Basic Trope: An animal who isn't anthropomorphic... for the most part.
- Straight: Alice the dog is sapient and makes humanlike expressions, but still has a very doglike mentality and stays on all fours.
- Exaggerated: Alice is almost completely a normal dog, but she does occasionally smile, nod, etc. like a human.
- Downplayed: Alice is mostly a normal dog, but she's still sapient, speaks in Animal Talk, and sometimes even walks on two legs or holds things for the sake of a gag.
- Justified: Alice is genetically engineered.
- Inverted: Alice is a human who's delusional and thinks she's a dog so acts almost exactly like one.
- Subverted:
- Alice seemed to be shaking her head no, but she only had a fly on her head.
- Alice behaves like a regular dog... but she was just playing dumb. She's really a Civilised Animal all along.
- Bob is reading too much into the overlap between human and canine expressions.
- Double Subverted:
- Parodied:
- Zigzagged: Alice will sometimes act completely doglike, sometimes nearly normal, and sometimes outright anthropomorphic Depending on the Writer.
- Averted:
- Alice is a Funny Animal.
- Alice is a completely regular dog.
- Enforced: "Let's give this dog some humanlike expressions. It'll make her easier to emote!"
- Lampshaded: "Sometimes it seems like she knows more than she lets on, but she still eats out of the trash."
- Invoked:
- Exploited: Bob, Alice's owner, can tell what Alice wants by her humanlike expressions.
- Defied:
- Discussed: "Some of these animals can make expressions almost like humans! It's almost scary!"
- Conversed: "Why did that dog on that cartoon nod? I thought she was a normal dog!"
- Implied:
- Deconstructed:
- Reconstructed:
- Played for Laughs: Alice is a Silent Snarker.
- Played for Drama: When the chips are down, Alice makes a humanlike Oh, Crap! face.
- Played for Horror: The humanlike expressions are given to a live-action dog to evoke Uncanny Valley.
Back to Nearly Normal Animal.
