Eat the Camera

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
"Man the helms! Dive, dive!"
—Ed, Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy

A visual effect where a shot is ended by having the camera zoom into a character's wide open mouth, usually while the character in question is screaming or singing. Usually done in animation, since, among other things, it's likely to be a Gross Up Close-Up in live action. Frequently done during songs.

Sometimes, it is done to represent something literally entering a character's mouth; usually, however, it is solely a visual effect.

Not to be confused with Mouth Cam, which is technically its opposite.

Examples of Eat the Camera include:


Film

  • The Matrix. While Morpheus and his crew are searching for Neo's body in the real world, Neo touches a mirror. The mirror spreads over him like quicksilver and flows down his throat with the camera following. The scene changes and Neo wakes up in his real body. Watch it here.
  • One early short film depicts a man jabbering in front of a camera, getting closer and closer. The shot looks as if the camera ends up the man's mouth, then the camera pulls back out.
  • The Animated Credits Opening to George of the Jungle end this way.
  • The 1970s version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers famously ends with this way.

Live Action TV

  • In The Day Today's "War" episode, the broadcast features precision-guided missiles "with nose-mounted cameras" which provide a POV perspective of the missles' path. One such missile is so precise that its camera shows the missile entering a soldier's mouth and going down his throat before the camera's transmission cuts to static, signifying an explosion in the soldier's stomach.
  • Tales from the Darkside The Movie had a Second-Person Attack shot, leading to an Orifice Invasion.
  • Sesame Street also loves this trope. One example was in the New Years' special, when Telly runs away screaming after Oscar scares him straight with lies on how bad New Years' is.
  • The Community episode "Regional Holiday Music" includes a shot-for-shot parody of the aforementioned example from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Video Games

  • In a French commercial for the first Rayman game, the camera zooms into Rayman's mouth, and then it cuts to gameplay footage.
  • Happens in Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach during one of the Security Office segments. Gregory hacks into one of the S.T.A.F.F bots while Glamrock Chica is trying to break into the office, using the robot to make a pizza for luring Chica away. This entire segment takes place from its POV - once it's finished, the player is treated to a neat little scene of Chica standing near the robot in a zombie-like gait, then suddenly rushing the robot, screaming "PIZZA?!", and lunging towards the camera with her beak wide open.

Web Original

Western Animation

  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic does this sometimes. For instance, with the exasperated Rarity during the "Art of the Dress" song, or with a screaming pony at the end of a creepy Imagine Spot in "Hearts and Hooves Day".
  • The Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner cartoon "To Beep or Not to Beep" features a scene where the Coyote, after the typical "falling down the cliff" shot, a cactus lands on him and he flies back up, screaming and "catching" the camera in his mouth.
  • The Roger Rabbit Short "Tummy Trouble" has a shot of Roger swallowing a rattle from the rattle's point of view.
  • In Cool World, a character falls toward the camera, which then winds down its digestive track (passing Geppetto and Pinocchio on the way) and comes out the other end.
  • "The Skeleton Dance" has the first skeleton jump towards the camera, which goes through its mouth and out the ribcage.
  • The scene in The Thief and the Cobbler where King Nod despairs about the magic balls being stolen ends with a closeup of his mouth, then goes into an Astronomic Zoom out.
  • Done literally in an episode of Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy, when Ed swallows the video camera that Double D and Eddy were using to film their movie, providing the page quote.
  • Done in some episodes of Metalocalypse. For example, in the first episode, when Nathan yells "WHAAAAAAAA?" after Toki tells him that they left the food back at the grocery store, the camera zooms into his mouth and down his esophagus, then transitions to the next scene.
  • Parodied (of course) in the Animaniacs episode "King Yakko". Before the first commercial break, the villain of the episode does an Evil Laugh and the camera zooms into his mouth. Cue the villain yelling in a muffled voice, "Get that camera out of my mouth!"
  • Rock-a-Doodle begins with the camera flying through space and toward Earth, where it then flies all the way toward a farm located somewhere in the midwestern US and into Chanticleer the rooster's mouth, showing a closeup of his uvula as he is calling forth the Sun with his crowing.
  • Rugrats did this in a good amount of their episodes (often when an episode would end with a character screaming or crying, such as "Dummi Bear Dinner Disaster", "Brothers Are Monsters" and "Piggy's Pizza Palace").
  • Hopper's death at the end of A Bug's Life.
  • Done at the end of Bart's nightmare on The Simpsons episode "Treehouse of Horror II", when Bart wakes up screaming long and loud due to Homer kissing him at the end of his dream.
  • Taken literally in one episode of Drawn Together, where half the members (including one-dimensional fat joke Toot Braunstein) win a life time's supply of food. A camera installed in the refrigerator shows Toot partaking of its edibles, getting progressively larger each time she opens the door, until the last shot is of her grabbing and lifting the entire thing in the air and gorging on its contents in a parody of the Sarlacc Pit - camera and all.
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