Not Allowed To Grow Up / Western Animation

Show with their own pages:

• The Simpsons

---

Individual examples:

#-L

• Adventure Time:
  • Zig-zagged by Finn: At first, he aged in real time from 12 to 15. The staff apparently realized the show would last quite a while, and so he spends the bulk of the series' eight years at 16. Once it became clear the show was ending, Finn turned 17 in the show's final season.
  • Inverted with Jake's kids who, due to their magical hybrid genetics, age into adulthood over the course of a few weeks, freeing him up to be Finn's roommate again.
• In Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic has two birthdays. Tails is still 4 1/2 over the course of the series.
• Alvin and the Chipmunks have been singing their songs since the 1950s, but through numerous albums, several animated shows, and several movies, they don't seem to have aged a day.
• Arthur ran for over 25 years, but Arthur and the other characters remained the same ages for much of the show's run. For example:
  • He and his friends are still in third grade. It's been stated that Ratburn will be resigning as a third grade teacher and become a kindergarten teacher next year (thus likely D.W.'s teacher) but that never happens despite the fact that Buster passed the third grade exams in season 1 (1996).
  • To get an idea of just how ludicrous this became, if the characters actually aged in real time like people in the real world do, Arthur and his third-grade friends would be 33 years old, Prunella and the other fourth graders (and the kids held back, like Binky) would be 34, and the four-year-olds like D.W. and the Tibble twins would be 29.
  • Oddly Kate, Arthur's baby sister, is the only character who ages. She's starting to speak and becoming more toddler-like, and with that, she's losing her ability to speak with non-anthropomorphic animals.
  • This is finally averted in season 19, where in the finale the gang begins fourth grade. But in the next season, D.W. is still in Ms. Morgan's class...
    • What's more averted is that Arthur and his friends begin 4th grade finally in Arthur's First Day.
    • Even further averted in the series finale, where they are all shown as adults.
  • Lampshaded in the New Year's Eve episode:
    D.W. I get to stay up 'til midnight, right?
    Mom You're too young, D.W.
    D.W. Why am I always too young? It's like I never get any older! What if I'm trapped in some kind of time warp and I never get any older? Is that my fault?
• In the third season premiere from The Amazing World of Gumball, when Gumball and Darwin's voices are getting deeper (as were their voice actors'), it is mentioned they are part of the 1% of people who never grow up. After that, their voice actors were replaced with younger ones (which were replaced again after they hit puberty, with Darwin's being replaced a third time). Despite this, none of the other characters appear to age either, though they do commemorate birthdays. The series' timeline spans at least 7 years (2010 to 2017), with the show actually airing from 2011 to 2019, but Gumball, Darwin, and Anais are still 12, 10 and 4, respectively. As of 2021, if they aged, Gumball would be 23, Darwin would be 21, and Anais would be 15.
• Steve Smith from American Dad!. He was initially 13, later became 14, then 15, but later reverted back to 14 and has remained there since. This also applies to Steve's friends and high school classmates.
• Played with in Beavis And Butthead:
  • The original series run only lasted four years, so the boys not aging was less noticable.
  • The 2011 revival was presumably set in that year with the boys watching Twilight and Barack Obama being president. Though Word of God said they'd thought about focusing on Beavis and Butthead as adults in this series.
  • The Beavis And Butthead Do The Universe movie actually uses Time Travel to explain how the guys got from 1998 to 2022.
  • The follow up season continues the movie with the pair living in the 2020s but some episodes focus on "Old Beavis" and "Old Butthead" in an Alternate Universe where they never travelled through time.
• It is the intent of the producers of Bob's Burgers that Tina, Louise, Gene, and their classmates will stay at their current ages throughout the run of the show, although they may do some intellectual aging.
• Caillou, if perhaps allowed to grow up a bit, experiences a very dragged-out childhood. In the earliest books from the 1990s, he is a baby. In the very early installments of the television series, he is 3. From then on, he is officially 4, as stated in the theme song, "I'm just a kid who's 4/Each day I grow some more!" However, in later seasons he takes more steps into school and eventually starts attending playschool and mixing more with older kids. And that's where things stand as of 2017.
