It’s rare for Disney to overlook a marketing opportunity. For years, Mouse Ears were the film studio’s theme park souvenir of choice, but recently the gift shops have started stocking white four-fingered gloves too.
Perhaps not the most sensible choice for dipping into a bucket of jalapeño poppers or a $6 Mickey Pretzel with Cheese Sauce, but the gloves have undeniable reach when it comes to cartoon history. Bugs Bunny wears them. So does Woody Woodpecker, Tom (though not Jerry), and Betty Boop’s anthropomorphic doggie pal, Bimbo.
As Vox’s Estelle Caswell points out above, the choice to glove Mickey and his early 20th-century cartoon brethren was born of practicality. The limited palette of black and white animation meant that most animal characters had black bodies—their arms disappeared against every inky expanse.
It also provided artists with a bit of relief, back when animation meant endless hours of labor over hand drawn cells. Puffy gloves aren’t just a comical capper to bendy rubber hose limbs. They’re also way easier to draw than realistic phalanges.
As Walt Disney himself explained:
We didn’t want him to have mouse hands, because he was supposed to be more human. So we gave him gloves. Five Fingers looked like too much on such a little figure, so we took one away. That was just one less finger to animate.
Caswell digs deeper than that, unearthing a surprising cultural comparison. White gloves were a standard part of blackface performers’ minstrel show costumes. Audiences who packed theaters for touring minstrel shows were the same people lining up for Steamboat Willie.
Comic animation has evolved both visually and in terms of content over its near hundred year history, but animators have a tendency to revere the history of their profession.
Thusly do South Park’s animators bestow spotless white gloves upon Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo.
“America’s favorite cat and mouse team,” the Simpsons’ Itchy and Scratchy, mete out their horrifically violent punishment in pristine white gloves.
Clearly some things are worth preserving…
Related Content:
The Disney Cartoon That Introduced Mickey Mouse & Animation with Sound (1928)
Disney’s 12 Timeless Principles of Animation Demonstrated in 12 Animated Primers
Free Animated Films: From Classic to Modern
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine, appearing onstage in New York City through June 26 in Paul David Young’s Faust 3. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Tom doesn’t wear white gloves he just has white paws. As it happens, when the “hands” and “feet” on a real cat are white, like Tom’s, they are called socks. But not gloves.