Cartoon physics

Cartoon physics is a joking reference to the fact that animation allows regular laws of physics to be ignored in humorous ways. It also reflects that many of the most famous American cartoons, particularly those from the Warner Brothers and MGM studios, have unconsciously developed a relatively consistent set of "laws", such as:

• If someone runs off a cliff, gravity has no effect until he or she notices his error
• Everything falls faster than an anvil
• No matter what happens to cats, they will always return to their default shapes
• Attempting to deceive a good character with a painted tunnel will not work, because the tunnel becomes real when the good character uses it. The bad character, on the other hand, crashes headlong into the cliff when trying to do the same

Reference to these laws extends back at least to June of 1980, when an article O'Donnell's Laws of Cartoon Motion appeared in Esquire magazine. A version printed in 1994 by the IEEE in a journal for engineers helped spread the word among the technical crowd, which has expanded and refined the idea. Dozens of websites exist outlining these laws.

Adherents of evolutionary psychology have suggested that the humorous effect of cartoon physics is a consequence of the interplay of different mental modules adapted to physics and psychology respectively. The physics module predicts that the cartoon character will fall over the cliff immediately, while the psychology module is drawn to anthropomorphize the force of gravity and thus model it as being vulnerable to deception by an actor who is self-deceived.