Flying Face

A fictional character or creature that is just a head (as opposed to a Waddling Head or someone who's recently lost their head) that can also fly, hover, or just get around under its own power.

Comes in a few artistically styles

Flying skull or Robot: usually some form of Attack Drone but occasionally more powerful than a similar character with a full body.
Floating Mask: sometimes causes Demonic Possession.
Skull or Core with a less real body: Such as a ghost or slime with an ectoplasmic body and a bony skull or a robot with a core and a bunch of wires.

Sometimes these Flying Faces are nice, sometimes noisy Cloudcuckoolanders, often intelligent, and sometimes they don't talk.

See Also: Cephalothorax, Oracular Head, and Oculothorax.

Examples of Flying Face include:

Anime and Manga

Yuurei Shoujo of Gate Keepers 21 with her "pretty" skull-in-a-ball.
In Black★Rock Shooter, Dead Master fights using flying skulls.
Mazinger Z villain Count Broken is a flying head with a headless android body... that just follows it around. He never attaches the head to his body; in fact sometimes he carries the head under his arm.
Hell Teacher Nube - One of the Obake the titular Nube runs into is a human head with bat wings.

Film

The Bowler, In Mystery Men, has her father's skull embedded in her weapon, a bowling ball. She talks to it, and it, apparently, to her. It saves the day.
Zardoz: The title character which is actually a vehicle

Literature

Dinotopia: Fritz the robot.

Live Action Television

Zelda from the old TV Horror Host Svengoolie, and Tombstone from his successor Son of Svengoolie (which is now just called Svengoolie).
Lokar/Dai Satan.

Music

Overkill's winged skull mascot Chaly
Avenged Sevenfold's mascot, the Deathbat, is a skull with bat wings.

Tabletop Games

Dungeons & Dragons:
- Demiliches.
- Basic D&D: the sacrol and druj monsters.
- Dungeons & Dragons adventure OA6 Ronin Challenge. The last manifestation of General Goyat is a 50 foot tall floating head. Once the PCs do enough damage to it the flesh flakes away, leaving a giant flying skull.
- The Forgotten Realms setting has Skullport, an underground city ruled by flying, spellcasting skulls that order the inhabitants to perform bizarre actions (and punish them if they don't).
Warhammer 40,000: Skull probes.
One of the monsters in the Munchkin card game has a Mortal Kom Bat: a flaming skull with bat wings.

Video Games

Morte from Planescape: Torment and the mimirs.
Several games from The Legend of Zelda series have flying skulls as enemies.
- In The Legend of Zelda Oracle Games, the second part of Seasons' next-to-last's dungeon boss is against his giant flying skull, which spits fireballs at you.
There's a floating ghostly skull available as a non-combat pet in World of Warcraft. Floating ghostly skulls also appear during the fight against Yog-Saron. Looking at them makes you lose sanity.
Doom has Lost Souls (flying flaming skulls which home in on you like missiles), Cacodemons (big red faces that belch ball-lightning), and Pain Elementals (giant brown faces with stubby arms that would cough up a potentially endless crowd of the aforementioned Lost Souls).
Skelly, one of the many optional party members in Chrono Cross, starts out as this. You have to find and assemble the rest of him to recruit him.
Great Dungeon in the Sky has Loads and Loads of Characters to choose from, including several varieties of floating skull.
Ghosts in Septerra Core are huge, ghostly floating skulls. Their damage reduction and magic attacks make them Demonic Spiders
The Sargassoes of Devil May Cry, appearing in the first two games as recurring enemies.
In the Castlevania series, recurring villainess Carmilla's One-Winged Angel form is that of a gigantic, naked woman riding an equally oversized skull that cries bloody tears (as a Visual Pun for her theme, "Bloody Tears"). Other examples periodically show up in this series, such as Death's OWA in the third game.
- Also the Medusa Heads.
The ever-annoying flying heads in Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame.
Some Pokémon, like Glalie (which is even classified as the "Face Pokémon") and Cryogonal.
Face Raiders, an augmented reality game built into the 3DS involves being attacked by a number of flying heads with the faces of anyone you've photographed.
Something Else: Yukkuri Reimu is the main adversary of Yukkuri Take. Yukkuri Reimu is also a sprite-swap of the Angry Sun, so she can fly and mercilessly pursue Luigi.
City of Heroes has the Spirit Masks from the Banished Pantheon villain group. These are literally Flying Faces, being nothing but wooden masks animated by malign spiritual entities.

Web Comics

Schlock Mercenary: Ennesby the robot.

Web Original

Cat Face is essentially a giant floating cat head. He has a body but it is extremely small and atrophied and just hangs underneath limply

Western Animation

Tom and Jerry: Shiver Me Whiskers the pirate skull(and crossbones) with Offscreen Teleportation.
Metalocalypse: Dethklok's mascot, Facebones.
Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: One episode had the smuggling of Warhead Attack Drones.
The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Somewhere between this and Floating Mask is a Flying Pizza monster.
Phineas and Ferb: The Giant Floating Baby Head, which is more of a recurring phenomenon than a character.
Megatron spends most of the second season of Beast Machines as an absolutely enormous airborne head-fortress.