Mood Whiplash/Film: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

* Disney movies, especially of the [[Disney Animated Canon]] or [[Pixar]] variety, tend to have a considerable amount of this.

*** At the end of ''[[WALL-E]]'', try immediately restarting the movie. What were [[Amusing Injuries]] two hours ago are now [[Dude, Not Funny]].

** ''[[Up (animation)|Up]]'' has a cutesy musical montage showing Carl and Ellie after their marriage, with the two doing heartwarming activities together, like building their house out of the abandoned one they met in and saving up to travel to Paradise Falls, but during this montage, we also see {{spoiler|Ellie crying at the doctor's because of either a miscarriage or learning she cannot have children, and Carl standing alone at her funeral.}}

''(Stitch exposes his antennae, spikes, and extra arms)''

'''Lilo''': You're one of them? ''(shoves Stitch into the ground)'' Get outta here, Stitch. }}

** After the lovely duet between Flynn and Rapunzel in ''[[Tangled]]'' where they had their [[Almost Kiss]], Flynn sees the Stabbington brothers and the atmosphere visibly darkens.

*** In-story, after Rapunzel has left the tower for the first time, she continually switches from being happy to depressed. "I'm free!"/"Mother is going to kill me..."/"This is the best day of my life!"/"I'm the worst daughter ever!"

*** In the scene where Rapunzel has Flynn tied to the chair, Flynn starts using [[Antiquated Linguistics]] to cheesy pickup lines in the span of one sentence. It's like the scene shifted from something out of Shakespeare to Joey from [[Friends]]. And it's [[Actually Pretty Funny]].

** The Courtship ceremony from ''[[Dinosaur]]'' (which involves lemurs participating in a merrymaking ritual so they can find mates) ends with a meteorite hitting Earth.

** Just when [[Alice in Wonderland (Disney film)|Alice]] decides she's had enough of Wonderland, she spots a path that might take her home. She happily runs down it, the music brightens up, and it looks like she'll make it home in time for tea...but then a dog sweeps away the rest of the path before her eyes. Alice then sits on a rock and sings a song about how often she fails to heed "very good advice", which climaxes into her and the surrounding animals breaking into tears.

** ''[[The Lion King]] 2: Simba's Pride'' features a hopeful, uplifting musical number about how the animal world is one big family supporting each other. Then it switches to a vicious [[Villain Song]] where the [[Big Bad]] sings about how she [[Loves the Sound of Screaming]].

** Even Better Example: {{spoiler|In the previous [[Tear Jerker]] as Shaun's stepfather passes away just after giving his last words to Shaun - to the effect that "I've always loved you... look after your mother, Shaun..." - Shaun tearfully begs for Ed to stop the car. Ed obliges... by swerving off the road to ram (comedically) into a zombie, and then pulling a racing-car slide-stop. Shaun calls him out on this though.}}

** Even better example still: {{spoiler|Once they finally get refuge in the local pub, they are quickly besieged by zombies. The bartender comes out, but they don't have any working weapons, and the power just came back on, which turned on the jukebox. So, they use pool cues to hit him in time to [[Queen]]'s "Don't Stop Me Now" before finally knocking him out and discovering the pub's titular Winchester is still activated and there is a box of bullets nearby. Skip forward five minutes, and Shaun's mother admits to Liz (Shaun's ex, although his mother isn't aware of the breakup) that she was bitten by a zombie earlier in the movie, dooming her to death and resurrection. She dies in Shaun's arms as he begs her not to leave him. This is followed by a genuinely tense Mexican standoff over what to do with Shaun's mother - David reckons they have to shoot her; Shaun and Ed are hysterically protective.}}

* The 1984 Chinese movie ''Fantasy Mission Force'', helpfully recapped [http://www.agonybooth.com/recaps/Fantasy_Mission_Force_1984.aspx here] by ''The Agony Booth'' crew. The movie starts out as crazy low-brow slapstick "humor", with plot twists that make no sense, and then suddenly there are people being bloodily massacred on-screen, including most of the main characters. ''What?'' You can't blame all that on the American dub, or on some cultural humor thing. But don't take my word for it.

