Impossible Hourglass Figure

File:HelloNurseFigure2 2089.png

"How'd you come up with the [bottle's] design?" "I don't know, it just came to me!"

A woman in comics or cartoons doesn't have ribs like a real actress does. Thus she can easily have a far narrower waist than would be possible with even the strictest of corsets - and usually without even wearing one!

A woman with an Impossible Hourglass Figure has generous curves, with an impossibly narrow waist as an unproblematic part of how she just happens to look. Thus taking the classic "hourglass figure" beauty ideal Up to Eleven. She's always designed to be attractive, even in the cases where she's not Ms. Fanservice or Hello, Nurse!: Monsters with insect-like narrow waists does not count, even if the shape reminds of a hourglass.

For more realistic hourglass figures, see instead Of Corsets Sexy and Of Corset Hurts.

No Real Life Examples, Please (it is, after all, impossible). This trope applies only to drawings and animation.

Examples of Impossible Hourglass Figure include:

Anime and Manga

• Miss Doublefinger from One Piece.
  • Not to mention Boa Hancock, Nico Robin, and Nami, for starters. One would get the idea that this is one of the author's many fancies.
• Similar to the One Piece example we have several female characters from Fairy Tail and Rave Master. Mashima states that he actually doesn't find it especially appealing and he mainly uses the design to please young male fans.
• The Gender flipped version of America in Axis Powers Hetalia.
• Quite a few of the female characters have this type of figure in Code Geass, most notably Kallen and Milly.
• In the time skip between her own comic in Street Fighter Legends: Ibuki and the Back To School Special comic Ibuki has filled out quite nicely as her breast appear to be the biggest out of all SF girls in the comic and while her pelvis matches Sakura and Karin's her waist appears to be more narrow than the other two, giving Ibuki quite a distinction with her waist compared to shoulders and hips.
  • In one shot in particular Ibuki's hips just flare out of her ninja costume's open spots.

Fashion Design

• This Stella McCartney dress creates the optical illusion that the wearer has one of these.

Film

• Francesca from Mad Monster Party.
• Jessica Rabbit from Who Framed Roger Rabbit is more one of the more famous and extreme cases of this trope. She was originally designed with more (relatively speaking) realistic proportions, but the creators decided that they wanted an unrealistic quality about her sexiness. She's a toon, after all.
• Miss Forcible, in her youth, and the Other Miss Forcible from the film version of Coraline
• Holli Would from Cool World.
• Mrs. Toad From Thumbelina who has huge Non-Mammal Mammaries on top of a near nonexistent waist, and wide hips to match.
• Sita from Sita Sings the Blues.
• Princess Jasmine from Aladdin.
  • Bonus points for actually getting trapped in an hourglass.
• Four of the muses and Aphrodite, from Hercules, have waists so tiny they could probably wrap one hand around them. Oddly enough, Megara ends up with Hartman Hips, despite being the only female to make use of her womanly charms.
• The evil stepmother Frieda from Happily N'Ever After.

Live Action Television

• An episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia actually deconstructs this trope. Dennis takes up fashion designing, and specifically designs his clothes for someone with an Hourglass figure. Of course, since no one in real life actually has one...

Newspaper Comics

• All the women in Li'l Abner, except Mammy Yokum.

