Culture and Society
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If you've watched enough cartoons, you have probably noticed something odd about the characters within them. An awful lot of them have only three fingers and a thumb, and a lot of them are wearing gloves.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.The Simpsons have three fingers and a thumb, Mickey Mouse has the same, and Spongebob Squarepants too; you name them, and they probably don't have the usual number of fingers. Popeye is a notable exception, though the number of fingers he has fluctuates over time.
Famously, God in The Simpsons is depicted as having a full set of fingers, as a choice to distinguish him. But in the final scene, even God was back down to three fingers and a thumb.
Then there are characters who wear gloves. These tend to be more vintage cartoon characters, like Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, and Goofy. So, what's the deal with this?
“At the dawn of animation, certain techniques to make the animation process easier were used,” animation historian and professor at NYU, John Canemaker, explained to Vox.
In short, putting gloves on characters made them easier to animate. Back when film was only black and white, and fuzzy by today's standards, making characters' hands stand out was difficult. Mickey Mouse, believed to be the first cartoon character to have gloves for hands, didn't start out with them. But after one cartoon where he wore them for plot reasons, they noticed an unintended benefit to them.
"In the 1929 cartoon, The Opry House, the gloves made their debut appearance as part of his stage costume, but had the added effect of distinguishing his hands from his body," the Walt Disney Family Museum explains. "His trademark gloves became a permanent fixture in the following short, When the Cat’s Away (1929), and has remained part of his design ever since."
As well as standing out more, the gloves were easier to draw. When cartoons were hand-drawn, this was a huge benefit, and so newer cartoon characters began wearing gloves too.
Time-saving is also one reason why cartoon characters tend to have fewer fingers. In earlier cartoons, where cartoons were drawn from circles, it would also have made them look weird.
“Using five fingers would have made Mickey’s hands look like a bunch of bananas,” Walt Disney reportedly once explained.
In more modern cartoons, effort is still a factor, while there are also stylistic choices involved. A lot of cartoons involve animals, and it can look a little odd to have, for example, a cartoon deer walking around with four fingers and an opposable thumb.
Another explanation is that having a full set of digits can make characters look "uncanny", a little too close to human while not being human to be appealing. This may be the case, but at its roots, it was simply to save time.
“Everybody shortens it to three fingers and a thumb," animator Jeff Marsh explained to the BBC, "just simply for an economy of line. When you're having to animate 24 drawings per second, dropping one finger makes a huge difference."
Essentially: sorry Homer, but drawing fingers is a pain in the arse, and so you're only getting three.
