http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RogerRabbitEffect

Nope, nothing loony about this!

Roger Ebert , in his review of Who Framed Roger Rabbit Roger Rabbit and his cartoon comrades cast real shadows. They shake the hands and grab the coats and rattle the teeth of real actors. They change size and dimension and perspective as they move through a scene...and the cartoon characters look three-dimensional and seem to be occupying real space.

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A special effect intended to show live-action, flesh-and-blood performers interacting with animated (usually ink-and-paint) characters.

If the story is a comedy, and it usually is, the characters tend to be medium-aware and recognize each other as belonging to either category. However, in some early examples like Pete's Dragon, animation is just a special effect and the animated characters are in-universe not different from the actor.

This is one of the oldest special effects in Hollywood (the 1914 animated film, Gertie the Dinosaur, actually had creator Winsor McCay interacting with animated Gertie in real time on a vaudeville stage), and has been done several times with varying degrees of realism, though it was probably perfected by the 1988 Disney/Amblin film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

A sub-category of this trope is any story where cartoon characters are real and exist independently from "real" human beings (which may or may not be set in Toon Town and/or an Alternate Tooniverse). Since this is such a visual idea, it's not very common in forms of media that lack a visual aspect, although exceptions exist—including the trope maker itself.

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This is mainly a hand-drawn animation trope. While CGI characters are often depicted alongside live-action characters, they are usually depicted as live-action in-universe, and are rarely portrayed as visually or stylistically different from their live-action surroundings. CGI characters, because they have the potential to look more "real" to audiences, are not as prone to this kind of portrayal.

A subtrope of Medium Blending, and an extended version of Rotoscoping. Compare and contrast Serkis Folk and Starring Special Effects. Not to be confused with Live-Action Cartoon, which is about live-action media making use of typical cartoon tropes.

Compare Animated Actors (the in-universe counterpart to this trope), Refugee from TV Land, Disneyesque.

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Examples:

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Anime & Manga

Asian Animation

In Canimals, the animated Canimals appear in live-action environments, and sometimes humans appear alongside them.

Comic Books

Fan Works

Technically, most Intercontinuity Crossovers in fanfiction between live-action and animated series are these. How it is treated vary widely, though. Most frequently, it's not mentioned at all or Handwaved.

This Toon Round, one of the side-continuities of This Time Round. In one Round Robin, it's stated that a Toonside character interacting with the regular Outside setting must be carrying his own laws of physics around with him to exist at all.

"Ponies in the real world" is a fairly popular genre in the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanbase, both in fanfics and in videos on YouTube such as MLP Car Decals

Films

Literature

Live-Action TV

Music Videos

Pinballs

Data East's Playboy 35th Anniversary pinball shows real-life people (Hugh Hefner and the Playmates) interacting with cartoon characters (Little Annie Fanny, the Playboy Femlin, and the Playboy Rabbit).

Similarly, the backbox translite for Last Action Hero includes Whiskers the cartoon cat hanging out with the rest of the human cast.

Space Jam, like the film that inspired it, mixes the live-action Michael Jordan with various Looney Tunes characters.

Theater

As Gertie the Dinosaur was originally a vaudeville act with a man performing live on stage with a cartoon character, it fits here. Let The Other Wiki explain : McCay would stand on stage in front of a projection screen, dressed in a tuxedo and wielding a whip. He would call Gertie, who appeared from behind some rocks. He then instructed her to perform various tricks, similar to a circus act. He would appear to toss a prop apple to her — McCay palmed the apple while Gertie caught an animated copy of it... The act ended with McCay appearing to climb onto Gertie's back (actually, he stepped through a hole in the screen, and a filmed copy of himself climbed onto Gertie), and the two rode off into the distance, which resulted in three mediums interacting with each other.

: Avenue Q: Nobody bats an eyelash at puppets and humans interacting (though a team-up with the cast of Fiddler on the Roof for Broadway Cares explored the idea in greater depth.) The audience can easily be lulled into ignoring the actors onstage who are controlling the puppets. This can be jarring when the cast comes out for the curtain-call at the end without the puppets in their hands. ("Who's that guy?") In fact, the characters seem to think the difference between monster puppets and human puppets is more striking than between human puppets and human... humans. However, in various in-character interviews and events, the characters seem to be aware that humans and puppets are different (they sometimes reveal themselves as Animated Actors). One video featuring Rod even treats puppets as a separate race, with him calling himself "the first Republican Puppet-American".



Theme Parks

At the Universal Studios parks: The pre-show of the former ride, The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera, had Bill Hannah and Joseph Barbera interacting with their own creations in person. Pulled off rather amazingly at this attraction at Universal Studios Japan, which has an animated Woody Woodpecker interact with a live-action character.



Video Games

Web Animation

Webcomics

Web Original

Western Animation