• Camp Candy: In the season three episode "When It Rains...It Snows", John mentions the season one episode "Christmas in July" and refers to it as last year. Even though this show takes place over two summers, the kids don't appear any older in the third season than in the first season.
• Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood is another one that uses this somewhat oddly. We're given regular indicators that the characters are becoming older and more mature, such as them being told that they're older and big enough to think of what to do. Daniel also has a sister that is born during the series and now is supposed to be 14 months old according to Word of God and also showing signs growing, such as taking her first steps. Yet, we see no physical signs of growth in most of the characters and everyone is still attending class together with the same teacher.
• No one is really quite sure how time works in Danny Phantom, and many a fan have had a headache over trying to make a timeline. Continuity clearly exists, but the characters remain 14 and in freshman year through a Christmas and summer — not to mention, three years on the air. By the finale, following real time, they should all be seniors.
• Daria has this trope to an extent. Time does pass in the show, seasons one through three was Daria's tenth grade, seasons four and five are 11 and 12 respectively. But characters' physical appearances never change, neither do their clothes, thanks to the Limited Wardrobe. Quinn is an exception as she gets a new shirt at some point - it's near identical to her old one.
• The core, classic stars of the Disney canon are forever the same age, while technology blooms and evolves around them with each passing decade. Mickey and Minnie Mouse are eighty years old, and yet still forever dating, living in separate houses, and working minimum wage jobs like young adults... with their co-stars not too far behind.
  • The comics are usually no different, but in a subversion, Don Rosa's Donald/Scrooge McDuck comics almost always take place in the late '50s, with small, subtle liberties taken with space technology and the like. It's understandable, as his crown jewel The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck has a very set timeline that stays consistent with the rest of his stories (Don Rosa has even mapped out when his version of the characters were born/will die). It must be noted, however, that his predecessor and faithfully-followed inspiration Carl Barks did not feel this way, and like all interpretations of Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck, froze the character's ages and let the environment around them roll with the times.
  • All Disney characters mentioned above are adults, but what do you think of Huey, Dewey, and Louie? They've been kids for 73 years now! Same goes for Monty and Ferdie (Mickey's nephews), who have been kids since FRIGGIN 1932. Funny thing to point out here is that Huey, Dewey, and Louie are actually 15 years older than their great uncle Scrooge. Oh, and they're 57 years older than their uncle Rumpus McFowl. They seem to have only aged twice, once after their introduction (in which they looked and acted much younger than they do today), and in the show Quack Pack, after which they quickly reverted back to their current ages everywhere else.
  • This is averted with the Goof Troop cast. Max and PJ were 11 in the show (1992), 14 in A Goofy Movie (1995) and 18-19 in An Extremely Goofy Movie (2000). However, in Max's limited appearances outside the Goof Troop universe (House of Mouse and the Christmas specials) he has a somewhat inconsistent age but does still seem to age in Real Time. This would put Max's, PJ's and the friend Bobby's date of birth around the early 1980s putting them as of now in their early 30's.
    • Within the universe, Goofy and Pete age as well, though they wouldn't have been born until roughly 15-20 years after they were invented.
• The Easter Bunny Is Comin' To Town takes place over multiple Easters, but the kids stay the same age from year to year.
• The Fairly OddParents!: Timmy is still described as being 10, even though he has had at least three summer vacation episodes, but then again it's just a show; we should really just relax. He's had at least one 11th birthday episode, and an anniversary of meeting his fairies in one movie, whereupon his age at the time of meeting his fairies was retconned to 9. But he's still treated as a 10-year-old.
  • A Fairly Odd Movie: Grow Up, Timmy Turner! has Timmy as a 23-year-old. However, he's still in 5th grade but must face the choice of whether to grow up or not, specifically whether to fall in love or not, with The Big Damn Kiss to seal the deal if he does.
