"What a woman! Eyes like pies..."
— Felix the Cat, The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat
During the 1920s and going into the 1930s, animated characters were sometimes drawn with eyes or pupils that were black and circular, but shaped like a pie that's had one slice removed from it, with the missing slice being an oversimplified representation of a radial light reflection. It is remembered today as one of the most iconic features of the Inkblot Cartoon Style. Pie-eyes were widespread until around the time color became the standard for most cartoons in the early 1940s, by which time the Inkblot Cartoon Style had fallen out of favor, and Western Animation as a whole had undergone significant Art Evolution. The style sometimes appeared in comics as well, particularly the Disney ones, and others based on characters that first appeared in animation.
When it shows up in modern media, it's usually as a homage or throwback. Parodies of the Inkblot Cartoon Style will almost always employ this along with Rubber-Hose Limbs and the like.
Another variation is Crescent Moon Pupils, where the characters are drawn with pupils shaped like crescent moons.
See also Black Bead Eyes, which were also employed in black and white cartoons; Sphere Eyes, which began to replace them both around the 1940s; and Sudden Eye Colour, which happens when a character who was once pie-eyed gets more "standard" looking eyes in redesigns. Not to be confused with a slang term for being drunk, or with the results of a Pie in the Face.
Classic Examples:
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Advertising
- Big Boy of the Big Boy Restaurants
originally had black dot pupils, but a redesign in 1956 gave him pie eyes and he's had them ever since.
- When the Cleveland Guardians were known as the Indians, their mascot was Chief Wahoo◊. His design underwent slight revisions from 1946-2018, but he had always been pie-eyed.
Anime & Manga
- Toyoo Ashida's art style during the late 80s onwards tends to feature these eyes for many characters, which can be seen in his character designs in Mashin Hero Wataru and Madö King Granzört.
- The works of Noboru Sakaoka depict characters this way, such as his Ultraman, Super Dimension Fortress Macross, and Voltes V manga.
Comic Books
- Many characters from Carl Barks' Disney Ducks Comic Universe stories are pie-eyed.
Comic Strips
- Popeye characters in the cartoon sometimes had them, usually only during close-ups.
Films — Animation
- Pinocchio (1940): The Coachman's Nightmare Face has a variant — he has black pupils and green irises, but the white highlight is the pie style.
Literature
- Dr. Seuss uses the crescent pupil variation on his illustrations.
- Land of Oz: Some non-human characters in John R. Neill's illustrations for the book series had pie eyes, most notably the robotic Tik-Tok.
- Rocko The Christmas Bat: Every character but the titular one has their eyes drawn this way.
Puppet Shows
- Sam, the title character of Jim Henson's first TV show, Sam and Friends, has pie eyes.
Western Animation
- Betty Boop, and most of her supporting characters, have the eyes.
- Dinky Doodle
- Felix the Cat: Zigzagged. In some shorts, he has pie-eyes, and in others, he has Black Bead Eyes.
- Flip the Frog
- Looney Tunes tends to drift in and out of this style.
- Common in the Harman and Ising era, with Bosko, the Talk-Ink Kid, Foxy, and others having them Depending on the Artist.
- Buddy from Looney Tunes, also Depending on the Artist. When brought back in Animaniacs in the 1990's as an overly dull parody of his former self he maintained them.
- Porky Pig, in the 1930s, particular when animated by Frank Tashlin. Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones phased this out when they redesigned Porky.
- Common cartoons in directed by Tex Avery with I Love to Singa having them prominently. The earliest appearances of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, directed by Avery, had them sporting these eyes.
- Mickey Mouse occasionally sported these eyes (as seen in the above image) in his early days, when he didn't just have Black Bead Eyes. It sometimes went between the two within the same short. He had them more consistently in the comics.
Modern Examples and Homages:
Anime & Manga
- In Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, Don Patch sometimes has these eyes.
- Enrico Pucci in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean is drawn with pupils like these.
- My Hero Academia has Mirio Togata, whose appearance is supposed to be a reference to the Vault Boy of Fallout.
- In Soaring Sky! PreCure, Battamonda's anxiety-induced visions of the Cures all have dead, pie-shaped eyes that stare at him.
