The staff report on three-fingered cartoon characters asks why they often wear gloves.
Many early animation characters were crude portrayals of black people, often based on the characters in blackface minstrel shows. The minstrels wore gloves, so their cartoon equivalents did too. When these racial steretypes became unacceptable, animation studios switched to using animals instead, often adding only a few token details (such as Mickey Mouse’s ears) to make the change.
Mickey took his gloves from his minstrel ancestors, as did some other early animated animals, and this became the accepted convention. It’s also a useful way to draw attention to a character’s hands and hence helps to make body language more expressive - a factor which minstrel shows may have had in mind when they adopted gloves in the first place.
That, at least, is my understanding of the issue. Anyone care to knock down my theory of put forward an alternative explanation of their own?
There are a couple of incidental errors in the column, though. The frame rate was about 16fps in the early days; 24fps came in with sound. And cels weren’t always there – that’s why the earliest cartoons have no backgrounds, or impressionistic backgrounds at the most.
As to the “minstrel gloves” aspect, it was probably a factor, but convenience for the animators mattered, too; most of the body could be black blobs, but hands have to do things, and the gloves made that simpler. Another factor was the simple fact that everybody used to wear gloves a good deal more than today.
And why do many cartoon characters still have just 3 fingers and a thumb on each hand? For ease of drawing, I suppose, but might there be another consideration?
Garfield, Beetle Bailey, Hi & Lois, Fox Trot, etc. Check you Sunday funnies and you’ll find more.
It’s not just the number of fingers. Proportions are all over the place. To some degree, it’s just the way we expect 'toons to look after a century of tradition. In particular, hands with four-and-one fingers look either too fragile or too large on a 'toon.
(Do you know why the humans in Yellow Submarine looked so damn weird? Their proportions were normal.)
One of my all-time favorite lines in an undistinguished cartoon:
Another Goofy Movie features Goofy’s son, Max, going off to college. While they’re sitting around in a basement coffeeshop (complete with a 1950s era beatnik chick in black catsuit and beret – Disney always prefers style over accuracy), one of the college-age kids starts speculating about Life and the Meaning of it all.
“Hey,” he says, looking down at his hand, “Did you ever wonder why…we always wear these gloves?”
Totally unexpected, and it cracked me up. I still love it.
Nitpick, that is an Extremely Goofy Movie, not Another Goofy Movie. And it is chock full of great little jokes like that. The goofy movies, IMHO, are very under rated.
When I was in animation school at Sheridan College, this was exactly the reason given: ease of drawing. The two middle fingers tend to move and act the most similarly as we use our hands, and the old-time animators discovered that they could be combined into one finger without too much impairing the acting and look of the characters.
I’ve actually come across the minstrel show idea in quite a few places, only one of which I can put my hand on right now.
In his 1993 book “7 Minutes: The Life & Death of the American Animated Cartoon”, Norman M. Klein discusses how the popularity of jazz and ragtime music in the 1920s led to a new kind of black stereotype in the decade’s cartoons. He says:
“Little black boys [in the cartoons] became much more musical. They plunked at banjos, did mad jigs or played on cat-house pianos. That is why Flip the Frog played his piano with body gestures very much like a black musician. Or why Bosco was clearly a little black man, often at the piano and then breaking into a fast dance. Mickey himself started off with touches of black caricature in his first cartoon, wearing tattered pants with bare, black legs and saucer eyes . . . [These] were part of the generic vaudeville costume, even though many veteran animators of the era (eg Freleng and Jones) identify them as obviously influenced by black slapstick.”
Slade. I remember reading about a black animator working for Disney in the sixties or seventies who got fired after he mouthed off how Disney built its success on the back of a black character, i.e. Mickey Mouse. He said something along the lines of, “Take off those white gloves, the shirt, the shoes and you’ve got a black man dancing around on screen!” or something to that effect.
I just wish I could remember who this was and the exact quote.
Having given the matter some thought and some Googling, I suspect I’m thinking of animator Frank Baxton. I still can’t remember where I’d read about his clash at Disney that made him quit, but reading between the lines of this bio makes me pretty certain this was the guy I was thinking of.
