programs living in the Matrix, so The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard is in effect here). And it is utterly fucking awesome. Said scene also has Trinity repeating her aforementioned maneuver to get the drop on her target.
• In the first scene of The One, Jet Li's evil character Yulaw ends up doing a short version of this while dodging bullets. It helps that he has superhuman strength, speed, and agility.
• In X-Men: Days of Future Past, Quicksilver uses his Super-Speed to run along the wall of the White House's kitchen at one point during the "rescue" of Magneto.

Live-Action TV

• The Flash:
  • As in the comics, the 2014 version of The Flash has Barry do that in "Plastique" to rescue a man falling from a maintenance gondola. Bonus points for asking Cisco how fast he needs to run for this to work. Being in a bar, Cisco does his calculations on a napkin (while being drunk) with Barry even providing the height in meters for easier calculations (both are scientists, so using the SI system should come naturally to them). However, Caitlin just tells him to move very fast before Cisco can finish his calculations (despite the fact that this is Cisco's area of expertise) and maintain the speed on the way down to avoid the "splat". It works, and Barry even outruns the falling gondola on the way down. In later episodes, he does this almost casually.
  • In the season 1 finale, he's running up a collapsing skyscraper, while dodging falling debris. At one point, he jumps over a piece of debris and lands back on the skyscraper, despite the fact that gravity should have pulled him down, not sideways.
  • In the Supergirl crossover episode, he does this during his initial appearance and rescues Kara, who's unconscious and falling out of a skyscraper window before zooming away into the countryside. It's not clear how he knew that she needed saving (to be fair, she would've been just fine even if she hit the ground at terminal velocity), as he has just appeared in this world moments before.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The 3.5th edition Expanded Psionic Handbook has a psionic feat which pretty much allows to treat walls as any flat surface: "Up the Wall". If you can't reach an horizontal surface at the end of your movement, though, you fall flat on your back.
  • The skill trick "Walk the Walls" and the Monk alternate class feature "Wall Walker" are more limited in distance, and only allow moving up or down.
  • The spell balancing lorecall allows balancing on vertical surfaces if the character has enough skill ranks in Balance, and move up and down with much more freedom of movement than when climbing.
  • The psionic power urban strider, when augmented with no less than 8 power points, allows one to walk on completely vertical surfaces at normal speed.
  • As of 5th Edition, Monks get a speed boost when not wearing Armor, which at later levels allows them to run on vertical surfaces or liquids, though they'll still fall or submerge if they don't end their movement on standard terrain.
• In the Warhammer Gaiden Game Mordheim, a model usually has to make an Initiative Test in order to climb a wall and can cover up to their maximum movement distance vertically. The unique Skaven skill Wall Runner however allows a model to climb a wall without the need of a test, while the general Speed skill Scale Sheer Surfaces allows a model to climb up to double their movement distance using this trope without making a test.

