Only Six Faces / Western Animation

• Appears after the second episode in Aaagh! It's the Mr. Hell Show!, due to the animation team working within a limited timeframe. An outstanding example is the Scooby-Doo parody characters reappearing in later sketches with different names and in a different context. Viewers didn't seem to mind, as the series was a British sketch-comedy and having a limited number of faces made it seem like an imitation of sketch comedy's tendency to have a small group of actors playing every role.
• The characters in Angels of Jarm all use the same basic body design, including the same face with large eyes and a small nose and mouth on a circular head.
• Angel Wars: One of the ways they helped keep the budget down for this Religious Edutainment show was they usually only had faces for main characters, and even then, they were sometimes copies of other characters—for example, Normal Kuburt's face was clearly a stretched clone of Eli's. And whenever the animators could get away with having helmeted faces, they did so: firefighters' helmets and space suits were examples for humans, and combat helmets for angel Red Shirt characters and demon Mooks were practically ubiquitous. And, of course, those helmets were also clones of each other.
• A lot of the characters in Codename: Kids Next Door follow this pattern, including Sector V, Numbuhs 86 and 362 and The Delightful Children From Down The Lane, excluding the tall, lanky one.
• The DC Animated Universe's simplified art style post-BTAS has shades of this, especially the generic 'male' body shape used for otherwise very different characters.
  • Very apparent in Justice League in the few rare instances when Batman takes off his mask and looks nearly identical to Superman.
  • And lampshaded (we hope) in the Superman episode "Knight Time", where Superman is able to 'be' Batman by putting on his costume and disguising his voice. Several characters do wonder, though, whether Batman seems taller all of a sudden.^note  Superman has a cleft in his chin, which differentiates him from Batman, even when wearing Batman's costume. Which is a joke considering that in their previous crossover episodes, Superman and Batman are the same height.
  • Also lampshaded in this dialog:
    Superman: Do I look like Batman to you?
    Flash: Yeah, you kinda do, especially when you get all scowly like that.
  • Even more evident with the female characters. Justice League eventually broke out of this, with broad-shouldered Wonder Woman and realistically-built Amanda Waller, but earlier efforts had "Bruce Timm Generic Female #2" for almost every distaff character. This is parodied in Shortpacked!, when Batman studies video footage of a female criminal, before concluding that, since the hair isn't visible, she's impossible to identify.
• A lot of animals from the Dingo Pictures cartoons are constantly reused for their films.
• The Fairly OddParents! uses this relentlessly, with most child or teenage characters having the exact same face, with the possible variations only extending to two different types of noses and two different types of eyebrows. Timmy, Cosmo, Wanda, Vicky, Chip Skylark, Chester, Trixie, Veronica and many more suffer.
• In Iron Man: Armored Adventures, the same characters repeatedly walk behind the main characters in school.
• Don Hertzfeldt's cartoons, which is lampshaded in It's Such a Beautiful Day.
• In Jem most of the females share a similar face. The Jem and the Holograms (IDW) comic reboot averts this by making the designs more diverse.
• Every character in JOT shares not only the same face, but the same body design (a white circle with hands and feet). The only difference is that most of the characters have hair to differentiate them from the main character, Jot, who doesn't have hair.
• Making Fiends. Vendetta has slightly distinguishable facial features and expressions from the others, especially in the webisodes, but the only difference between everyone else's faces is that they have either a pointed nose or a rounded nose. Also, the adults have the exact same faces as children (unless they have mustaches), so there's no Animation Anatomy Aging to diversify.
• Nearly every incarnation of My Little Pony has featured a cast of identical ponies, distinguished only by their colors, because all the toys used the exact same mold. In the 1980s and 2000s series, they even often had the same hairstyle. Friendship is Magic gave the main characters unique eyes and hairstyles, but their face shapes and bodies are identical to most every other pony. Stallions were given larger, more angular snouts and are visibly larger. Some characters were designed with entirely unique heads, bodies, and/or facial features, most of which were recycled into new background extras in Season 2.
  • Their EQUESTRIA GIRLS counterparts are similar, differing eyes and hairstyles but otherwise similar faces.
  • Oddly inverted with Trixie, who originally had a unique eye and horn design◊^note She had eyelashes used only by her and Mayor Mare, only one reflection in her eye, and a fatter longer horn than typical unicorns but as of To Where And Back Again has been given a more standard design◊ shared by countless characters.
  • Lampshaded in one episode when Ember is unable to tell Twilight Sparkle and Starlight Glimmer apart, remarking how they look and act exactly the same. It also doubles as Racial Face Blindness.
• A deliberate example is Right Now Kapow: a Sketch Comedy in which six “actors” (Candy, Diamond, Dog, Ice Cream, Moon and Plant) play every character.
• Robot Chicken parodies this within a Cloverfield parody.
  Girl: Which one's Josh? All the guys here kinda look like the same generic douche. (pan to show more partygoers; all the male ones shown share the same face)
• Often lampshaded in South Park:
  • In "Super Best Friends," Stan and Kyle get buzz cuts and identical clothes as part of joining a cult, and don't even wear their trademark winter hats. Stan, Kyle, and Butters (who also joined the cult) look identical now, and it becomes impossible to tell them apart. Then, when Stan decides to leave, he and Kyle get confused as to which one is Stan and which is Kyle:
    Stan: Let's go!
    Kyle: I'm not going anywhere!
    Stan: Goddamnit, I'm not going with you! I wanna stay here!
    Kyle: Huh? I thought you wanted to leave!
    Stan: Oh wait, who am I again?
    