Asian Animation
- The dancing flowers in the intro to Happy Family (2004) have these.
Films — Animation
- Arlo the Alligator Boy uses this type of eyes for every character, to keep up the theme of its faux-retro aesthetic.
- The Lorax (2012): The cartoony version of the Once-ler depicted on advertising banners has pupils like this.
- The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie: Mindy has pie-shaped pupils.
- Steven Universe: The Movie: Spinel once had black eyes with a cut taken out of them, part of her general Inkblot Cartoon Style. After she discovered Pink Diamond abandoned her, she shifted to beady eyes with red irises.
Films — Live-Action
- Johnny Dangerously: The animated segment uses them, as it's done in a 1930s art style.
- Reefer Madness: The Brownie from the animated segment of the musical has these.
Live-Action TV
- Doctor Who: Lux's avatar Mr. Ring-a-Ding is meant to be an homage to old-timey cartoons and has these eyes.
- Loki (2021): Miss Minutes has these types of eyes. As befitting the Schizo Tech of the TVA, she is designed to look like an old-timey cartoon character, just as everything in the TVA seems designed to appear as old-timey technology.
Pinball
- FunHouse: Rudy's Nightmare: The living hot dog in "Hot Dog Combat" has pie-shaped eyes, tying into its overall design resembling an old cartoon character.
Toys
- A Playmobil set with two vampire figures features these on the female vampire.
Video Games
- Cuphead: All of the characters have this kind of eye. This is fitting, since the entire game is a giant homage to animation circa the 1930s.
- Bendy and the Ink Machine: Given the game is a retraux based on the 1930s, all the Toons have these.
- Megadimension Neptunia VII: B-Sha occasionally gets these. Quite fitting, as she's a Moe Anthropomorphism of Bandai Namco, who made the aforementioned Pac-Man.
- EarthBound Beginnings: The clay models had this kind of eye on Ninten and Ana. Loid and Teddy's aren't apparent because they wear Opaque Nerd Glasses and Cool Shades, respectively. This is another rare modern usage that is not a throwback. However, the characters in the two sequels feature Black Bead Eyes instead.
- Several villagers in the Animal Crossing series have pie-eyes.
- Kingdom Hearts II uses this for the Retraux segment, where Sora and company travel to the time of Steamboat Willie to help out Mickey Mouse. In Super Smash Bros., Sora has a costume that represents this segment, where he again has pie-shaped eyes.
- Pac-Man: Appropriately enough, when Pac-Man is pictured in his mascot form (as having arms and legs) he usually has these eyes. It shows up on the arcade cabinet art, and in later games such as Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures and Pac-Man World. Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures also features this for most characters, while '80s American Pac-Man art such as the Hanna-Barbera cartoon avoided it.
- Super Monkey Ball: AiAi and most of his fellow monkeys have their eyes drawn in this manner.
Web Animation
- Double King: The titular character has this kind of pupil, although he is the only one with them, save for minor background characters.
- The Grossery Gang: The characters from "back in the day" are portrayed with this style of pupil instead of the standard round ones for an old-fashioned feel.
- Happy Tree Friends: Most of the characters have pie-shaped pupils, except for Lumpy.
- The song "The Ghost of Stephen Foster" by the Squirrel Nut Zippers has an Animated Music Video that paid homage to the Max and Dave Fleischer cartoons of the 1930's. Every character in the video is pie-eyed.
- In the infamous Prager U series Leo And Laylas History Adventures, all of the characters' eyes are drawn like this.
Webcomics
- Auguste Fighter uses the triangle-shaped highlights associated with cartoons from the 30s.
- The Cartoon Chronicles of Conroy Cat: Doggy D. Dachshund, whose shtick is being a Jaded Washout from the appropriate era, has these.
- Charby the Vampirate: Tony the Alp has tall black oval eyes with a wedge of yellow when deprived of his hat (which kind of depowers him).
- Cirque Royale has the characters have pie-eyes as part of the storybook-style shift in "The King's Monster" when Fred is talking about his and Will's childhood as part of The Freakshow since they were born as Conjoined Twins. Kingston is drawn with blue ones to reflect his uniquely colored eyes as a half-mime.
