Basic Trope: Otherwise normal animal that can communicate freely with human beings.
- Straight: Alice is a squirrel who lives in a tree, stores nuts for the winter and talks to our Plucky Kid Hero on a regular basis.
- Exagerated: Alice is an extremely intelligent, verbose, eloquent talking squirrel who has multiple human friends and is considered an equal member of society despite that, she still lives in a tree and stores nuts for the winter.
- Downplayed: Alice speaks via speech bubbles, ala Hobbes and Dogbert.
- Justified:
- Alice is a genetically engineered animal designed for human speech.
- Alice is from a magical fantasy world where animals frequently talk because that's how God/the gods designed it, or she was enchanted by a wizard to be able to talk.
- Alice is a sapient animal that evolved into having the ability to speak like a person.
- Inverted: Not just only he can speak human, Herman the Human has the ability to speak animal.
- Subverted: Plucky Kid Hero Bob keeps telling his friends about his new friend Alice, when he finally shows his friends, she is just an ordinary (albeit very tame) Squirrel.
- Double Subverted: Then she stands up on her hind legs and greets her friends in human speech.
- Parodied: A fierce lion comes up to Bob, speaking like a New York cab driver.
- Zigzagged: Kid Hero Bob tells his friends about talking squirrel Alice, but she appears a normal squirrel. Then she greets the people with human speech- but only because Bob is using ventriloquism to fool his friends. But Alice CAN actually talk human language. She just didn't find it necessary to do so that moment.
- Averted: Animals do not talk in this story.
- Enforced: The story is designed to appeal to kids who are seen to like this sort of thing, and/or is inspired by mythology where this trope is normal.
- Lampshaded:
- "Hi, I'm Alice the talking squirrel."
- "I'm just a regular Squirrel in a crazy world!"
- Invoked: A lonely mad scientist genetically engineers animals to talk to him and be his company.
- Exploited: Alice went to a wizard and asked them to make her talk, like how some of her animal peers do.
- Defied: Alice's vocal chords are removed.
- Discussed: "Alice is pretty cool. just don't watch her when she is burying her nuts."
- Conversed: "Oh look a talking cow! I get the feeling PETA puts cute talking animals in these shows to make us feel guilty about eating meat!"
- Implied: It is mentioned that Alice is able to speak, but she's never seen doing so.
- Deconstructed: Alice is a genetically engendered animal created by evolutionary biologists for science, She has since lost the ability to communicate with her own species, and thus other squirrels shun her, she tries to make friends with humans, but humans either think they are hallucinating, run in terror or worse try to put Alice in a carnival freak show, Alice dies lonely and alienated from both her own kind and humans.
- Reconstructed: After meeting Alice and discovering how intelligent she is, people conclude she is no different from humans and allow her into society, eventually scientists create a mate for Alice so talking squirrels can become a proper species.
Back to Talking Animal.