* ''La Vita è bella'' (''Life is Beautiful''), starts out as a comedy in Mussolini's Italy, and ends up as a comedy in a concentration camp. See also [[Genre Shift]].

* The final third of ''[[North]]'' doesn't just involve the youthful hero trying to return to his parents -- another kid, his conniving, power-hungry friend from back home, has sent assassins out to kill him. The film has been a light fantasy up to this point, and indeed continues to be, but the plot development is so dark that it invokes this trope nevertheless.

* ''Incident at Loch Ness'' is a documentary {{spoiler|(...but not really)}} about director Werner Herzog attempting to film a project about the Loch Ness monster and the nature of folk tales. Herzog has to deal with the undercutting of assistant-director Zak Penn constantly. Penn is trying to stage things for dramatic effect, such as getting an animatronic Nessie to scare the crew members, much to Herzog's consternation. Then, after Zak Penn draws a gun, {{spoiler|the REAL Loch Ness monster attacks the crew}} and all hell breaks loose.

** {{spoiler|Let me through! LET ME THROUGH!}}

** {{spoiler|That's my son! That's my boy! My BOY!}}

** There's an earlier example of this in the same film, when [[Crazy Awesome|Mad-Eye Moody]] is demonstrating the Unforgiveable Curses. Making the little spidery thing dance and jump and crawl over people? Classroom is in fits of giggles. Making her jump out of the window or drown herself? Hilarity comes ot a screeching halt. See it [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBFkA9mAlX4 here].

** In the same film, there's the scene where Hagrid and Slughorn are singing that wizard song and reminiscing about Aragog. In a drunken stupor, complete with Hagrid passing out after Slughorn mentions he once had a fish. {{spoiler|After Hagrid passes out, Slughorn turns to Harry and immediately explains that the fish was given to him by Harry's mother, and the fish disappeared because the magic sustaining it was dead...}}

* ''[[Jaws (film)|Jaws]]'' manages to successfully switch back and forth between comedy and horror, sometimes in the space of a single line: "Come down here and chum some of this shit!"

** Spielberg admitted that in that scene, the intention was laugh - [[Jump Scare]] - nervous laugh ([[Gonna Need More Trope|"You're gonna need a bigger boat"]]). So much that when after a preview had the one-liner being covered by screams, they re-edited so the audience could recover and properly laugh.

* Minor example in the 1946 Cole Porter biopic ''Night and Day'': at one point you get [[Busby Berkeley Number|Busby Berkeley-type numbers]] intercut with scenes of Porter on the operating table getting major leg surgery after his riding accident.

* ''[[V for Vendetta]]'', Gordon's hysterically funny TV show and then BOOM {{spoiler|He gets beaten with a stick and Evey gets kidnapped.}}

* In ''[[The Lost Battalion]]'', the main characters are saved by their side's artillery, complete with heartwarming music and cheering. In an instant, this turns sour as the artillery has been misaimed and is falling right on top of them, killing tons of soldiers.

* ''[[Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium]]'' is a very musical, colourful, and exciting film until it begins winding down to {{spoiler|Mr. Magorium's death, which plunges even the titular Emporium into a deep depression. The characters are then forced to enter the "real world"}}. Granted, one of the movie's lessons is about how to rise from tragedy and find your own place, but the shift from whimsical to bleakly serious is fairly shocking for a children's movie.

** The climax of ''[[The Phantom Menace]]'' was pointed out by the editor to do this, in a negative way. Due to it being made up of four different conflicts with varying tones, it jumps between sadness at the death of a hero, humour with Jar-Jar Binks, excitement in a large space battle, and nothing in a scene with Padme. This results in all the would-be emotions being negated and in a worse case scenario leaving the audience bored out of their minds. Both the following movies had much less complicated climaxes as a result.

