When you wish upon a star, your fever dreams come true.
The musical number in an animated musical in which the animation stops pretending to depict things that are actually happening in the world of the film and becomes a more abstract illustration of the music. This is usually a whacked-out moment of lighting and choreography, sometimes caused by hallucinations. If it is caused by a dream, see Dream Ballet. If it is caused by substance use, see Mushroom Samba. The Disney Acid Sequence is not as common as it first seems—moments only fit this trope if they are not explainable in-universe. It shares some characteristics with the Big-Lipped Alligator Moment, in that it frequently has nothing to do to with the plot and the characters never mention it again, but a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment, no matter how bizarre and random, is still assumed to have actually taken place in the film's physical reality.
The Disney Acid Sequence can be used to good comedic effect in films which break the Fourth Wall. In general though, if the switch is too pronounced, be prepared for some genuine Nightmare Fuel.
Named for the most prolific offender and trendsetter, although the phenomenon is not limited to the Disney Animated Canon. It's not even necessarily limited to animated musicals; live-action musicals can also contain one if a musical number goes more surreal than just a random song and dance routine. Some examples here are likely to be inspired by Busby Berkeley Numbers. All examples here are prone to contain Deranged Animation.
Sub-Trope of Quirky Work. For trippy music videos that are not part of a larger and less surreal work, see Surreal Music Video. For an alternate take on musical scenes set to incredible visual spectacle, see Busby Berkeley Number. Compare Drunken Montage.
Example subpages:
Examples:
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Advertising
- itemLabel: “Peepy’s Secret”. The visuals include giant Peepys floating through space, various Item Label characters charging at the camera, and oversaturated colors everywhere.
- Every installment of the Metro Manners PSAs, following Super Kind's Transformation Sequence, cuts to a musical sequence that takes place on highly stylized sets rather than on a bus/train like the rest of the episode. These feature surreal touches such as supersized fruits floating in the background and a mini train coming out of Super Kind's mouth. This is particularly evident in the "Seat Hogging" PSA, where all the sets are filled with brightly-colored geometric shapes. At the end of the song, it cuts back to the bus, and it's unclear whether the dance number really happened or not.
Anime & Manga
- Both of the first two Dragon Ball Z OVA films subject Gohan to this. Neither really have anything to do with the movie's overall plots.
- Dead Zone has "Tenkaichi Gohan" (The World's Greatest Gohan) after Gohan eats an alcoholic apple. By Gohan's perspective, he begins to hallucinate. In reality, he's stumbling around all over the place. Eventually, he sobers up, and is found when he pees off a high ledge...right onto Krillin.
- The World's Strongest has "Piccolo-san Daisuki" (I love Mr. Piccolo) when he falls asleep while studying. It just shows him following Piccolo around a Super-Deformed dreamscape. Though the song is entirely positive, the last visual scene of the sequence is Piccolo's Heroic Sacrifice shielding Gohan from Nappa's attack during the Saiyan saga.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind: The torture dance sequence.
Mista, Fugo, and Narancia, having captured the still-living severed head of the rival gang member Zucchero, are trying to interrogate him, and when he refuses to say anything (because he's not capable of saying anything), they hang him from a fish hook by his eyelid, which is held open while a pair of glasses focuses sunlight into a beam that is searing directly into his eyeball, and then suddenly start playing music and dancing for absolutely no good reason while the helpless Zucchero is Forced to Watch. It's implied the psychedelic visuals in the anime are actually Zucchero starting to hallucinate from the prolonged torture.
- Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere: Episode 9 showcases the fight between Futayo Honda and Kimi Aoi in an Acid-Trip Dimension where Futayo uses her Tonbokiri spear and Kimi simply utilizes dancing. All of this is done to a club house remix of P-01s' Leitmotif. Definitely much better than it sounds.
- Every song in One Piece Film: Red, as a result of Uta's Sing-Sing Fruit powers. Every song she sings creates a crazy imagery. The Sing-Sing Fruit draws people who hear her singing into an illusionary world, where she can control everything. The problem is that she wants to keep everyone trapped in her dream world forever...
- Tamagotchi!: Lovelitchi and Melodytchi's first performance of "Happy Happy Harmony", in episode 49b, features elaborate visuals such as them in front of bunches of musical notes, them holding hands as they fall into an abyss in outer space, them walking in front of visuals of amusement park rides that are themselves imposed over a night sky with fireworks, and them riding a rainbow above the ocean. Aside from the musical notes, there isn't much in the sequence that has to do with what the lyrics are describing (it's a song about enjoying music).