Video Games

• Cloudbuilt and Super Cloudbuilt has a lot of vertical platforms, so expect to be doing this a lot.
• In The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, Hulk's leg muscles are strong enough to allow him to run up buildings and mountains.
• Mario can do this in Super Mario World if he runs at a purple incline block first.
  • These purple incline blocks appear in e-reader exclusive level of Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3 except now they can be used to have Mario run on ceilings!
• Ever since the Sands of Time series, this has been a staple of the Prince of Persia games, both vertically and horizontally. It's accomplished via Le Parkour, so it's less extreme than most examples, but it's still beyond human capabilities.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic himself, and various other characters, can run on walls in any direction indefinitely, provided they keep going fast enough. And provided the floor leading up to the wall is a ramp of increasing incline. Fortunately, in Sonic's world it frequently is. Sonic is capable of doing this when there is water falling down the wall.
  • Sonic CD's Palmtree Panic stage features pseudo-3D wall runs as its main gimmick.
• [PROTOTYPE]: Alex Mercer can do it as well. While simply running up or along walls is pretty good, stopping will make him fall... unless the "use" key is pressed while facing the wall which makes him latch on and climb, Spider-Man-style. He can't traverse ceilings, though.
• Wallrunning is present in Call of Duty: Black Ops III and Call Of Duty Infinite Warfare.
• Titanfall and Titanfall 2: The most common form of movement used to get around for Pilots. And not just on specific walls, but on anything that even classifies as a wall.
• In My Hero One's Justice, following up on certain attacks that plant an opponent to the wall will temporarily lead to both players fighting on the wall as if it were the floor.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • In the Sequel Hook movie of the first game's Final Mix, Roxas runs up a skyscraper as he and Riku fend off Neoshadows together. The exact context for this moment wouldn't be made clear for several years.
  • In Kingdom Hearts II, Sora recreates this moment while fighting Xemnas.
  • In Kingdom Hearts III, Sora can finally run freely across certain walls during gameplay, indicated by a glowing effect
• In Shovel Knight campaign Specter of Torment, by jumping upon certain walls, Specter Knight can run up on them for a few metres before falling down. During that time he can jump off them to get significant horizontal speed.
• In Yo! Noid 2: Enter the Void, Noid can cross longer horizontal distance by jumping diagonally towards a wall while running, which allows him to briefly run along the wall. Gravity still applies, so this isn't useful for very long unless it's combined with Building Swing or a Wall Jump.
• In Sundered, Eshe can run up sheer walls after obtaining the Gravitational Boots. She needs to start at the base of the wall, and she’ll fall off if she stops moving partway. Corrupting the Gravitational Boots into Atlach-Nacha’s Grip replaces this ability with a Wall Crawl.
• Recurring staple in games developed by Insomniac Games.
  • Sunset Overdrive features wall-running as one of its major forms of transportation, which also earns the player Experience Points.
  • The Spider-Man games carry over the mechanic almost unchanged, albeit with smoother controls and faster speed.
  • Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart presents a similar ability, though confined to specific, magnetic walls.
• Star Wars:
  • Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast and its sequel Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy have this as an undocumented Jedi power: once your Force Speed and Force Jump powers get strong enough, with the right combination of controls you can jump onto a wall and run along it for a few seconds.
  • Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, from the same developers as the aforementioned Titanfall games, has wall-running as a traversal option for certain walls.
• Ys IX: Monstrum Nox: White Cat's Heaven's Run ability allows her and her allies to run straight up walls, allowing the player to easily climb most buildings.

Web Comics

• In El Goonish Shive, Elliot needs to return a cell phone a girl dropped, but there's a crowd in the way, so he runs up the wall of the hallway. He refers to this as "going around them," and sees nothing exceptional about it.

Western Animation

• Code Lyoko: On Lyoko, Ulrich sometimes also run up vertical surfaces with his Super Sprint.
• Steven Universe: Peridot jogs up a ninety-degree cliff face as casually as running along the ground. As she's a Gem, it's probable this is just a unique ability of hers- and, keeping with the tradition of Gem abilities, it's revealed with very little fanfare and isn't even a successful getaway.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In the Superhero Episode "Power Ponies", Pinkie Pie as Fili-second can run on the side of buildings just as fast as on the ground.
• In Ben 10, Ben regularly uses XLR8's Super-Speed to do this and, as shown in "Lucky Girl", he's fast enough to avoid projectiles while wall running.
• X-Men: The Animated Series has Nightcrawler do this in his debut episode — which is odd because his talent (besides teleportation) is Wall Crawling.
• Miraculous Ladybug: In the first episode, both Ladybug and Cat Noir do a fairly long run on the walls of Parisian buildings. Their powersets clearly involve superhuman agility and defying gravity.
• Zuko runs up a wall to get over some booby traps in a season 3 episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender while he and Aang are going through a Raiders of the Lost Parody style temple.
• Family Guy: In "Fecal Matters", Meg does this during a parody of the Quicksilver scene.

Real Life

• Many birds are capable of doing this by flapping their wings to increase traction as they run, even while they are too young to fly. It has been suggested that this behavior was also present in other feathered dinosaurs.
• You can perform a literal wall run in a space station. Since there's no gravity in the outer space, calling a surface a wall would be redundant. The only question is how you keep your feet on the wall...
• Wall Running is a thing that actually exists that real people can do. Granted, it's for only a few steps, but it still is an actual thing that is done in Le Parkour and Freerunning.

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