** The second and third prequel movies do a better job at keeping the same general mood throughout except for the climax of ''[[Revenge of the Sith]]''. Anakin is disfigured and has turned to the Dark Side, Padme is dead, the Jedi Order and the Republic are no more, Palpatine has taken over the galaxy,... and we get a cute little funny scene with C-3PO moments before the end credits.

* The little-seen movie ''[[Fierce People]]'' is really only notable for this trope. The first half is a jolly, cutesy coming of age/FishOutOfWater movie. Then around the halfway mark the main character {{spoiler|suffers a violent, brutal rape}}, causing him to reevaluate everything he knows. The scene where his mother discovers the... true nature of the crime is particularly brutal because Finn's character is pretty understated up until this point, where he breaks down with shame, begging her not to reveal it. Not surprisingly, the second half of the movie is like a completely different film after that.

* Korean cinema and Asian movies in general tend to do this a lot. There are already a few examples here but others include:

*** ...which itself flip flops from a family drama, to a comedy, to a giant monster movie, to a political thriller, and returns to all of these in a moment's notice.

** The Korean film ''[[Save the Green Planet!|Save the Green Planet]]'' can be described as "''[[Men in Black (film)|Men in Black]]'' meets ''[[Misery]]''," with all the mood dissonance that implies.

* ''[[Kung Fu Panda]]'' and [[Kung Fu Panda 2|its sequel]] have made an art form out of this. At any point in either movie, you could be laughing, crying, cheering, or any combination of the three.

* The Russian adaptation of ''[[Pippi Longstocking]]'' does this a couple of times. One second, the audience, along with half of the characters, is laughing at Pippi's antics, the next second she is asked about her parent and breaks into a total [[Tear Jerker]] song, revealing that {{spoiler|her mother is [[Never Say "Die"|dead]] and her father is missing}}. And ''then'', "Lets play Hide-and-Seek!"

* In a German Film ''Stahlnetz: PSI'' a little girl is kidnapped, locked up and left to die and the police struggles to find her in time. The the help of [[Power of Friendship]], and some supernatural thing they do and then her best friend meets her:

{{quote|- I missed you ''so much''.

* ''The Seven Little Foys'' gives you [[Bob Hope]] and [[One-Scene Wonder]] [[James Cagney]] trading jokes and tap dancing together for a good five minutes. In the very next scene, Hope's character finds out that his wife died while he was away.

* The elevator scene in ''[[Drive (film)|Drive]]'' is a rather notable example transitioning from romantic music and a lit backdrop over the kiss to the Driver brutally killing the other in the elevator by ''stomping his head into a bloody pulp''.

{{quote|Mook's friend ([[Hey, It's That Guy!|Rob Lowe]]): Yes, I have a friend named John Smith. That's right, he's in Dr. Evil's private army. What? He's dead? Decapitated by mutated ill-tempered sea bass? Oh my God! OK, thank you.}}

* [[Coraline (animation)|Coraline]] is famous for transitioning from fantasy to horror at the halfway point, when the true intentions of the Other Mother are revealed.

* ''[[The Poker House]]'' has quite a few examples of this. The most notable is the rollercoaster of a third act, wherein the the main character {{spoiler|gets [[Rape as Drama|raped]], then [[It Got Worse|verbally abused]], then [[Down to the Last Play|sets a record at a basketball game]], then [[Heroic BSOD|breaks down sobbing in the car]], then [[Earn Your Happy Ending|sings along with her two sisters to "Ain't No Mountain High Enough"]]}}. [[Mood Whiplash]] indeed.

* ''[[The Godfather]]'' uses this extensively for dramatic impact, snapping from violence to peacefully pastoral scenes, and vice versa, culminating in a series of murders intercut with a baptism.

 

{{reflist}}