    Stan: Kyle, I'm beginning to think this was a bad idea.
    Butters: I'm not Kyle, I'm Butters, I thought you were Kyle.
    Stan: No, I'm Stan.
    Kyle: You're Stan? Where's Kenny?
    Stan: Who are you?
    Kyle: I'm Kyle!
    Cartman: Heheh, guess who I am, you guys!
  • In the Terrance and Phillip episode, "Not Without My Anus", the character "Ugly Bob" wears a paper bag over his head. When he takes it off, he looks exactly like all the other characters, but they react as if he's traumatically hideous.
  • Cleverly lampshaded in the episode "The Coon", in which after spending the entire episode keeping the other characters^note The only characters that Professor Chaos has crossed off his Mysterion identity list are the obvious ones: Token, Cartman, and Jimmy and Timmy — and the audience — guessing as to his identity, masked vigilante "Mysterion" finally removes his mask, revealing him to be... completely indistinguishable from every other boy in the show. Just to rub it in, the rest of the characters recognize him instantly, but don't say his name (and in a non-canon deleted scene would have had it be Kyle, who took the rap for the real Mysterion, but it would have just been a retread of the joke when Mysterion revealed himself just to Kyle). Later episodes reveal him to be Kenny.
  • "Naughty Ninjas" has the boys starting a ninja club to keep homeless people away from Kenny's house. Cartman tries to convince everyone Kyle shouldn't be in the club and tries to discuss it with the others but he keeps confusing everyone because most of them look the same with their hoods on (the exceptions being Cartman due to his size, Token and David because of their skin tones, and Jimmy who has his crutches).
  • Another episode has the girls create a league table of the boys' attractiveness... which is, naturally, entirely of the Informed variety.
  • Oddly enough, many of South Park's one-off characters are a complete aversion of this. The primary characters look similar because of a far more simplified character design from the early seasons, while characters introduced later have unique head shapes, hairstyles, hair colors, mouths, and eyes — they've got a ton of different Redneck characters that all look very distinct from one-another. And most of this characters are Acting for Two to boot.
  • In a particularly meta sequence in which the boys create an animated Christmas special featuring themselves (and which is represented by the original Spirit of Christmas special that served as a proto-pilot for the series), the boys react to the animated versions of themselves as though there were fine details that the audience is incapable of seeing:
    "They kind of look like us. I mean, Stan's got blue eyes and I've got a sharper nose, but I mean, they kind of look like us."
  • Possibly the best Lampshade Hanging however came in a Cracked magazine parody^note Cracked used to be a parody mag akin to MAD before it became a humor website. At one point in the comic, the characters go to a beach to gather sand to throw into a giant butt threatening their town, but due to the Limited Wardrobe trope, they overheat in their winter clothing and faint. They all wake up naked in a hospital bed, and the Stan and Kyle expies (who both have the exact same hair, because the show had not revealed how they actually looked without their hats at the time) can no longer tell which of them is which. The Cartman expy suggests they look under the covers, since "Kyle" is Jewish. You can work out the joke from there.
• Spider-Man: The New Animated Series had six background characters that were continuously reused in different contexts. Sometimes they even played different "roles" in the same episode.
• The religious-themed video series produced by Richard Rich's studio post- The Swan Princess feature characters that are almost visual clones of that movie's characters.
• Also happens with Titan Maximum, a Robot Chicken-styled series. Just watch the fight in the second to last episode. The same guy gets an ass-kicking no less than three times, two of those being at the same time in different spots.
• Comes up in many of the incarnations of Transformers, since so many characters are re-colors of other characters. This finally was addressed in Transformers: Animated, when it was explained that there were a few particular "body types" that were common, explaining why there were dozens of extras that looked like different colored Bumblebees and Arcees.
• In the Winx Club, every girl has the exact same body, head, and face shapes. If it weren't for the vastly different hairstyles, clothes, and colors you wouldn't be able to tell any of them apart. The background characters also fall victim to this, to the point where one character could be both a witch and a fairy. Sometimes it was just the same character with a different hairstyle while other scenes had repeated, recolored characters to fill out the masses; Shilly (a witch from Cloud Tower who featured a few times in the comics) makes an appearance (in a blue dress instead of a red one) in Season 4 as "Sally", one of Mitzi's friends. Not even the Winx escaped; there was a brown-haired Bloom in a crowd at Redfountain in Season 2.
  • Some characters are copied exactly. Priscilla (a red-headed girl in an all-green outfit) appears in both Alfea and Cloud Tower, leading many early fans of the show to believe that there was a pair of twins attending both schools. And Darma (Mitzi's fuschia-haired lackey in Season 4) showed up regularly in background shots from Cloud Tower, leading to a debate over whether or not she's actually a witch; the Cloud Tower version was never named or even spoken to (like most of the characters at Cloud Tower), so it's entirely possible that it really was her.
• Becomes extremely evident in most crowd shots seen in WordGirl where there are actually duplicates of the same people!
• This is a very common complaint about the female character designs in Young Justice (2010), especially where facial structure is concerned. If not for the differing skin/hair/eye colours, about 90% of the female characters would be identical in appearance. You know it's bad when Batgirl and M'gann or Dinah and Cassie look like they could be siblings as civilians.

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