Tooth Strip

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Barney gives us an accurate depiction of a Tyrannosaurus Rex's dentition.


It isn't always practical in animation to draw each individual tooth in a character's mouth and in fact, can run the risk of careening down the Uncanny Valley. Because of this, a popular way of simplifying teeth is to draw them as a solid toothy mass stretching from one side of the mouth to the other.

Examples of Tooth Strip include:


Anime and Manga

  • Characters drawn in manga usually have these. And when they do, it's usually the creepy/funny-looking kind.
    • Notably averted in Beck in that every character has all their teeth visibly shown.


Literature


Live Action TV

  • This is one of the signature traits of the eponymous purple dinosaur, Barney.


Newspaper Comics

  • Parodied in FoxTrot. Roger tries a whitening toothpaste which erases all the lines between his teeth.


Video Games


Web Comics

Western Animation

  • My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic
  • Pretty much anyone in a Seth MacFarlane series. Especially Mr. Bottomtooth of Family Guy, a pretentious rich guy with a single bottom tooth. His son shares this trait. Strangely, the creepy pedophile also has tooth strips when he laughs or chuckles, despite not having most of his teeth...
  • Averted in South Park—even though the characters are crudely animated, they still have lines to mark the division of teeth.
  • We see a weird variation in Invader Zim: the Irkens all have their teeth joined together in an undulating, zipper-like pattern. The humans usually have their teeth drawn separately.
  • Many other characters in Western animation use tooth strips for the same reason as anime/manga. Drawing them with individually divided teeth looked bad and would be difficult to draw. It isn't so much lazy animators, but what looked decent and was reasonable to animate.
  • Pixar is infamously known for their tendency to give most of their nonhuman characters this kind of teeth, whether they are either |toys, insects, monsters, fish, or vehicles.
  • Played straight with many animated Disney characters. Aversions include Beggar Jafar's crooked dentures and The Coachman's Nightmare Face.
  • This is standard in 3D modelling: the artist models a tooth strip and maps the color and normals to make it look like a row of discrete teeth.
  • Bubs from Homestar Runner.
  • The Car Crusher at the end of The Brave Little Toaster apparantly has a large guillotine-like blade used to crush cars into tiny cubes that's shaped like a wall of teeth.
  • Recess uses this sometimes.
  • 101 Dalmatians: The Series, Depending on the Artist.