Perspective Magic



"It's all about perspective."

- Old saying, probably related to painting, possibly applicable to everything.

These cows are small, but the ones out there are far away. But if we ignore that, much fun results.

See that huge giant on the horizon about to come and eat us? Just close an eye, pick him up between your fingers and drop him in a bottle until he learns his lesson.

Perspective Magic is a way for characters to play with the Fourth Wall, using the fact that they live in a 2-D world imitating 3-D to their advantage. Characters likely to use Perspective Magic are usually cartoons, wizards, gods, or just someone Genre Savvy enough to take a step back and manipulate their surroundings.

A few possible techniques used in Perspective Magic:
 * 1) Far away is small: Therefore you are the largest object in the world and can manipulate any other object accordingly. This may result in sun/moon/stars being plucked from the sky.
 * 2) Distance is relative: The house that looks like it's two leagues away is really just on the other end of the same page, walking "on the page" they can go there in a few steps.
 * 3) Tiny can be Titanic: A small object near you is no different than a large one far away, so you can do the inverse of 1 and use miniatures or toys to create life size replicas.
 * 4) Magnifying Glass Enlarger: By using a magnifying glass or other device, a character can literally enlarge an object.
 * 5) Existence requires visibility: Anything that can't be seen isn't hidden, it isn't there. Objects can thus be made to "disappear" in a Puff of Logic.

See also Depth Deception. Often used in the form of Grasp the Sun.

Advertising

 * One Starburst ad was this trope and nothing else.
 * In a Coke advert, a man takes the bottle off a billboard, drinks the contents and replaces it.
 * In a Tic Tac ad, a girl captures the man of her dreams in a transparent Tic Tac box.
 * The iPhone billboard commercial.
 * One car advert has a little girl picking up a cow from a field like it was a toy.

Anime & Manga

 * A villain from one of the Read or Die episodes had this as his power. If, in his perspective, his bo-staff 'hit' you, it actually did hit you.
 * Played for laughs in .hack when Kite wins a battle by violating the laws of perspective in .hack 4Koma.

Art

 * M. C. Escher's artworks make use of this.
 * William Hogarth: Satire on False Perspective (1753). Originally intended to show the kind of mistakes an artist can make, but it's a fine example of this trope in its own right.

Comics -- Books

 * One issue of Marvel Comics' Illuminati had the group look for the Infinity Gems. When professor X, Namor and Dr. Strange seek the gem of mind they appear on a vast, featureless blue plane... the gem itself seen from real up close. They retrieve it by changing their perspective to make it small.
 * In a 2010 Fantastic Four storyline, Reed's new man-friends (alternate Reeds) helped saved millions from a sun nova by perspective magic. They "got big" with techno-babble and pulled out the defective parts of a sun.
 * One Mortadelo Y Filemon comic deals with UFOs that were coming to Earth in order to invade it. One of them appears to be really huge and far away, but in the end it turns out it is very small... and it hits Filemón right in the mouth.

Eastern Animation

 * One of the first episodes of Staflik a Spagetka had this with a long spyglass which was used to get crow off the chair and then trap it into spyglass itself.
 * A 10-minute-short film, Time Out, features this quite a few times.

Films -- Animation

 * There's a short animated film called Shhh! that was featured on Channel 4 in the UK where the protagonist's grandfather had the ability to make people disappear by placing his thumb over them and simply 'wiping' them from his field of vision.
 * In Bill Plympton's first feature film, The Tune, as the main character approaches the town of Flooby Nooby, he notices that the trees seem to get smaller as he approaches them. The mayor explains that perspective is an illusion: things really do get bigger when one gets nearer as a defense mechanism. But at Flooby Nooby, everyone is so relaxed that the opposite is true.
 * The Secret of Kells features a non-size related variation: the film's distinct flat style is just decorative for most of it, but in one scene it allows Brendan to.

Films -- Live-Action

 * Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade has the awesome "leap of faith scene", where Indy steps onto a stone bridge that has been crafted to appear invisible from where he is standing.
 * The fate of Mike Teevee in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. Sadly, miniaturizing is easier than biggifying.
 * Done in the Nina Paley video "Fetch".
 * Bruce of Bruce Almighty, after pulling the moon closer to the earth, casually creates a few stars, then wipes one out, by poking the sky with his fingers. Considering the effect the moon's gravity had, the star manipulation has some pretty horrible implications.
 * A sight gag in Top Secret used a phone which appeared to be huge from being extra close to the camera. Wrong! The phone really was huge.

Folklore

 * There's a folk story about a little boy bemoaning that he's getting too big to sit in his mother's lap; his mother tells him that he can always walk to the horizon and be tiny again. Hilarity Ensues when he does just that and ends up two inches tall ("As tall as my thumb" was the measurement given in the story).

Literature

 * A guru in one of the Hitchhiker's Guide books has the ability to step between a series of pillars and the mountains behind them.
 * In the Discworld novel Sourcery, the Sourceror has this power.
 * A David Macaulay book had a picture of the "discovery of the vanishing point," a bunch of cowboys standing around looking at a spot where parallel train tracks meet.
 * Number four is inverted in E. Rose Sabin's A School for Sorcery where a girl's vision of a terrible monster is defeated when she looks at it through a reversed telescope.
 * Zorya Polunochnaya uses version 1 in American Gods to pick the moon out of the sky and give it to Shadow, in the form of a coin.
 * In The Scar, a grindylow magical artifact can give its user this power, and is used by a human spy to impressive effect. However, it comes with the price of starting to mutate him into something that doesn't quite seem human or grindylow...
 * Professor H.M. Wogglebug. T.E. from The Marvelous Land of Oz (the sequel to The Wizard of Oz) is a man-sized insect who became so after being projected on a screen—down from which he then climbed, to go about human-scale business in Oz.