Live-Action TV
- Degrassi: The Next Generation: The season 2 episode "Take My Breath Away" opens up with Manny having a sudden fantasy of Craig singing a love song to her while she wears a silver diamond-covered ball gown.
- The middle instrumental section of "Mickey Mouse March" in the original The Mickey Mouse Club is comprised of floating marching band instruments and dancing musical notes.
- Scoop (2009): Starting from the second season, whenever Hacker heard a catchy beat, he’d immediately travel to his “happy place”, cuing a Stock Footage musical number about how great Hacker is, complete with dancing girls and Digby having a Gratuitous Rap segment.
- Yellowjackets: In "Burial" the adult Misty reluctantly gets inside a sensory-deprivation tank as part of a therapeutic treatment. It takes her about 7 seconds inside it for her mind to go into a full-blown musical number starring John Cameron Mitchell as her parrot.
Music
- Peter Gabriel: SLEDGEHAMMER!!!! The animated nature of it allows for offbeat moments to occur all around, from the scenery and props changing according to the lyrics to spawning two dancing raw chickens.
- The video for "The Perfect Drug" by Nine Inch Nails shows everything in blue-tinted monochrome, except for one green drink of absinthe. The ensuing trip switches to a green tint.
- The Weeknd in "Blinding Lights" depicts himself as the psychotic guy who has a hallucinating joyride as he hits the road in overdrive and Drives Like Crazy around late at night from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, speeding in his grey Mercedes-AMG GT convertible.
- Ur-Example in music: the Tone Poem Symphonie Fantastique by Hector Berlioz ends with a mad artist's non-fatal opium fantasy about a Witches' Sabbath, illustrated with proto-psychedelic music.
Puppet Shows
- The Muppets:
- The Muppet Babies sequence in The Muppets Take Manhattan. Miss Piggy imagines what it would be like if the Muppets met as babies, resulting in a bright and cheery Imagine Spot with different looking puppets than the ones normally used. This scene is a rare example in that the scene in question inspired its own series, which contained its own examples, which makes it the Russian dolls of animated puppets.
- The Great Muppet Caper has Miss Piggy fantasize about being the center of an underwater ballet, in which the film's villain sings-except after returning to reality and learning what's Beneath the Mask of the villain, she scornfully tells him, "You know what? You can't even sing! Your voice was dubbed!" Then again, the film had No Fourth Wall whatsoever, and she was under considerable emotional duress at the time.
- "Cabin Fever", a musical number in which the entire cast of Muppet Treasure Island comes down with Ocean Madness. Lampshaded when the only character who mentions it is treated as being crazy.
- Sesame Street:
- Many early episodes had a series of sketches on numbers (1 through 10) that involved a baker who holds in his arms that number of desserts but falls down a flight of stairs, ruining the desserts in question. The sketches started with a very flashy animated intro in which the voices of kids are heard counting up from 1 to 10, then back to 1, and finally up to the featured number in the sketch, in choral voice over, while that number, in animated form, zoomed around the screen.
- John and Faith Hubley of Storyboard Films did a lot of Sesame Street and Electric Company video trips, including this beloved classic, about the letter E, which involves an eagle, a dream about ice cream and a pair of Es becoming a pair of eyeballs.
- Many of the animated sequences were, in some way, acid-y. The Pinball sequences, for example, had a pinball journey through a very large and technicolour pinball machine, while it counted one through twelve. If the lightshows themselves didn't make them trippy, the automatons certainly did. The funky background music probably helped make it more so.
- There are also raps about the number six and all subsequent odd numbers, one of which, 7, is among the video examples.
- "The Lost Kid and the Yo-Yo Man", featuring a boy who rides his bike into a very trippy scene, almost like much of Porky in Wackyland or the last part of The Cat that Hated People and meets a stranger who bounces a yoyo, morphs into the strange landmarks the boy has passed, and finally gives him a riddling bit of advice, "Try to remember everything you passed/But when you go back, make the first thing the last."
- "In Your Imagination", a musical number where Elmo shows all the places one can be if they just imagine it.
