Animated Credits Opening

"He'll spend a 30 million dollar budget, trying as hard as he can to make it look like he only spent a few hundred thousand. The first step is to spend millions on a hand-drawn title sequence that looks like it was made by some Junior High kid during Pre-Algebra."

—Strong Bad, Strong Bad e-mail 203, "independent"

A live-action movie or TV show that has an animated Artistic Title sequence with all sorts of wacky hijinx. It may foreshadow the plot, set up the backstory, or just be emblematic of the story's theme.

Very popular in the films and television series of The Sixties, with a nostalgic, Retro revival in The Eighties. Since The Nineties, filmmakers' desire to get to the action as quickly as possible has resulted in this trope largely being discarded in favor of Creative Closing Credits.

A subtrope of Medium Blending. Compare Bait and Switch Credits.

Examples of Animated Credits Opening include:

Films -- Animation

• Monsters, Inc. and Kung Fu Panda have opening sequences that engage in Medium Blending to 2D animation.
• A recent trend is for CGI features to have 2-D animation for the closing credits: The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Kung Fu Panda, Bolt, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Tangled, etc.
• .hack//Liminality features opening credits over the .hack game footage.
• The title sequence of the 2011 The Adventures of Tintin is animated in 2D.

Films -- Live-Action

• Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
• Are We Done Yet?
• Around the World in Eighty Days (1956) has animated closing credits.
• Auto Focus
• The Back-Up Plan
• Bedknobs and Broomsticks, which begins with a animation based on the Bayeux Tapestry.
• Better Off Dead
• Big Momma's House was originally supposed to have one but it was dropped after test audiences found it too cheesy.
• Blacula
• Catalina Caper, riffed on in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode. Joel and the Bots seemed to prefer the animation to the rest of the movie.
• Catch Me If You Can
• City Slickers
• C.H.O.M.P.S
• Condorman
• The 2004 retro-style live action Cutey Honey movie.
• The Dogfather
• Down With Love, in keeping with the Retraux style.
• The Vincent Price comedy Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine had part of its opening credits animated by Art Clokey.
• Elf
• Four Rooms—interesting for containing references to the cut fifth story.
• All three Dollars Trilogy movies have some form of animation for their opening credits. A Fistful of Dollars' is totally animated, For a Few Dollars More has animated words on a live-action background, and The Good the Bad And The Ugly has a mix of animation and still photos with various filters applied to make them look somewhat hand-drawn.
• Freaked
• Friday After Next
• Being themselves inspired by a cartoon, both George of the Jungle The Movie and the direct-to-video Part 2 have animated credits, although in wildly different style.
• Going Overboard
• Grease
• Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
• Its a Mad Mad Mad Mad World
• Most of the James Bond films.
• Juno (although it was more rotoscoped than actually animated).
• Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, probably as an homage to Anatomy of a Murder and other noir classics.
• Labyrinth. Notable as one of the first such sequences to be made with CGI. The animated barn owl that sweeps above and around the credits becomes a live-action one as the film proper starts, and not long after is revealed to be the shapeshifted form of the villain.
• The Lady Eve
• Land of the Lost
• Mannequin
• Monty Python's Life of Brian and Monty Python's The Meaning of Life have animated credits by Terry Gilliam.
• The live-action version of Mr. Magoo, naturally enough, uses the animated character for its credits.
• As does the film adaptation of Underdog.
• Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium
• Mrs. Doubtfire, in which Chuck Jones' animated credits overlap into the film proper as Robin Williams' character is revealed to be a voice artist working on (and subsequently fired from) the cartoon we've just seen.
• Nanny McPhee
• National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
• No Deposit, No Return
• One Crazy Summer is a semi-example: not strictly credits, and justified by the main character being a cartoonist.
• The Parent Trap (the original, not the remake) features a stop-motion animation sequence during its opening credits.
• The Pink Panther, whose titles spawned its own series of animated shorts, which themselves inspired a TV show (which, ironically enough, used live-action credits in its first season).
• The Private Eyes, an early 1980s comedy starring Don Knotts and Tim Conway.
• Rat Race
• Run Lola Run
• Ruthless People
• A deleted scene in Scooby Doo is this.
• A Series Of Unfortunate Events has animated closing credits that run so long it's almost a mini-film in itself. And a creepily gothic one, too.
• Soap Dish
• Super
• Super Mario Bros: The Movie, which begins with footage of pixellated dinosaurs.
• Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny
• Those Magificent Men in Their Flying Machines
• Troop Beverly Hills, animated by John K.
• Youth in Revolt

Live-Action TV

• The British Game Show 3-2-1.
• The French wildlife show Les Animaux du monde (warning: serious Ear Worm).
• Batman
• Bewitched
• Blackout, Bob Goen's first network game show.
• Bullseye
• The late 1960s/early 1970s kids' fantasy series Catweazle.
• Chuck
• The mid-1990s sitcom Dave's World.
• Densha Otoko
• Desperate Housewives
• Even Stevens, using Stop Motion plasticine versions of the actors
• Honey I Shrunk the Kids
• Hustle, possibly as a Shout-Out to Catch Me if You Can.
• I Dream of Jeannie
• I Love Lucy (although these were replaced in syndication).
• Jeux Sans Frontières (a.k.a. It's a Knockout), a wacky European athletics show.
• Land of the Giants
• Last Call with Carson Daly
• Lost in Space
• Mad Men
• The Mickey Mouse Club
• Misfits
• Monty Python's Flying Circus
• My Three Sons
• The Nanny
• The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency
• The 1970s Britcom On the Buses.
• The Partridge Family
• The Phil Silvers Show
• A special case with Rome, whose credits feature animated graffitis and paintings over the walls of Ancient Rome.
• Soul Train
• The Starter Wife
• The UK children's show Super Gran.
• To Say the Least
• TV's Bloopers & Practical Jokes, by none other than Mad Magazine artist Sergio Aragones.
• Ultra Seven
• What's My Line?, in the late 1960s.
• Wheel of Fortune used some in the 1990s, including anthropomorphic Wheel wedges dancing down a staircase, then one of Pat and Vanna parachuting, then a CGI shot of the Sony Pictures Studios. In 2010, the opening sequence featured Miis of Pat and Vanna to promote the then-upcoming Home Game for Nintendo's Wii and DS.
• Whew, another game show by producer Jay Wolpert, who just loved these in general.
• The British version of Whose Line Is It Anyway featured this title sequence in its later seasons, which was evidently inspired by a series of Italian animated shorts, "La Linea".
• The Wild Wild West