Live-Action TV

 * In the Doctor Who story "The Robots of Death", the Doctor tells Leela that that this is the principle that enables the TARDIS to be much Bigger on the Inside than it is on the outside. How serious an explanation this is, no-one knows. It makes perfect sense as long as he has a black hole somewhere inside the TARDIS; later dubbed the "Eye of Harmony". So Time Lords Hand Wave black hole husbandry, not conventional physics.
 * Mr. Tyzik (a.k.a. "The Headcrusher)" from The Kids in The Hall seemed to think he had this power. He would hold his hand close to his eye, and pretend to crush people's heads with his fingers. And putting your thumb up to obstruct your view of some meant there was "nobody home".
 * In the Merlin miniseries, he plucks the moon out of the sky and it becomes a glowing coin that he rolls around his fingers. He then says something about appearances being deceiving and points at the sky to show the clouds pulling back from the moon.
 * In one of Spike Milligan's sketches Milligan walks over to a perspective backdrop of a street and leans over the rooftop to shout at the supposed occupants.
 * In the Coco Loco episode of series 2 of British sitcom The Mighty Boosh, the protagonists are trapped on an island, and a boat appears on the horizon. Howard begins trying to signal it, but Vince interrupts him, saying "It's just really small." as he plucks it from the apparent horizon and reveals it to be tiny.

Tabletop Games

 * In Scion, heroes with the "Moon" and "Sun" Purviews can use this trick to, respectively, pluck the moon or the sun out of the sky (and pocket it for later use). The sun can be used to create a Sun Crown, which is basically a halo that will shoot incoming projectiles out of the air with a solar laser, while the moon is a reflective disc that hovers around the user, deflecting energy-based attacks. Combining them both on a single character, either by having both powers, or by having two characters combine their abilities, and you get the rather scary Eclipse Crown...
 * In Godlike, there's a Talent who can use his shadow's hands to move objects—and the larger his shadow, the stronger his power.
 * Exalted
 * One of the spells in the sourcebook The Black Treatise creates a giant war machine. The sorcerer builds a miniature model of the device, holds it up so that it looks to him like a big machine on the ground far away—and when he lets his hand drop, there is no model, but there actually is a giant mecha on the distant ground.
 * Also, in the Wyld, Reality Is Out to Lunch, resulting in this trope being applied very frequently.

Video Games

 * This is basically Lisa's superpower in one Simpsons videogame.
 * Super Paper Mario could be an example: in 2D things are blocking your way, but if you flip into 3D you can go around.
 * It's the major gameplay element on Echochrome. If it's covered, it doesn't exist. If it appears to be above, below or connected, it is. Echochrome 2 does Perspective Magic with shadows instead of objects.
 * Similarly with Crush. You can choose to view the level in 3D or in 2D; in 3D, normal physics apply, but when viewing the world in 2D, this trope comes into full force. You can jump to the other end of the map just by stepping from a block in the foreground to one in the background.
 * Commodore 64 offering Realm of Impossibility featured this sort of dungeon design in the titular Realm. It also took full advantage of the 2D graphics to blur the lines between horizontal and vertical surfaces.
 * Another character appears with the powers of the dead in Ghost Trick, but unlike Sissel's, his are based on switching objects with the same shape according to the game's static camera angle.
 * In Fez, you rotate the world in a way so it is treated as a single plane and therefore many gaps suddenly appear and disappear.

Web Comics

 * One of Coyote's tricks for Annie in Gunnerkrigg Court is to pluck the moon from the sky between his paws. Antimony initially thinks that Coyote's trick is nothing more than a flashy bit of illusion (hence the "poke" to see if it's real)... telescopic evidence later reveals that the "poke" left some difficult to explain evidence on the surface of the moon.
 * Homestuck seems to have this as the signature power of . Notably, even the author seems afraid of messing with now.
 * Keychain of Creation features a character who uses the webcomic format this way. She can strike multiple opponents at range because the panel's viewpoint angle makes her strike appear to hit them all. She can look across panel borders to see what happens in the "future," and then jump between panels to teleport across time and space. She also knocks a chunk out of the panel border to use as a projectile.
 * Minus. The eponymous Reality Warper does this quite often.

Web Original

 * This video.

Western Animation

 * In Chowder, the titular character exploit this by using glasses and made himself smaller.
 * The Ed, Edd n Eddy episode "1 + 1 = Ed" did this when they ended up taking apart parts of their cartoon reality (causing the perspective thing to actually be literal).
 * Used on Tiny Toon Adventures when Montana Max air-drops garbage and toxic waste in Wackyland. Gogo Dodo stops him by picking his airplane out of the air.
 * On one episode of Muppet Babies, Gonzo uses a magnifying glass to make a mouse hole big enough to go through.
 * In a Futurama episode, Kif tries to pluck the moon for Amy in the Nimbus holodeck. But while he is able to grasp the moon, he is not strong enough to remove it.
 * In the Re Boot episode where Hexadecimal gets her hands on an art program, perspective gets worse the farther you go into Lost Angles. Her "cat" Scuzzy gets in on the fun by appearing normal-sized at a distance and HUGE close up; when he's frightened by the heroes he runs away to become tiny. Never mind when she was literally cutting and pasting things around: since it was based on the size of the windows, at least one building disappeared from one area, and reappeared ''grossly' out of proportion in another.

Real Life

 * You can't move around certain famous landmarks for people playing around with perspective magic for their holiday snaps. Probably the most common is pushing over (or pushing back up) the leaning tower of Pisa.