- "Mystic Twenty", a classic and trippy animation short from Sesame Street's third broadcast season, in which an Indian guru counts from 1 to 20 on his four arms, accompanied by sitar music and a lot of psychedelic visuals.
- "Psychedelic Morphing Alphabet", bookended by a black screen with the entire lower case alphabet read quickly by a female voice and, in between, the 26 lower case letters of the alphabet progressively morphing from a to z while a dreamy male voice recites the alphabet, identifying the letters one at a time, accompanied by trippy, psychedelic, morphing visual backgrounds and a trippy, dreamy, weird musical score.
- “Alphabet Jungle” has a lot of dark humor and deranged visuals. What helps is that it was animated by Klasky Csupo who also worked on Rugrats.
- The two segments with Limbo (AKA Nobody), one of which, A Count of 10, is on the Video Examples page for this trope. It is an odd little sketch from the early years of Sesame Street, where a floating face that looks like it's made of rubber bands, with quite possibly one of the scariest voices ever heard on the show, counts to ten while weird animations and sound effects play continuously in the background. Also, the face jerks around like it's a seizure victim, and who can forget those high-pitched synth tones at the beginning? It's also a good example of the Scanimate system in action.
- Fraggle Rock:
- “I Want to be You”: Red sings "Dreaming of Someone", a song about yearning to be Mokey. During the song, Red has a Fantasy Sequence of Gobo, Wembley, Boober, Mokey, and even the Fraggle who was playing the flute in this piece. All of them are dressed in white and standing on clouds, with the former four gazing up at Mokey, who is holding a scroll.
- Boober and Wembley have a bizarre Imagine Spotting sequence in the episode "Pebble Pox Blues" in which Boober warns Wembley about "the greatest evil the world has ever known" with the song "Talkin' Bout Germs." As he sings, monstrous, spiky germs begin flying about, darting at the two terrified Fraggles.
Boober: [singing] You know their name is contagious.
Their number's outrageous.
They're wriggling and raging like worms.
And it wiggles and squirms!
Wembley: Wiggles and squirms?
Boober: I'm talkin' 'bout germs! - "Wembley and the Mean Genie" has The Genie's Rotten Rock & Roll song, "Do You Want It?", where he hypnotizes all the Fraggles but Wembley, turns them into a mindless army wearing identical clothes and standing with arms directed to the sides (which resembles a totalitarian regime), and slow-mo destroys an entire Doozer construct, with sparks flying.
- "Playing Till It Hurts": While singing "Chase the Wind," Red imagines herself scoring a perfect game of rock hockey in a gleaming silver uniform trimmed with sequins.
- "I'm Never Alone": Searching for some peace and quiet apart from noisy Fraggle Rock, Boober moves out to the Caves of Boredom and enjoys his solitude. As he sings, Boober has a fantasy where several clones of himself partake in activities like a Maypole, doing laundry, and playing the harp (which has a figure of Boober carved into it) with myriads of bubbles floating around them.
- In Troll, the Villain Song “The Music of The Monsters” performed by Torok's minions borders on this, with the monsters all singing a Labyrinthesque number outside the house, unbeknownst to the heroes inside.
- Donkey Hodie:
- “Dancing Under The Golden Rainbow" from "The Golden Crunchdoodles" takes place on a yellow background for the entire duration of the song, rather than the backgrounds that are usually seen in the show. Not helping matters is that this sequence occurs right after a scene depicting Donkey and Panda with tired eyes.
- "Too Many Pandas" from "Panda Panda" features a purple background featuring silhouettes and puppets of many Pandas.
- Part of the end song in "The Golden Crunchdoodles Return" counts as this. Like "Dancing Under The Golden Rainbow", much of the song takes place on a golden background.
- Part of the lullaby Donkey sings in "Ruff Night" takes place in a night sky with Donkey, Bob, and Panda's sleeping bags floating in the air.
- Most of the musical numbers in Labyrinth are pretty damn bizarre.
- "Magic Dance" isn't that weird in context, but it’s basically David Bowie and a bunch of goblins singing to a baby.
- "Chilly Down" is a straight-up Big-Lipped Alligator Moment sung by fuzzy red self-decapitating...things, with terribly outdated bluescreen effects.
- "As The World Falls Down", Sarah is given a "present" from Jareth — a peach which either causes her to hallucinate or actually transports her to a Dream Ballet set at a Masquerade Ball inside a crystal with freaky masks.