  • There was an episode ("Timmy's Secret Wish") where it is revealed Timmy actually wished that he — and everyone around him — would never age, and they've been living the same year for 50 years. However, everything at the end of the episode is reversed and people go back to aging.
  • There is also a TV special where Timmy discusses how TV characters stay the same age, and this is his motivation for wishing for a magical remote that takes him "into the TV".
• Family Guy uses it and plays it for comedy, except Chris has moved up from junior high to being a freshman at Meg's high school. In an especially over-the-top example, Bonnie Swanson had been pregnant in her third trimester for nearly her entire tenure on the show, only finally giving birth in "Ocean's Three and a Half" one month away from a full decade after her debut; her unborn child is not allowed to grow up at all. Much like Stewie's aging freeze, it has not gone without some Lampshade Hanging.
  Loretta: We have had it with [Quagmire's] disrespect for women. We're petitioning the city to have him removed from the neighborhood.
  Bonnie: Yeah, I don't want to bring a new baby into the world with him running around.
  Peter: Okay, first of all, Bonnie, you've been pregnant for like six years, alright, either have the baby or don't.
  • Another example of this both subverted and played straight in the episode "Sibling Rivalry". In the episode, Peter ends up "donating" (i.e. having to hastily replace) a large amount of sperm to a sperm bank before getting a vasectomy. Over the course of the episode, enough time passes for a woman to get Peter's sperm, impregnate herself, grow the baby to full term, deliver the baby, and then for the baby to grow to be Stewie's age... except that, over this entire time period, no noticeable time passes for Stewie (who should be 1-2 years older by now).
  • Also, in "Back to the Pilot", Stewie and Brian go back in time from 2011 to 1999, where they meet themselves, despite the fact that both of them are less than ten years old (so they shouldn't have been born yet). Towards the end, a bunch of alternate-universe Brians and Stewies from 2011 show up - you'd think one pair would be a very old Brian and teenage Stewie, but no. They also go 5 years into the future and no one has aged there, either.
• Both played straight and averted in The Flintstones, with Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm aging somewhat realistically throughout the years. In the series they grew from babies to toddlers in Seasons 3-6, in the TV specials of the 1970's they were young children, in The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show show they're teenagers, and in the TV specials "I Yabba-Dabba Doo!" and "Holly Rock-A-Bye-Baby", they're adults who marry each other and have children of their own. Their parents, however, have looked exactly the same throughout the series and specials.
• Used very oddly in Franklin. Throughout most of the series, the kids were in kindergarten, but they were finally allowed to advance to the first grade in the DVD release Back to School with Franklin, which came after the fifth season. Best not to think about this at all when it comes to either Bear's little sister Beatrice or Franklin's little sister, Harriet. In the first season, Bear's sister was born, but a couple of seasons later, he said that she was four years old. And Franklin's little sister wasn't born (yes, born, not hatched) until after the fourth season in the film Franklin and the Green Knight: The Movie. Yet by the next film, Franklin's Magic Christmas, she was already talking and walking and by the time of Back to School with Franklin, her speech had advanced and she was said to be just a year away from being able to attend preschool.
• Futurama:
  • Despite dates in this show advancing with real time, the child characters like Cubert, Dwight, and the Cookieville Minimum-Security orphans never grow any older. This rule isn't even consistently applied, as Jrrr, Lrrr and Ndnd's son who first appeared as a baby in Season 2's "The Problem with Popplers", becomes a 12-year old by Season 7's "T.: The Terrestrial".
  • Amy was originally meant to be in college and an intern at Planet Express. The show would lampshade this a few times, calling her a "long-term intern" in Bender's Big Score, for instance, but she was eventually allowed to graduate college.
• The kids in Hey Arnold! never seem to age through 100 episodes and one movie, despite the fact that judging by the order of their holidays, they've been in 4th grade for 2-3 years. (Christmas->Valentine's Day->Halloween->Thanksgiving->Veterans Day->Spring Break->April Fool's Day — In that order). They age about a year and a half in the second movie, even though it appears to take place in recent years, with beepers being obsolete and replaced by cellphones and Wi-Fi.
