When you see cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse and Goofy wearing gloves, are you ever confused as to why they wear gloves? Vox interviewed Professor John Cairnmaker, an animation historian at New York University, specifically on this point, and got some possible answers
Extreme Flying is the sequel to the classic movie The Ultimate Fool and one of my favorite animated films.
There is a clip in the movie:
Marx's iron buddy Bobby, the cheese-loving guy, said, "Have you ever wondered why we always wear gloves like this?" ”
That's a good question, Bobby, and let's find out today.
To answer this question, we conducted an interview with Professor John Cairnmaker, a historian of animation at New York University.
"Why do animated characters wear gloves?" Have many people asked such a question? ”
In this regard, John said, "Although few people ask this question, if someone asks, I can give a lot of answers." ”
The most basic saying is that gloves help save time in animation.
At the beginning of the animated film, everything relied on drawing over and over again by hand, and with certain specific techniques to make the process more efficient, the animation style was shaped in the process.
For example, the Filet cat originally had a very boxy appearance, but as it became more popular, animator Bill Nolan decided to remove its long nose and make it more rounded overall. This animated design, which they call hoses and circles, which painted the arms of the characters like spaghetti, was also applied to Mickey Mouse.
The animation design aesthetic of hoses and circles allows animators to image quickly without spending much time sketching out realistic details of the human body, such as elbows and knees. Because drawing a circle is much faster than drawing a corner. So naturally, all the fingers and knuckles were drawn like this.
In the era of blurry black-and-white movies, drawing hands also brought another problem for animators: in black-and-white movies, the black body and hands were difficult to distinguish.
In the case of Mickey Mouse, for example, in 1927's Crazy Airplane, he had black hands and feet like Fili's cat.
In 1928's Steamboat Willie he put on his shoes.
In 1929's The Opry House, he wore gloves. The hose animation style comes into full play here. Each character is exaggerated, rounded and simple.
Like many gloved cartoon characters of the Mickey Mouse era, Mickey Mouse is a non-human who does what humans do.
In the 1968 biography Disney Edition, Walt Disney mentioned this issue. "We don't want him to have rat hands because he should be more human, so we put gloves on him," he said. ”
Therefore, in addition to saving time and providing color contrast, the gloves bring non-human characters to life, focusing on portraying and highlighting their posture.
This was true of the 1935 teapots of The Veblen Studios, as were the characters in the cinema cameras.
When Pinocchio was a puppet, he wore gloves.
But when he became a boy, the gloves disappeared and they weren't needed.
Behind the cartoon character's white gloves, though, there's another, less practical effect.
The House of Opry is a film about Mickey staging a major cabaret show that, like many animated films before it, is inextricably linked to juggling and singing at the time.
In fact, early animators often performed on the opera stage. Nicholas Salmond wrote in The Birth of Industry: "Early animated characters, like Philip the Cat, Bimborough, and Mickey Mouse, they were not only like performers, they were performers. ”
Both the cartoon and the stage characters are portrayed as playful and rebellious but also good-natured, wearing loose-fitting clothes, colored faces, and white gloves.
In the 1930s, vaudeville performers gradually declined, and in the eyes of a new generation of audiences, the white gloves had no connection with vaudeville performances. Instead, it became part of the cartoon style that people expected.
The 1935 film Concert for Bands features a character, The Cow, krabell, and one of the scenes is when it plays the flute and the gloves get stuck in the flute. If there were no gloves, how difficult it would be to express this plot.
60 years later, Goofy took off his gloves before entering the pool, which, to be honest, was scary. What really bothers me now is why The Duffy Duck and many other animated birds don't wear gloves anymore, and we probably never know that.
Maybe it's just like the answer of Bugs Bunny to others in the cartoon:
"Now let's not worry about it, why do you wear gloves?"
"Because I've been wearing it, that's who I am." Why do you wear that thing around your neck? ”
Brother Rabbit's statement may be the most interesting reply.