Eye Glasses

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

In many cartoons, characters that wear glasses seem to have their whole eyes fused into the lens. Their eyelids are nowhere to be seen, often all that is seen are pupils and the lens. Often the pupils go squinty when the character blinks, and the frames of the glasses have the ability to move around similar to an Expressive Mask.

Presumably this is simply because drawing eyelids inside the glass frames is rather difficult.

Contrast Opaque Lenses and Scary Shiny Glasses, where you can't see the eyes at all through the glasses, and Meganekko and Sexy Spectacles, where there's a normal set of eyes behind the glasses.

Examples of Eye Glasses include:

Advertising

Anime and Manga

Film

  • Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire averts this with Milo (though briefly played straight during the viewing of an old film reel depicting his childhood), but plays this straight during a brief scene about halfway through the film where Kida actually takes off his glasses because of her curiosity and puts them on her face.
  • In the 2005 film of The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy, Hummakavula wears glasses that apparently magnify his eyes many times. Then he takes them off to reveal that the magnified eyes are in the glasses themselves, and his own eye sockets are sunken, empty pits. This is the first sign to the protagonists that he is more sinister than he appears.

Newspaper Comics

Puppet Shows

Video Games

Web Comics

Western Animation

  • Dexter and his dad from Dexter's Laboratory.
  • Daryl (again) from the Baby Blues animated series.
  • Averted on King of the Hill where all the glass frames are drawn independently of the eyelids.
  • Played with on Family Guy where most characters' glasses just happen to be the same size and shape of their eyeballs. Meg's large glasses are noticably bigger than her eyes though. Also lampshaded: In "The King Is Dead," Peter takes off his glasses and his pupils stay attached to the lenses.
  • Sherman from Peabody and Sherman.
  • Arthur Read.
  • Millhouse from The Simpsons.
  • Duckman. His glasses are his eyes: They have eyebrows. Very odd when he lampshades it by taking the glasses off to clean them: his face is blank.
  • Coop the Chicken from Yin Yang Yo!
  • There's an episode of Phineas and Ferb in which Candace puts on glasses to show how serious and focused she is. And her upper and lower lids show up when she blinks and changes expressions.
  • There's a kind of variation in the Canadian short The Big Snit, where the wife's pupils get stuck in odd positions and she actually removes her eyes as if they were a pince-nez and shakes them rapidly to unstick the pupils. Lampshaded in the following exchange:

Husband: Why are you always shaking your eyes?
Wife: I... I don't shake them like I used to.
Husband: Yes you do! You shake 'em here and shake 'em there! Why dontcha go join some stupid shake 'n' rock 'n' roll band?