- "Within You" takes place in a literal M.C. Escher maze, where the word 'up' varies.
- "Magic Dance
- There is the "Too Much Honey" song number from The Book of Pooh story by the same name, with psychedelic music and walking honeypots, as a possible Call-Back to “Heffalumps and Woozles”.
Theater
- Jerome Robbins' comic ballet The Concert is All Just a Dream anyway (more precisely, people daydreaming to music), but the end features all of the characters morphing into butterflies and being chased off the stage by the increasingly irritated pianist.
- "Spooky Mormon Hell Dream" from The Book of Mormon, which features appearances by the spirits of Genghis Khan, Jeffrey Dahmer, Adolf Hitler and Johnnie Cochran, along with Starbucks cups and bizarrely dancing demons.
- End section of "Expressing Yourself" from Billy Elliot the Musical, which features giant dancing dresses, of Michael's creation.
- A Midsummer Night's Dream: The undoing of the love spell involves a surreal puppet dance.
- The Addams Family (2010): musical had a ballet in which Uncle Fester dances with the moon. It's never mentioned before that, and since the rest of the musical is staged pretty realistically, the Sequence that is Fester dancing with the moon seems thrown in just to show off.
- The Musical Screen-to-Stage Adaptation of Mrs. Doubtfire has "You've Created A Monster", in which Daniel is tormented by a horde of Mrs. Doubtfire clone zombies.
- Oklahoma! has this both for traditional productions and the Darker and Edgier 2019 revival.
- The traditional dream ballet starts out normal enough as Laurey and Curly happily dance and are to be wed, then takes an abrupt turn into nightmare territory when Jud appears and takes control of the dreamscape as burlesque dancers appear and force Laurey into joining their number. Then dream-Jud kills dream-Curly during a fight, with the 1955 movie adaptation adding an even more surreal tone by having their fight take place in a tornado and Jud not reacting to gunshots at all before closing in on Curly.
- The 2019 revival of the show portrayed the dream ballet with a single dancer who represented Laurey's self-consciousness and intimacy, and fled as cowboy boots fell from the sky while Jud swept them offstage, with electric guitars heard nowhere else on the soundtrack to emphasize the feeling of being out-of-place.
Theme Parks
- "Dreamin'" from the April 2004 Chuck E. Cheese show, a live-action/animated lip-dub video as Chuck E. sings about all the fun dreams he has when he goes to sleep, complete with trippy visuals.
- In the E.T. Adventure ride at Universal Studios, the ending celebration sequence on the Green Planet sports very trippy colors and features some quite unusual-looking creatures, including one alien that looks like a mushroom.
Video Games
- Aladdin (Capcom) replaces the "Friend Like Me" sequence with something that might be even trippier, featuring a cloud landscape dotted with Genie-faced balloons, pots with bird wings and feet, giant Genie heads with stretched-out tongues you use as platforms, and random mini tornadoes.
- Haven (2020) opens with a psychedelic hand-drawn/painted animation sequence of the protagonists.
- The Journeyman Project Turbo shows time travel as a sequence of drifting through rings and geometric shapes, accompanied by hard rock music and sound clips that Agent 5 already heard in the present. This is the only game in the series where this happens, though. Pegasus Prime replaces it with a multicolored wormhole, and the 2nd and 3rd games just show flybys of the time zones you're heading to.
- Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge: Guybrush suffers one in which the skeletons of his parents dance and sing to a jaunty xylophone rendition of "Dem Bones".
- Psychonauts 2: Near the end of "PSI King's Sensorium", Raz reunites the members of PSI King's band for a performance. As PSI King regains his memories of being Helmut Fullbear of the Psychic Six, one of the founding members of the Psychonauts, he sings a trippy psychedelic rock musical number called "Cosmic I (Smell The Universe)".
- Ratchet & Clank:
- We've got Obani Draco in Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, which happens to be the home of a sadistic pop star who directly works for the Big Bad as his dragon. What makes it an acid sequence is that it's almost completely dark pink, contains a giant disco ball, has a torture chamber and all of its residents are evil.
- Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters has the level "Dreamtime", in which Ratchet has been drugged down by the Technomites while they are doing laboratory surgery on him. The result is a level with several teleportation portals, with walls and glass panels being broken, optical illusions, large flying paper pieces in the shapes of various characters from Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, and several fights against multiple Captain Qwark hallucations with doctor gear and chainsaws, all while the outer edges of the camera view are heavily blurred.