• Jackie Chan Adventures: Jade and Paco never physically age throughout the show's five seasons (though their voices do change due to Children Voicing Children). The exact timeline of the show is unclear, but at least a few years have transpired according to this line from Uncle in the series finale:
  Uncle: All these years, Black has learned nothing. Magic must defeat magic!
• Johnny Test: Lampshaded by Dukey in the episode "The Return of Super Smarty Pants" after Johnny had been taken over by his crazy Yandere pants created by his sisters in a previous episode that gave him intellectual abilities by imploring him to remember of all the times they spent together juxtaposed by flashbacks of episodes of their adventures since 2005.
  Dukey: Remember me?! We've been together for years but surprisingly haven't aged very much.
• King of the Hill offered a variation on the Trope. Bobby actually ages a year or two on the show but never hits puberty, and thus his character never really changes. This is explained in-series as Bobby being a late bloomer, but behind the scenes, this is mainly because it would ruin his usage as a comic foil to his dad Hank and also require a change in voice actors. His friends Joseph and Connie have episodes that involve the onset of puberty (although Bobby is slightly older than them), and by the last episode, everyone in Bobby's class has hit puberty aside from him.
• Liberty's Kids takes place in the years 1773 through 1788. The main characters do not age even one year throughout the entire series. This is especially odd as notably several of the adult characters (especially Benjamin Franklin) get more and more aged as time goes on.
• Averted by The Long Long Holiday, which takes place over 6 years. If you look closely, the child characters do get taller over the course of the series.
• The Loud House: At first, despite there being three episodes set on separate April Fools' Days ("April Fools Rules", "Fool's Paradise", and "Fool Me Twice"), meaning at least two years have passed in-universe, none of the cast appear any older or are stated to have aged a year. This was eventually averted as of Season 5, where all of the cast ages a year. Lori goes to college, Lily goes to preschool, is potty-trained, wears clothes more consistently, and speaks full sentences, and Lincoln and his friends go to middle school. Furthermore, sometime in the 6th season, Leni gets her driver's license and has the ability to drive.
  • However, the timeframe of its spin-off series The Casagrandes is less clear. The Season 1 Casagrandes episode "Cursed" and at least two episodes of Season 2 of The Casagrandes ("A Very Casagrandes Christmas" and "Tee'd Off") clearly take place during Season 5 of The Loud House, with references to Lori being in Fairway University, and there are two episodes set on separate Halloweens ("New Haunts" and "Curse of the Candy Goblin"), but if all of Season 2 was meant to take place in the same timeframe as Season 5 of The Loud House, then Bobby ought to be in business school, Carlota ought to be in fashion designer school, and Carlitos ought to be potty-trained.

M-Z

• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • The Cutie Mark Crusaders are a trio of fillies who were on the hunt for their cutie marks until Season 5. During that time, other foals in the series were getting theirs about Once a Season. Finally averted in "Crusaders of the Lost Mark" where all three of them finally got their cutie marks. Age-wise, their voice actresses have aged, and thus Applebloom and Sweetie Belle voices have deepened; however, they still use the same foal designs they did in season 1. The series handwaves it by saying only a year has passed since episode 1. Eventually, this was subverted. The season 7 episode "Forever Filly" has Rarity trying to bond with her sister but treating Sweetie Belle as if she was a little filly. It lampshades how much the Crusaders have developed since Season 1, even featuring them with slightly taller designs than in previous seasons. The CMC seem more like preteens in later seasons rather than the little kids they were in Season 1.
