Grotesque Gallery

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
BUT WHO WAS PHONE??

Ugly Cute characters, and those trying to design them, walk a thin line. If they run too close to the "Ugly" side of the scale, you can wind up with something that warrants a Nightmare Fuel warning, due to how messed-up it looks.

This basically covers what happens when animators try for Ugly Cute and fail spectacularly. Then again, sometimes the "failure" is intentional. Compare Uncanny Valley.

Examples of Grotesque Gallery include:

Advertising

Art

Film

  • The Wizard of Oz has the unspeakably creepy flying monkeys.
  • 1985's Return to Oz has the Wheelers and Jack Pumpkinhead, who then calls Dorothy "Mom"!
  • Jim Henson's Labyrinth. Goblins in a childhood bedroom plus kidnapping plus David Bowie's aggressively bubbling sexuality are bad enough, but then there's those horrible red Fiery puppets who juggled and swapped their body parts and sent their grinning, disembodied heads to chase our fleeing heroine while chanting "We just want to take off your head! Let us have your head!" Horrid.
  • Also all of The Dark Crystal by Jim Henson... though this may have been intentional.
  • E.T. Particularly his weird, spine-like legs. (And especially if you're only three in 1982, there's merchandise everywhere, and nobody has explained to you that E.T. is a friendly alien.)
  • The Svankmajer version of Alice in Wonderland is a severely bad trip.

Literature

  • The picture book Hair in Funny Places is intended to reassure kids about to go through puberty. With pictures of a young girl's insides being taken over by grotesque furry monsters representing hormones.
  • These examples of Alice in Wonderland illustrations by Dusan Kallay fail to show the childhood-devastating terror that were those disturbing pieces of art, best described as "Dali meets Bosch".
  • The Nursery Alice, apparently illustrated by a morbid Impressionist having a very bad acid trip. How it came to be in the children's section is beyond comprehension.
  • Tim Burton's The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories has a whole array of weird characters who are kids with strange abilities or deformities, such as Stain Boy (whose only superpower is to leave a nasty stain), the girl who turned into a bed, the pincushion queen and Jimmy the hideous penguin boy. (It's telling that Burton showed Danny DeVito his illustration of Jimmy to give the actor an idea of how they would be approaching the character of The Penguin in Batman Returns.)
  • Gennady Spirin's illustrated edition of The Tale of Gentle Jack and Lord Bumblebee. Spirin's paintings take what the text would seem to indicate is a fairly bland fairy tale involving magical beings who shift between somewhat insect-like humans and somewhat human-like insects from one moment to another, and plunge it straight into an industrial-sized tank with human faces leering in place of compound eyes and mandibles, monstrous bee-knights impaling their enemies on the lance-like stingers springing out of their faces and dying as the ants drag their dismembered bodies down into the eternal darkness under the earth to be fed to the larva...

Live Action TV

  • Pictured above are the Martians (aka Yip-Yip Aliens) from Sesame Street.
  • Those (un)lucky enough to grow up in Chicagoland (and various syndication markets) in the late '70s may have been "treated" to Gigglesnort Hotel, which featured a number of rather grotesquely modelled puppet characters; most notable was Blob, a literal blob of (apparently living) clay "statuary" who would regularly have his facial features remolded by the human host as he moaned and bellowed in a rather ghastly wordless voice.
  • Most of the characters on The League of Gentlemen are played by the same three actors, so they need to use various prosthetics to differentiate between roles. Some of them (Tubbs and Edward, in particular) are quite hideous.
  • The 80s French programme Téléchat. Joueur Du Grenier (the French equivalent of The Angry Video Game Nerd) even dedicated his first Special to this programme and how it abused this trope to no end.

Music and Music Videos

  • Basement Jaxx's "Where's Your Head At" is an upbeat-sounding dance song, but the video has monkeys with human faces who, after playing guitars a bit, chase a man through a science lab, tearing through safety nets, before the man is captured in a Mad Scientist's experiment, where people have their heads switched with animals.

Theme Parks

  • There are more than a few examples of Nightmare Fuel to be found in good old Disneyland/Walt Disney World. Simply put, there is a darn good reason why The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World has a whole chapter heading about "Disney, Kids, and Scary Stuff". Take the costumed mascots, for example. Whenever one of those gets anywhere near a small child, there's a 50% chance that child will cry in terror!

Robin Williams: "Disneyland for a three year old..? Mickey Mouse for a three year old..? Bullshit! Mickey Mouse to a three year old is a six foot fucking rat!"

Toys

  • Boglins are incredibly gross looking.
  • Bobbleheads are weird looking because of their abnormally large heads.

Video Games

  • Any character from Psychonauts is quirky at least (the camp kids are odd but still relatively cute) and often bizarre (characters like Loboto, Crispin, and most of the mental realms' inhabitants).

Web Original

Western Animation

  • Courage the Cowardly Dog uses this trope on a regular basis.
  • All Dogs Go to Heaven has King Gator, the grotesquely animated crocodile who has horrified children for years with his sexually ambiguous nature and innuendo (specifically, the song "Let's Make Music Together").
    • It's more likely that the kids were scared by the fact that there actually IS an alligator living in the sewers. It contributed nicely to the general creepiness of the whole world.
  • Rankin Bass' animated version of The Hobbit is a notorious case of going for characters that are so ugly they're cute and... failing. Badly.
    • "We hates it... hates it... FOREVER!"
      • "Is it... scrumptious? Will it taste... delicious?" ...It wiiiiill.
    • The wood elves.
      • Most of the hobbits (with the exceptions of Frodo, Bilbo, Merry, and Pippin) especially Samwise from Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings are hideously deformed creatures with bulging eyeballs and jagged teeth.
  • Filmation is almost as bad at this. See Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night.
  • Lots of stuff in The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, like the plague victims in the episode where Flapjack gets a pet rat, and the sea monster things from "How the West Was Fun"!
  • A few in Invader Zim were especially ugly. Bloaty comes to mind. There were also a lot of grotesque background characters who ranged from unpleasantly greasy to clearly disfigured.
  • Most anything in John Kricfalusi's oeuvre.
  • A completely straight example: When Ed "Big Daddy" Roth designed the characters in Rat Fink, he was aiming for the ugliest creatures in the world. He succeeded.
    • In Tales Of The Ratfink, Ed Roth (voice by John Goodman) describes Ratfink as the Anti-Mickey Mouse so it's kind of fitting.

Other

  • Nutcrackers are not festive symbols of holiday cheer. They are terrible, grimacing figures of rage with toothy, lipless mouths that open into their chests. That they are generally dressed in military garb and carry weapons does not help. And since they're made to, you know, crack nuts, it's easy for a child's mind to seize onto the idea of them crushing other things, such as the bones in one's fingers. Overexposure may numb the terror, but won't remove the underlying wrongness of the malevolent, garish things. How something so ghastly became a symbol of yuletide festivities is absolutely baffling.
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