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{{trope}}
[[File:Facelessmassesresize.jpg|link=Excel Saga (anime)|frame|OK, now that's just ridiculous, even for [[Widget Series|this show]].]]
Animation is on a very strict timeframe almost all of the time. [[Limited Animation|It's a massive chore]] trying to get the main characters, their backgrounds, and their actions drawn and colored. One can forgive the animators for skimping on the unnecessary bits... like nine-tenths of the population of the show.
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Can easily fall into horror, although savvy animators will take advantage of this depending on the mood of the show.
''[[Faceless Masses/Trope Co|This item]] is available in the [[
{{examples}}▼
▲{{examples}}
== Anime & Manga ==
* ''[[Di Gi Charat]]'' [[Lampshade Hanging|hangs a lampshade]] on it by drawing its minor characters as literal finger puppets, even when they're in the foreground.
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* ''[[Kare Kano]]'' did this frequently, where extras were often drawn as white silhouettes.
* Parodied in ''[[Pani Poni Dash!|Pani Poni Dash]]'', where nearly all the non-regular characters had obvious ''identical'' female or male designs. Or hilariously inhuman, such as a classroom of non-regulars all having flower pots for heads, or a classroom largely made up of scarecrows. To make that even more extreme they are refereed as "the rest of class" during introduction.
* ''[[
* ''[[The Wallflower]]'' uses this extensively - the [[Bishonen|bishonen boys']] adoring masses at the school look like a multi-armed,multi-headed cardboard cut-out. Later episodes do this on the ''main'' characters as well - to be fair, the manga it's based on does this too.
* Particularly common and pronounced in ''Atashin'chi'', where even in close-up shots extras are gray, ghost-like blobs.
* ''[[Pucca]]'' spoofs this trope by having the extras be pink and blue smiley gum-drop people. The series proper has a large cast of extras and no real need for them, but they're used for comedy nonetheless.
* Also seen in ''[[Lucky Star]]''. However, the "faceless-ness" of background characters vary between episodes, from humanoid-shaped blobs in earlier episodes, to outlines of people with hair, and occasional facial features. Leads to jarring effects when [[Stock Footage]] of earlier episodes is used in later ones. The most jarring part of this trope's appearance in ''Lucky Star'' is that the extras never move an inch, ''even when they're in the foreground''. Sometimes background characters are drawn in complete detail, but are tinted blue to make the main characters stand out.
* The second season of ''[[Minami-ke]]'', produced by a different studio, replaces the skin colouring and anatomy of [http://i31.tinypic.com/2qlqu8o.jpg previously fully-animated] extras with silhouettes... even in closeup. Every character that didn't have a speaking part in the first series is now a black/darkened outline with hair and clothes, facial features added [http://i26.tinypic.com/20ifn7n.png as required]. Quite [[media:
* Background characters in ''[[Mononoke]]'' are ''literally'' faceless. The exact specifics depend on the arc, but they'll have clothes, weird skin tones, and usually something weird instead of a face.
** ''Zashiki-Warashi'': While the backgound characters have hair and clothing, their skin is blank white or black with spinning flowers. This is especially unsetteling when they are being intimate with normal-looking characters.
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** ''Bakeneko'': Anyone who isn't connected with the bakeneko's revenge is a ''half-dressed mannequin'' {{spoiler|during any action that takes place in the bakeneko's illusion or in a flashback. Again, it's very strange to see a normal, non-insane woman in bed with a blank-faced mannequin. And one person even turns from a mannequin into one of the main characters. Was that supposed to represent us realizing he was important!?}}
* The backgound and ''foreground'' attendees of the Komiket-esque convention in the ''[[Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei|Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei]]'' anime are depicted as paper cut-outs on sticks. Not to mention that the background characters are often deliberately faceless, with a Katakana/Kanji character instead of an actual drawn face.