  • The Cake twins by the Season 6 episode On Your Marks they still seemed to be infants, although they no longer wore diapers like in Baby Cakes. However, as of A Hearth's Warming Tale they have been shown behaving more autonomously and singing carols (though their distinct voices aren't heard), so they do seem to be aging—at a rate somewhere between a pony's and a human's. In The Mane Thing About You, Pinkie has a line that suggests that the Cake twins are either one year old or are almost one year old. This explains why they're talking and also shows that there's been at least two years in-series since the first episode. However, "The Mane Thing About You" also plays this straight as the foals still look and (mostly) act like infants despite being toddler-aged. Zig-Zagged in the Series Finale; they're adults in the Distant Finale, but still babies in the flashback to the present despite the fact that they should be at least over 5◊ by which time they'd have the distinct 5-year old design.
  • Gummy is Pinkie's pet baby crocodile. He doesn't ever get any larger no matter how many seasons go by. He might actually be an adult though, as his internal voice in the 100th episode implies. This is later subverted when the Distant Finale shows that Gummy eventually grew big enough to be ridden.
  • Dragons age differently than ponies, but Spike has spent the entire series as a "baby dragon" (which seems to be the equivalent of a 9-13-year-old). He didn't start maturing until Season 8's "Molt Down" where he molted and gained wings. He's still a baby dragon but he's an older one. The finale shows that he aged into an adult several years into the future.
• Even though PAW Patrol has been on the air for almost a decade, Ryder remains ten years old, and his team of pups remain puppies. Considering the authority that these characters have despite their age, makes one wonder if age works differently in this universe.
• One episode of Pinky and the Brain starts with a show where they finally figure out that the current actress playing the kid role is well past the Suspension of Disbelief age. Brain tries to further his goals by applying for the freed up role.
• This is actual Word of God in Pocoyo:
  He is 4, and his birthday is the 14th October. But he's always 4, I don't know how he does it!
• Pingu, his sister Pinga, and their friends did not age during the decade-plus run of the original series, carrying over to Pingu In The City.
• The Powerpuff Girls:
  • The titular girls were five years old in Craig McCracken's school film, the pilots, 75 series episodes in the space of five years (including an episode where they celebrate their birthday), a movie and two specials. This could be justified due to them being Artificial Humans, but their peers don't age accordingly either.
  • The 2016 series features the girls as seeming older than before. Their new voice actresses speak in lower voices and they act more like ten- or eleven-year-olds than five-year-olds. Despite this, they don't look any older than they did at five, they're still in Ms. Keane's class despite having several school picture days, and Princess only turns six during the series.
• In Ready Jet Go!, this trope is zig-zagged. In season 2, Mindy turns five years old and finally gets to accompany the older kids to space. However, the other kids (Jet, Sean, Sydney, Mitchell, Lillian, and Zerk) don't seem any older than they did before in season 2. Not to mention that there are two Halloween episodes, two episodes that take place at wintertime, and the annual soapbox derby is held in two episodes.
• Rugrats: The title characters remained babies for a good decade or so.
  • Eventually, however, this was averted when they were aged up ten years for the All Grown Up! spin-off.
  • Taken to ludicrous lengths when baby Dil was introduced. If not from the sheer number of episodes, then at the very least, the number of holidays that passed before Dil was introduced would lead one to infer that close to a year must have passed from the beginning of the show. There was both a Christmas special and a Chanukah special, and a Passover special, and a summer vacation special (where they went to Las Vegas—your guess is as good as mine), and the three-episode season finale that set up Didi's pregnancy was almost pointedly set in autumn. Nine months later, maybe eight if it was a relatively brief pregnancy, Tommy is still just one year old, and after the time skip, their ages are 11 and 10. Pregnancy Does Not Work That Way!
  • However, floating timelines have their own conditions for each series, where with the Rugrats series, it is possible that the cast were stuck in the year of 1991 (when the series debuted) for 10 years, since no references to the current year or pop-culture were ever made, since the series is set in the point of view of infants and toddlers. However, one of the episodes from the later seasons implied Charlotte was a teen in the 80s and Chaz is shown on the Internet in the second film.
  • In the third movie, Chaz states that it's his and Kira's first anniversary, yet the babies don't seem to have aged a day.
