Fanservice putting on a (perhaps unintentional) show, there's some pretty clever programming behind it.įor a more low-tech, more specific Sister Trope, see Gainaxing. Whether it's the Badass Longcoat of the hero bouncing and flapping around as he runs, the gelatinous monster wobbling as it's pumped full of plasma fire, or Ms. Next time you play a game or watch an all-CGI movie or cartoon, take a look at what bounces and jiggles in reaction to physical stimuli. Of course, the computing power to simulate soft anatomy became commercially available much sooner, so for a relatively cheap gimmick it could be applied to body fat and the example which first comes to mind for most people when they hear the term, breasts. The earliest uses of Jiggle Physics were not for simulating anatomy, but rather for hair and clothing.
In this respect, it's a sister trope to Ragdoll Physics, which deals with more rigid structures. Jiggle Physics, also known as Soft-Body Physics, or sometimes Cloth Physics, is the art and science of simulating the behavior of non-rigid objects and materials in a computer.