Fact – Mickey Mouse wears gloves. Yes, go check!
In fact if you’re of a certain age, you probably have never came to question a statement like that because the gloves have just become part of him. But that’s the real question worth asking: why does Mickey Mouse wear gloves?
The answer is two-fold, according to a video done by the fantastic folks at Vox.com seen above.
One reason has to do a lot with efficiency techniques used in the early days of animation. Walt Disney pioneered the art form of having static drawings “move”, but drawing multiple images to mimic movement took a long time. Imagine the old flip books you use to make in grade school times 100,000.
Character drawings specifically took the most time because they were the focal points and needed to exhibit motion, but also emotion. Early animators created a “rubber hose and circle” method that allowed them to recreate characters and their features like hands easily because round shapes were faster to draw than angles. They also wanted to provide more color contrast for the hands since most cartoons had black skin.
The other answer to why Mickey wears gloves traces itself back to a simple idea that Walt had: to make Mickey more like us. “We didn’t want him to have mouse hands,” he said. “He was supposed to be more human, so we gave him gloves.” In effect, all cartoons were supposed to be a reflection of human-like actions and behaviors but more exaggerated and fun. But Walt and his animators might have been inspired by a reflection that was even more relevant and similar – Vaudeville entertainers.
Vaudeville was a form of stage entertainment in the early 20th century mainly in the US that consisted of live performers doing comedic acts. They weren’t joke-centric, but action-focused with many performers doing exaggerated acts of everyday life during the time. Most of the performers, too, also painted their faces black and wore white gloves.
The white gloves on characters like Mickey was a staple on other characters too like Bugs Bunny and even Pinocchio. It became part of what people expected when watching cartoons, but ultimately disappeared on them as early as the 1930s when Vaudeville entertainment started to decline.
But Mickey Mouse and a handful of other animated characters kept their gloves. Because seeing a mouse or another animal with human hands can look pretty disturbing, don’t you think?