Video Games

• Vivi from Brain Dead 13.
• Cyberswine: The Civilian Robots have incredibly skinny waists. Justified, because they are robots and they can be shaped that way without any health issues.
• Valentina from Super Mario RPG, who has about the same proportions as her martini glass she's always carrying and is one of the few, if the only mario characters with noticable breasts.
• The F-Zero series has two: Mrs. Arrow (debuting in X) and Princia Ramode (GX/AX).
• Grunty from Banjo-Kazooie's Game Over screen.
• The Dark Queen from Battletoads.
• Jessica Albert in Dragon Quest VIII. Ditto for the elf maiden Rajah and the Witch-type enemies.
• Veran from The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages.
• Both Ringford Queen Elfaria and Queen Odette from Odin Sphere have pencil thin waists sandwiched in between huge breasts and wide hips. In Queen Odette case it makes sense considering aside from the breasts she is literately just skin and bone.
• Lara Croft was one of these in the early installment of the Tomb Raider franchise, though her character design in later installments have been progressively averting this trope by widening her waist and shrinking her breasts. Since Tomb Raider Underworld, she now has a realistic hourglass figure.
• Iroha from Samurai Shodown.
• Taldeer, Macha, and the unnamed Farseers in the first Dawn of War game.
• The beautiful Queen of Tumblers Salina from Drakensang.
• Some females from the Shantae series. Notably NPC women around Scuttle Town.
• Bunnie Rabbot of Sonic the Hedgehog, who is canonically described the Freedom Fighters' sex symbol.
• Rumble Roses has many of it's Roses (human female wrestlers) nearing this category, though their waists are more of a realistic very narrow rather than as narrow as possible, but it's most literal example is Lady X Subsistance who is a robot created by Anesthesia and has a female figure with bigger breast and wider hips alongside a smaller waist than the Roses.
• Hellen Gravely from Luigi's Mansion 3.
• Morgan Le Flay from Tales of Monkey Island.
  • And the other character that uses her model, Elaine Threepwood.

Web Comics

• Phobia from Gastrophobia. It even gets lampshaded here.
• Both Ben'Joon and Pella from Looking for Group.
• Space Princess Voluptua (at least her human form) from The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob.
• This is the basic bodyshape for many female characters of Las Lindas. It tends to be more obvious in Fan Service-heavy segments, like Breasts are the Best (as Mora Linda demonstrates).
• The title character of Doctor Voluptua.
• Lavender from El Goonish Shive. Lampshaded here but Justified as she belongs to a species of shapeshifting aliens and thus can have whatever figure she likes.

Western Animation

• Lindsay from Total Drama Island, in contrast to most of the other females on the show who typically have Hartman Hips. Not too surprisingly, she's also the most attractive female in the cast.
• Hello Nurse from Animaniacs, as seen on the picture above.
• Princess Aura from The New Adventures of Flash Gordon.
• Bunnie Rabbot. In the comics, she's openly calls herself the "Resistance sex symbol".
• Miss Sara Bellum and Sedusa from The Powerpuff Girls.
• Suga Mama on one episode of The Proud Family when she lost weight before marrying Clearance. However, they did not get married in the end.
• Princess Mandie from The Fairly Odd Parents.
• Almost every female character from Kim Possible. There's too many to name, but there's mainly Kim, Shego, Monique, and Bonnie.
• "Red" (or "Lou") from Tex Avery's cartoons.
• Jez from Jimmy Two Shoes, surprising that the people behind the show managed to get her ludicrously sexualised design past censors.
• Virtually every female in the DCAU. Bruce Timm clearly loves him some hourglass curves.
• The entire Winx Club... look at those girls! Is it even possible for waists so skinny to support their boobs and hips?! Supermodels clearly try to get figures like those girls.
  • This is a bit more prominent in the comics than the TV show. In the cartoon, their breasts, while still large, are reasonably sized for their figures. In the comics, however, their breasts look like they could fall off at any given moment.
• Kimmy from Sym-Bionic Titan.
• Betty Boop.
• Oblivia from the Bubsy TV Pliot
• Dennis' mother, Alice Mitchell, from Dennis the Menace US.
• One episode of Samurai Jack featured the Sirens. You know you have a winner when you realize that even their arms are thicker than their waists!
• Princess Kashmir from The Simpsons.
• When Candace from Phineas and Ferb is shown as an adult, her figure has gone from literally pencil-straight to improbable hourglass.
• Panty the Panther from El Arca.
• Ms. Physics from Dexter's Laboratory.