  • In one episode, "No More Cookies", Angelica tries to refrain from eating her Trademark Favorite Food. Flashbacks show her age from a newborn who is practically bald, to a one-year-old baby who is awkwardly learning to walk, to a taller, more confident 2-year-old, and finally to a mischievous 3-year-old, like she is for most of the series. None of the other babies is given such a clear age progression, although the Mother's Day special briefly shows what Chuckie looked like when he was a year younger and didn't have glasses, as well as one quick scene where Phil and Lil were tinier and had less hair, similar to Tommy.
• Scooby-Doo has the gang remain teenagers for years on end:
  • This is blatantly used in an episode of The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, where Scooby sees a Bad Future where the Monster of the Week has taken over. When he meets Scrappy and Flim Flam, they haven't aged a day. This is jarring in the fact that everyone else has: Daphne is fatter and has noticeable lines, Shaggy has grown a beard and looks older, even Bogel and Weird look older despite being ghosts.
  • Though if one takes the live action films to be canon, Velma lampshades it by saying something about Scrappy not being a puppy, that he really just has a pituitary gland problem.
  • Actually it depends on the series or movie. What's New, Scooby-Doo? and the Direct-To-Video films portray them as adults (in their early 30's to be exact). If they are either adults or teens is never consistent.
  • Scooby-Doo itself has been around for over forty years. This is lampshaded by Shaggy in Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated.
    Shaggy: Yeah, we've been teenagers for, like, ever!
  • Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island is a sequel to the 1969 cartoon and depicts the characters as adults in their 20s, with Daphne's job kickstarting the plot. The sequel Scooby-Doo: Return to Zombie Island retcons them back into high schoolers.
  • Though no matter what age they are they are always called "Meddling Kids" regardless.
• Timmy hasn't aged through the 5 seasons of Shaun the Sheep or the entire run of his own show.
• The boys in South Park took three seasons to go from the third grade to the fourth. The show is now in its 26th season and they're still in fourth grade.
  • In a Simpsons-like (Simpsons Did It!) age fix, the episode "You Have 0 Friends" shows Stan's birth year as 2001... even though there was an episode in the fifth season when the boys went to fourth grade in a post-9/11 situation.
  • Stan is shown having his tenth birthday party and refers to the other main characters as also being ten. They were eight when the show started, so they are aging, just very slowly.
• Done rather blatantly in The Spongebob Squarepants Movie. Despite winning 31 years' worth of Employee of the Month Awards, Spongebob is only 28.
• Steven Universe: The first five seasons pass without Steven or any of the other child characters getting visibly older (and their originally pubescent voice actors started pitching their voices up to sound the same even as they age), even though about two years occur in-universe. Being a Half-Human Hybrid is shown to have slowed Steven's aging, but this doesn't apply to the others. However, Steven Universe: The Movie jumps forward two years, by which point Steven (who's now sixteen), Connie, and Peedee are noticeably taller. Bizarrely, Onion (who's younger than Steven and Connie) looks exactly the same in the movie as he did pre-Time Skip, and hasn't aged in general since the start of the series (four years In-Universe).
• Subverted in G2 of Strawberry Shortcake. There was a timeskip in 2005 where characters all received new redesigns that aged them up from vaguely seven-year-olds to vaguely preteens. The other incarnations play the trope straight.
• VeggieTales: The child characters, including Junior Asparagus and Laura Carrot, stay roughly the same age over the course of the series, over two decades.
• The Venture Brothers zig-zags this with the title twins, but oddly enough it seems to be at least partly justified. In season two, Dean says they are sixteen when Myra Brandish (who may or may not be reliable) claims they should be nineteen. By the middle of season four, despite getting high school diplomas from their learning beds, they are apparently not eighteen nor close to it. In season six, Dean is just starting college. Some justification may be that they've actually died several times and been replaced by clones. While this has only happened once that we know of during the show's run (allegedly fifteen times over their entire histories), it could have been more. Also, some of the clones may be younger than others. And in any case, their father has been known to wait a month or so before replacing them.

---