* ''[[Sailor Moon]]'' uses this very noticeably in episodes where there is an audience of some sort. Due to the fact that the setting in this case is a darkened theater/auditorium, the
* Many notable [[Shonen]] titles that involve battling with an audience does this, such as ''[[Pokémon (anime)|Pokémon]]'' or ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh (anime)|Yu-Gi-Oh]]''. ''Pokémon'' is especially notorious for this as seen in details of the opening in the ''Latias & Latios'' movie in which most of the crowds on the stands were just a bunch of colorful blob-like beings... in 3D.
* ''[[Doujin Work]]'' has a minor example: crowds are not faceless, but monochrome.
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* This was used for Morisato Keiichi's "dorm eviction" scene in the second TV episode of ''[[Ah! My Goddess]]''.
* ''[[Fushigi Yuugi]]'' had faceless blue people in the background in the beginning of the series, and in episode 4, all of the people clamoring to get to Miaka and Tamahome were in blue, save for two people. Near the end of the series, look-alikes of Soi and Yui appear in the crowd.
* In the ''[[Aria (manga)|Aria]]'' manga there is a variety in that extras usually still are have distinctive features, but that other Prima undines aside from the three main ones are drawn without faces.
* ''[[Rose of Versailles]]'' has them, just grayed out instead of faceless.
* In the ''[[
* In ''[[Detective Conan]]''/''[[Case Closed]]'', when someone is suspiciously eavesdropping on a conversation (or whatever) and we don't know who it is, they are just a black silhouette with an utterly bald, mannequin-like head. (The eyes are still shown, though, and they're often bloodshot psychotically.) Very [[Uncanny Valley]], and it makes the criminals seem even more inhuman. Ooh, philosophical.
* At one point in the opening theme of ''[[Heartcatch Pretty Cure]]'', Tsubomi and Erika are chased by some formless, keyhole-shaped people. [[Student Council President|Itsuki]], Kanae, Nanami and a random background student are the only ones with definite shapes, but the last two become formless by the next shot.
* [[Durarara!!]] features gray, unmoving masses. When someone in a crowd becomes important, they become colored-in. This makes for a [[Crowning Moment of Awesome]] in Episode 11, when {{spoiler|a wave of color washes over a crowd of hundreds as they are revealed to be Dollars members.}}
* [[Saiyuki]]'s mangaka has a tendency to use variation on
* The ''[[Hime Chen! Otogi Chikku Idol Lilpri|Lilpri]]'' anime abuses this trope. Several mass gathering scenes are full of white or blue people blobs.
* Noted in the Author's Notes in the ''[[Mahou Sensei Negima]]'' manga, where he specifically points out what background elements were added digitally, and that digitally empty blobs in the background make a scene look crowded with much less time per drawn person, enabling much larger crowds.
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* This used to be a common trope in sport video games. The reason there was quite understandable: there's only so much memory on a cartridge/CD, and nobody could fault the programmers for spending it on the main action and leaving the crowd as a bunch of cardboard cutouts. With the latest systems, however, this is no longer the case, and thus crowd animation is part of the criteria by which sports games are judged.
* ''[[Kingdom Hearts II]]'' is even worse than this trope. Background characters are often not depicted at all, to the point where we hear cheering coming from ''empty stands'' in the Olympus Colosseum. Not to mention that we never see the majority of the population of Destiny Island.
* ''[[Touch Detective]]'' has them wearing really creepy Scream-like masks. Later subverted in the sequel, where while still
* Even though they're all just randomizations of a couple of character models, the ''[[Spider-Man (2000 video game)|Spider-Man]] 2'' game manages to avert this trope by having the hapless citizens of New York be fully colored, wander the city realistically, and react to Spidey; with one exception. During the "sports event" with Quentin Beck, the people in the stands are just cardboard cutouts. Heavily Lampshaded when you have Spidey crawl on the fake audience, and he says: "Even the audience is fake! Beck's the real phoney here."
