Slow Motion Fall

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Similar to a Slow Motion Drop but instead of an inanimate object dropping, we see a person falling backwards (or, rarely, forwards) in slow-motion, usually, after being shot. Bonus points if their True Companions are watching: it's the cue for an appropriately slowed down Big No.

See Disney Villain Death for when the fall happens without slow-motion. Sub-Trope of Death Is Dramatic. If it goes on long enough for it to start being funny, it's I Fell for Hours.

Be warned that this is frequently a Death Trope!

Examples of Slow Motion Fall include:


Anime and Manga

  • Subverted with Revy and a toy gun in Black Lagoon.
  • A fixture in Bleach combat scenes, if almost never fatal.
  • Euphie in Code Geass.
  • Cowboy Bebop
    • Julia. This one comes with Disturbed Doves in the background...
    • When Spike falls from the stained glass window in the first chapter featuring Vicious, we get one of the slowest drops of all time. Spike falls through the air for fully 1 minute 50 seconds as both he and Vicious have flashbacks, some of which are themselves in slow motion.
  • Despite the extreme Anyone Can Die atmosphere, only happens once in Death Note.
  • Maes Hughes in Fullmetal Alchemist.
  • Various Gundams like to do this, especially since Anyone Can Die.
  • Katekyo Hitman Reborn: Whenever Reborn shoots Tsuna with the "Dying Will Bullets" he is shown falling backwards in a show of dying to the ground before getting a fierce expression on his face and going into "Dying Will Mode", complete with massive Clothing Damage.
  • Parodied in Lucky Star: "The drawing hand is an artist's everything..."
  • Madlax "killed" by Margaret for the first time right after Vanessa's death.
  • The Last Guidance in Noir. Probably a homage to the above is the scene in El Cazador de la Bruja when Nadie falls down after being apparently shot but it turns out she just slipped on the ice.
  • Happens to Haruhi in the last episode of Ouran High School Host Club, though she was just thrown over the side of a bridge instead of being shot. The thing is, she falls so slowly that Tamaki has time to say thanks to Eclaire, get out of a carriage, jump over a car and off a bridge, grab and hug Haruhi, and execute a swan dive before she actually starts falling. Lampshaded in episode 4 when Tamaki collapses after being repeatedly insulted by Renge.

Hikaru: He's created a new technique!
Kaoru: One-Man Slow Motion!

  • Soul Eater- This happens to Soul, complete with flying blood drops in mid-air, when he Takes The Sword for Maka in the fight against Ragnarok.
  • Wolf's Rain: Toboe, after being accidentally shot by Quent instead of Taking the Bullet for him. At this point the audience can tell that Toboe's Not Quite Dead yet because he's still maintaining his human disguise.
  • Happens a few times (for a few reasons) in Rozen Maiden.
  • Poor Umi in Magic Knight Rayearth after Alcyone uses her for icicle target practice. Complete with wide-eyed stare from Hikaru and Fuu.


Film

  • Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when the title characters shot down the Bolivian bandits.
  • Dumbledore's death leads to this in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
  • Hans Gruber in Die Hard, though he actually falls at normal speed after the first twenty feet or so.
  • Trinity in the second Matrix film.
  • Star Wars
  • Haldir's death in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers movie is an interesting take on this as we see it through his eyes. Followed promptly by a Foe-Tossing Charge by Aragorn.
  • In Frequency, Dennis Quaid did a slo-mo fall out of a burning building into the Hudson River, followed by his helmet bouncing on the pavement.
  • Aman's wife for good in Survive Style 5+.
  • The Comedian being thrown through the glass in The Movie of Watchmen, as seen in the trailer.
  • Isabeau in Ladyhawke
  • Done for hilarity and/or cruelty in Shaolin Soccer when a woman slipping on a banana peel is stretched out to more than a minute with multiple camera angles for good measure. In the epilogue She slips on another peel, but has now learned Kung-fu, so she rights herself in mid-air and then performs a Slow-Motion Pass-By on the man who popularised Kung-fu for a new generation.
  • Jack Slater's fall from the elevator in Last Action Hero.
  • 300 had a scene in which a character's head gets chopped off and falls in slow motion.
    • Parodied in Meet The Spartans, in which the character had time to do that pump chest peace out thing.
  • Several in Inception, but everyone who does fall is alright since they're used as a method of waking a dreaming team member up or as a way for a dreaming person to quickly wake themselves up.
    • The part where the van falls into the river, which takes half the movie to finish falling.
  • The ending of Hitchcock's Saboteur, where the villain falls from the Statue of Liberty leaving the hero holding onto an empty jacket sleeve.
  • Megamind begins his story by falling to his death.
  • Leon:The Professional has a first-person POV example after Leon is shot in the back by the Big Bad.
  • The Room: Johnny falls backwards in slow motion after eating his gun.


Live Action TV

  • SNL's Dear Sister. And the original scene from The OC.
  • Engine Sentai Go-onger had Sosuke collapses and turns into rust due to a device given to him by one of the villains. He gets better though.
  • In Doctor Who, the parallel universe Cyber-controller falls to his doom after Pete Tyler cuts the ladder the Controller is climbing with the sonic screwdriver.
    • In "Voyage of the Damned", four characters fall into the Titanic's nuclear storm drive this way. One of which were by forklift.
  • The 4th season of Big Love featured lots of Slow Motion Falling in its teaser and new opening credits sequence, presumably reflecting the fears of the characters about being exiled from their church.
  • Colin in the first season of Everwood. While he doesn't die, it's the beginning of the end for him.


Theater

  • The Light in the Piazza has an indirect one- there's a song in which Margaret describes her daughter's slow motion fall, but we don't actually see it, which wouldn't work on stage anyway and is much more effective.


Video Games


Western Animation

  • Family Guy
    • "Stewie Kills Lois", with Lois falling in slo-mo off the ship's railing.
    • Nazi puppeteer Franz at the end of his battle with Herbert.
  • Used in X-Men: Evolution when Rogue Pushes Mystique off a cliff. Nightcrawler tries to BAMF down to save her, but he can't get there in time. When she finally comes to a halt in pieces at the bottom of the cliff, he teleports down there and starts crying over her remains.
  • Happens to Vakama in Bionicle 3: Web of Shadows, with Nokama, who is one of his True Companions, watching in horror.
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