- Stardew Valley:
- In Emily's 6-heart event, she shows you a dance number that gradually turns into a full-screen display of rainbows, pearl strings, and random floating symbols for about a minute.
- The Mermaid's song performance is a similarly colorful and trippy show of waves, fish, and floating mermaids.
- The Third Super Robot Wars Z: Tengoku-Hen has Basara Nekki, the VF-19 Kai Fire, and his band Fire Bomber regain access to the song "DYNAMITE EXPLOSION" after they lost it in the previous chapter, Jigoku-Hen. When used to debuff an enemy (or damage them outright if they are Made of Evil or particularly emotionless), this song produces one of these in the form of an animated Continuity Cavalcade referencing the original Macross 7'' anime.
Web Animation
- Annoying Orange: The music videos tend to go this direction. “Pear Isn’t Boring” especially because during it, Pear gets a mohawk and the entire kitchen becomes a flaming wasteland of floating rocks. The animation also switches to uncanny 3D.
- Without exception, all animation done by YouTuber Cyriak qualifies for this trope. See particularly the "Cows and Cows and Cows" Video, where you get cows that morph into Eldritch Abominations through the dark arts of Adobe After Effects. Heck, any of Cyriak's videos has heaping doses of terrifying Mind Screw-flavored eldritch beasts set in completely Etscheresque surreal landscapes that looks like it was created while he was high on something.
- Duffy's Digital Circus: Most of the episode "Stupid Sauce" is one of these due to it taking place from Jangle's point of view after her consumption of the titular sauce, particularly as it first takes effect and she starts running down a hallway that quickly turns endless and whose walls melt away into swirls of psychedelically flashing color.
- Fazbear and Friends (ZAMination): In "Bonnie BROKE His Guitar!?" Freddy sings a song to Bonnie about the color he wants to choose for his new guitar, in addition to telling her not only to think of a single color but also of others, all this while they tour a place where colors they combine during the song.
- Helluva Boss:
- The Truth-Serum-induced Mushroom Samba, in the episode "Truth Seekers", pulls out all the stops in both mind screwery and bizarre non-standard animation, whether it's the exaggeratedly fluid musical number for Moxxie or the deeply philosophical and introspective clusterfuck for Blitzo.
- Some of Stolas' songs count as this, namely You Will Be Okay, which features Stolas and Octavia watching the collapse of a dying star from a nearby planet, and All 2 U (Motherfucker), which jumps between several fantastical scenes with repeating imagery of stained glass murals, mirrors, and curtains.
- Octavia's song I Will Be Okay also qualifies. The first half of the song contains Octavia chasing after shadowy figures resembling Blitzo and Stolas. As a reference to stolas's songs, especially You Will Be Okay, the second half contains lots of imagery of outer space as well as general magical things.
- Lackadaisy: It begins on Lackadaisy's doors opening to reveal its empty stage, with the curtain rising on violinist Rocky performing a glittery, golden, lavishly staged Disney Acid Sequence, eventually revealed as his Daydream Surprise while neglecting lookout duties on a bridge. It ends with the band beginning to play as Lackadaisy's owner Mitzi shuts her eyes, envisions her husband's hand on her shoulder, then opens them to reveal they've filled with stars. A wash of glitter reveals her gold-hued fantasy of the stage and speakeasy filled with people, and the camera pulls out until the speakeasy doors shut.
Web Original
- Daniel Thrasher: "Shiny Object Syndrome" involves multiple Daniels dancing and singing in a colorful, trippy world, changing locations rapidly. It ends on what could be described as an attempted hypnosis sequence, with a spiraling background and repetitive lyrics.
- Don't Hug Me I'm Scared:
- The very first episode revolves around a living sketchpad singing a song about being creative, which leads to a bizarre and disturbing "creativity explosion".
- The job episode from the TV series has the elevator robot sing a rather bizarre song to Duck about dealing with stress. The robot drags Duck into her programming, turning him into a vector drawing with minimalist details.
- The very first episode
- The Nostalgia Critic:
- He does one of these in his review for Junior. In the middle of the review, he falls asleep and has a bizarre dream sequence while singing a song about how boring the movie is.
- He also does one at the end of his review for Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer where he sings rather psychotically about how he "Fu-Fu-Fu-Fu-Fu-Fucking Loves Christmas".