- Doris Doodle: Being a Toon created in the early 1940s, Doris' design features pie eyes. Belle and Berry Bunny also feature pie eyes in their original rubberhose era designs like their inspirations.
- PepsiaPhobia has a Western storyline drawn in this style.
- Love Me Nice: Most of the male Toon characters are pie-eyed, possibly as an homage to the old Inkblot style. One character, Roger, essentially is an Inkblot cartoon character.
- Being based on old-timey silent-era cartoons, the characters of Silent Sillies have this as part of their designs.
Western Animation
- American Dragon: Jake Long: In the first season, nearly all the characters are drawn with these.
- Drawn Together: Toot Braunstein, a parody of Betty Boop, naturally has these.
- DuckTales (2017) characters have thin slices in their eyes as a nod to Carl Barks' style.
- Their version of Magica De Spell is an inversion; her Hellish Pupils are triangular slits, representing the "missing slice."
- El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera: Used by almost every character.
- The Fairly OddParents!: The episode "The Good Old Days!" is a homage to 1930s animation and thus the main characters are redrawn with that style.
- Futurama: The episode "Reincarnation," which parodies several animation styles, gave these to the cast◊ in the 1930s-style segment.
- Harvey Beaks: Most characters just have dots for pupils, but Piri Piri, her mother Hanzi, and Michelle have large pupils with notches in them. For the first two is emphasizes their New Aged outlook, while Michelle's is simply because she's a baby. The notches are a bit less triangular than classic examples, with a noticeable taper.
- King of the Hill: Nearly all the characters are drawn with a subtle Crescent Moon variation, with the exceptions of Bill and Kahn having more standard-looking, rounded cartoon eyes, while Cotton and Boomhauer have Black Bead Eyes.
- Max and Ruby: The characters have pie-shaped pupils.
- The Paul Rudish Mickey Mouse cartoons have these eyes on everyone, with more consistency than the original black and white shorts.
- My Life as a Teenage Robot, which uses a Retraux style, has most of the characters with a small "slice" taken out of their eye, though Jenny has eyes like slotted screws.
- The Patrick Star Show: Some One-Shot Characters are drawn with this style in a few episodes.
- The Powerpuff Girls (1998): In the episode "Silent Treatment", the girls gain these when they get trapped inside a silent cartoon.
- She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: In various scenes, has drawn characters with black eyes (like Bow and Scorpia) as either pie-eyed or with an explicit reflection.
- The Simpsons: Mr. Sparkle, the Japanese detergent mascot that happened to look like Homer in the episode "In Marge We Trust", had them.
- South Park: Mr. Hankey and his family. Also, in the episode "Red Sleigh Down", proximity to Christmas presents caused children to briefly morph into old-fashioned pie-eyed cartoons.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Truth or Square", Patchy shows a SpongeBob short in a 1920s style, where everything has this eye style.
- Also, SpongeBob is comically pie-eyed when he learns that he will be the cashier in "Squid's Day Off".
- In the first movie, King Neptune and his daughter Mindy are drawn with these. SpongeBob and Patrick also briefly gain them during an extreme close-up.
- Steven Universe: Spinel is pie-eyed as a default, as shown when she was hit with the Rejuvinator and reset to that state.
- The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!: Mostly everyone in the cartoon has this feature, a rare modern usage not meant as a throwback.
- Thomas & Friends: Zig-zagged. While the engines themselves, other vehicles, and rolling stocking are consistently depicted with Black Dot Pupils in the show proper, they are frequently depicted with pie-eyes in promotional art and merchandise from the '80s until the shift to CGI in 2010. Human characters, meanwhile, tended to go back and forth between having pie-eyes and Black Dot Pupils until the aforementioned switch to CGI, where they're given more realistic eyes with irises.
- 2 Stupid Dogs: This style was used in the short "Hobo Hounds", which was made to look like an old silent cartoon.
Real Life
- Cat clocks with moving eyes often are pie-eyed.
- The Thomas replicas used for Day Out with Thomas events were depicted with pie-eyes until 2014, where the face was redesigned to match Thomas' CGI appearance in later seasons.