* In ''[[The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion]]'' a close look a the audience in the Arena shows them as distorted cardboard figures with no feet.
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* Most background characters in ''[[Misfile]]'' are fully drawn, but during Emily's date the artist got some ghost jokes for [http://www.misfile.com/index.php?page=649 this scene].
* ''[[Dominic Deegan]]'' occasionally uses this.
* In the improvised round-robin comic ''Ito'', people the protagonists consider to be irrelevant are [https://web.archive.org/web/20020322015244/http://tangcomic.com/doji/ito/ito_02.jpg rendered as vegetables]; [https://web.archive.org/web/20020322021936/http://tangcomic.com/doji/ito/ito_03.jpg one page later], they become victims to this effect as well while trying to charm a young girl into joining their (all male) drama club.
* Notably averted in ''[[Concession]]''. The author uses a "random character generator" to assign a species, gender, sexuality, and religion to each one of the extras (usually customers at the titlular concession stand), and writes a detailed backstory for them that's found at the bottom of the page. A few of the randomly generated characters have become minor or even major characters, most notably [[Camp Gay]] skunk Nicole.
* ''[[Ménage à 3]]'' all but resorts to stick figures for crowds of audience members, though they get expressions... it's actually (deliberately) hilarious. You'd... uh, have to see it.
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* Sometimes used in ''[[The Order of the Stick]]'', especially in Azure City, on Hinjo's Junk, during the parade in Bleedingham, and in the Empire of Blood's arena. [http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0478.html Lampshaded like many other tropes:]
{{quote|'''Elan:''' Excuse me, huddled masses! Pardon me! PC coming through! PC coming--}}
== Web Original ==
* There's "[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/spot-the-main-character Spot the Main Character]" meme, in which a participant shows a picture where all but one character are faceless, greyed or sketchy and then "cannot figure out" which of characters could be the important one. Surely, that one? Hmm, no, perhaps this...
* Seen in the first volume of ''[[RWBY]]''—anyone not important to the plot in some way is rendered as a simple black silhouette. However, this wasn't exactly a deliberate decision—according to [[Word of God]] the production team somehow overlooked the fact that they would have to do crowd scenes with dozens of extras until too late in the production process to actually generate individuals. This was rectified during the break between Volumes One and Two, and starting with the first episode of the 2014 season, the "shadow people" were gone.
** Mocked in ''RWBY'''s [[Summer Replacement Series]], ''[[RWBY Chibi]]'', where the rest of the cast notice the shadow people and are each initially concerned that something's wrong with them for seeing only silhouettes -- including silhouettes of themselves.
== Western Animation ==
* ''[[Looney Tunes]]''. Ever notice the people in the audience at major events are just fuzzy blobs?
* Exception: In its early episodes, ''[[The Simpsons (animation)|The Simpsons]]'' drew notice for being among the few animated series to actually draw each extra in the background. In later episodes, when the show had over a hundred recurring characters, the extras became unnecessary, and the animators filled out crowd scenes with fully-drawn [[
* This is even more strongly averted in its [[Spiritual Successor]] ''[[Futurama]]'', which uses computer animated (but still ''Simpsons''-style) footage. The commentaries for one of the DVD releases states that the software they use can automatically draw a crowd of random characters for them.
* Another American cartoon exception is ''[[Avatar: The Last Airbender]]'', in which the people in the background are always drawn fully-colored, though again, not always animated.
* A computer animation variant: In ''[[War Planets]]'', the entire population of one planet, Planet
* Somewhat averted in ''[[Clone High]]''; while traditional
* ''[[The Fairly
* The same thing happens from time to time in Butch Hartman's second animated show, ''[[Danny Phantom]]'', but it has its fair share of fully drawn crowds as well.
* Averted in ''[[Kim Possible]]'' where every person in a given crowd has a face (except for the extras in the medal scene during the [[Grand Finale]]).
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[[Category:Cast Filler Tropes]]
[[Category:Lazy Artist]]
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