The Book of Mouse: A Celebration of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse (3 page)

In 1939, Gottfredson used the name Mouseville for the urban city where Mickey now lived and worked. He used it again in several Mickey Mouse comic strip stories in the 1950s. Disney Publishing used that name in the comics it produced for foreign markets from the 1960s through the 1980s.

The general public assumed that Mickey Mouse lived either in Burbank, California (home of the Disney Studio), or in Hollywood (home of the movie stars).

Mr. Mouse Takes a Trip
(1940) had Mickey departing from the Burbank train station.
Mickey’s Kangaroo
(1935) had Mickey receiving a crate addressed simply to “Mickey Mouse Hollywood”.

When Mickey fills out his tax form on the cover of the March 14, 1942, issue of
Liberty
magazine, he lists his address as Hollywood, California, and his only dependent as Walt Disney.

American Magazine
(March 1931) reported that:

Mickey Mouse receives great stacks of fan mail. Some of the letters are just addressed to Mickey Mouse — Hollywood.

With the opening of Disneyland in 1955, the company stated that Mickey lived there in his own clubhouse (which originally was planned for Tom Sawyer’s Island). The walk-around costumed characters reinforced the idea that Mickey and Minnie were living at some undisclosed location at the park, and not just visiting.

In 1988, with the opening of Mickey’s Birthdayland at the Magic Kingdom in Florida, Mickey and Minnie’s houses were on the outskirts of Duckburg, home of Donald Duck and his relatives.

With the release of
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
in 1989 and the opening of Mickey’s Toontown at Disneyland in 1993, Mickey had moved to Toontown.

Examining the early comic strips, books and theatrical cartoons, however, it was clear that Mickey did not live in a city where mailboxes talked or where cartoon animals were segregated from humans, so even though Disney Parks promoted that concept for years, it was not used outside the theme parks in comics, animated cartoons, stories, or in any other format.

In 1990, starting with the stories in the Disney comic books, the Disney Company established that Mickey lived in Mouseton, and that is his official residence today. (Mouseton, by the way, is not far from Duckburg, Donald Duck’s hometown, which accounts in part for their close friendship.)

Either writer Michael T. Gilbert or one of the editors, David Seidman or David Cody Weiss, came up with Mouseton. The town was going to be called Mouseville, but at that time on Saturday morning television there was a Mighty Mouse cartoon series produced by animator Ralph Bakshi who had
Mi
living in Mouseville. To avoid confusion, Disney wanted a new name for the town — a unique name that it could own — and so Mouseton was created.

In the animated cartoons, Mickey is about three feet tall. In the Disney theme parks, he is about five feet tall. Actually, animation model sheets indicate Mickey is “three heads high,” meaning that whatever the size of his head, his remaining body height is twice that size. Over the years, Mickey has sometimes been drawn to be almost four feet tall.

Animator Frank Thomas, remembering a recording session for the Mickey Mouse short
The Pointer
(1939), recalled:

When he recorded the voice, [Walt] couldn’t help but feel like Mickey and he added all these little gestures that were spontaneous with him. At one point, he put out his hand like this (roughly waist high to indicate that Mickey was about three feet tall). It was the only time we knew how big Walt thought Mickey was.

In the July 1930 edition of the
Standard Casting Directory for Talking Pictures and Stage
, which included almost 300 pages of headshots, contact information, and brief resumes of working Hollywood actors looking for more work, there was a half-page devoted to Mickey Mouse, who was described as “two feet three inches tall and weighs eighteen pounds.” (Later entries put his weight at 23 pounds.) Mickey’s agent was listed as Walt Disney at the Hyperion Studio in Los Angeles.

In
When The Cat’s Away
(1929), Mickey and Minnie were portrayed as roughly the size of real mice but audiences did not find that size appealing. Instead of sitting on a stool and playing a piano, Mickey and Minnie were so small that they danced on the keys to make music.

Arguably, Mickey was also mouse-sized in
The Barnyard Battle
(1929), where he fought an army of cats, though his size fluctuates wildly in the film. In one scene he is small enough to ride on a mousetrap, while in another he is roughly the size of a child standing next to an upright piano.

In the January 1964 issue of
LOOK
magazine, Walt told interviewer Hooper Fowler:

I had him as a mouse. And it wasn’t well received. The distributor wrote to me and said, ‘You’ve done something to Mickey; we’ve lost him.’ And it’s because we brought him down and we thought of him as a mouse. Then I went back and thought of him as I originally did (as a young boy) and we went on from there. He was a little fellow is what he actually was, a little fellow.

In a 1956 interview, Ub Iwerks stated:

I don’t recall any special meetings or discussions on how Mickey should look… We decided to make Mickey the size of a little boy. We couldn’t have him mouse-sized because of scale proportions (in terms of being seen clearly on the screen with objects). We asked ourselves “What are people going to think?” The size must have been right — people accepted him as a symbolic character, and though he looked like a mouse he was accepted as dashing and heroic.

Disney Legend Ward Kimball elaborated upon the height issue in comments made during Mickey’s 40th birthday in 1968:

In the old days of cartooning, the characters didn’t have much relationship to reality. You could put almost anything into animation and the public accepted it. But whoever heard of a four foot tall mouse? That was the problem.

Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto, Clarabelle Cow and all the rest were drawn to scale. They were believable because they were of a relative size. Then along comes a mouse as big as they are and it stopped working.

The more we got into reality, the more ickey became an abstraction. When our pictures began to use psychology and realistic stories, Mickey Mouse became an outcast.

In the March 1931 issue of
American Magazine
, Walt Disney said:

In the beginning we thought we had to make the mouse very small in order to win the sympathy of the audiences. We have learned that we can make him as big as a horse. Sometimes we do.

And in a September 21, 1947, interview with the
New York Times Magazine
, Walt told Frank Nugent:

[Mickey was] three quarters the size of The Goof, about a head taller than The Duck and a third bigger than Pluto. He stands exactly level with Minnie.

During the first decade of Disneyland, there were no size limitations, and sometimes Mickey could be as tall as six feet. Since 1964, however, the Mickey found in the Disney theme parks stands about five feet tall.

Mickey first wore shoes in
Gallopin’ Gaucho
(1928). In 1957, Walt told interviewer Bob Thomas:

[Mickey’s] legs were pipe stems, and we stuck them in big shoes to give him the look of a kid wearing his father’s shoes.

From an artistic perspective, that approach made Mickey’s feet more definitive against the background of a scene, and it also hid Mickey’s real feet so that he appeared more human and less animal.

It’s also the reason why Minnie’s high-heel shoes looked so big in the early cartoons.

Walt told Bob Thomas:

We didn’t want him to have mouse hands, because he was supposed to be more human. So we gave him gloves. Five fingers seemed like too much on such a little figure, so we took away one. That was just one less finger to animate.

Every time Mickey’s gloveless black hand moved across his solid black torso, his hand just disappeared, so white gloves made it easier for audiences to see the animation and gave Mickey more expressiveness with his hands.

The three black lines that sometime appear on the backs of Mickey’s gloves represent darts in the fabric extending from between the digits of the hand, typical of the design style of a child’s glove from the 1930s.

Mickey first wore his white gloves on screen in
The Opry House
(1929), the fifth Mickey cartoon. Mickey starts without gloves, but about three minutes into the film, he dons white gloves to perform for an audience and has rarely removed his gloves since.

In an August 1933 interview with the
Minneapolis Star
newspaper, Walt recalled:

I evolved him [Mickey] out of circles. They were simple and easy to handle. Leaving the finger off was a great asset artistically and financially. Artistically, five digits are too many for a mouse. His hand would look like a bunch of bananas. Financially, not having an extra finger in each of 45,000 drawings that make up a six-and-one-half-minute short has saved the Studio millions.

“No one seemed to notice,” affirmed Walt in
Collier’s Magazine
(April 9, 1949).

In
Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life
(Disney Editions, 1995), Disney Legends Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston stated:

Mickey’s eyes were a special problem. They had started as black pupils in large eyes that looked more like googles than an eye shape. Since the whole figure was stock cartoon formula for the time, the eyes worked well.

As Mickey quickly developed, the rims of his eyes got so large tt they seemed to resemble eyebrows with two mirrored, curved lines near the top of the head. The pupil of his eye also got bigger and was considered by the audience Mickey’s actual eye, much like a solid black eye on a doll. While this image was appealing, it became almost impossible to draw Mickey looking in any direction other than directly in front of his face.

In print appearances, a flesh-colored hue sometimes would be added to the bottom of Mickey’s face to better delineate that the large white area was indeed an eye with a black pupil.

Mickey’s head had to be raised to make him look up or turned to look toward the side.

When staging a scene in one of the shorts, it was sometimes necessary for Mickey to look to either side without his entire head moving, as in
The Band Concert
(1935). This motion often presented a challenge because it would appear as if Mickey’s eyes were not moving as an entire unit but that just the black dots were floating or drifting toward the side of his face. As a result, when seen on a large screen, Mickey would sometimes have an unappealing or odd expression. Although the skilled Disney animators were able to partially hide this oddness from the audience, the few people who focused on it would feel queasy, and so such staging was often avoided even though it limited the artistic possibilities for a scene.

For Mickey’s appearances in print, including film posters, it was necessary for a viewer to be able to tell where Mickey was looking. The solution was the “pie-eye”, in which a white triangular section would be drawn on the black oval eye to represent the highlight from a light source. This section, in appearance much like a slice cut from a whole pie, would indicate where Mickey was looking.

In a 1975 interview with
Crimmer’s
magazine, Disney Legend Marc Davis said:

I think it is intriguing that the interest now is in the Mickey of that early period, with the pie-shaped highlight that doesn’t look like a (real) highlight.

This technique was primarily used on print images and merchandising in the 1930s, but it had first appeared in the animated Mickey short
The Karnival Kid
(1929).

The first use of the now familiar eyes in the white area of Mickey Mouse’s face was an illustration done by animator Ward Kimball for the cover of the party program for Walt’s Field Day, a staff party held on June 4, 1938, to celebrate the completion of
Snow White
. Mickey is attired in a golf outfit getting ready to take a swing at a golf ball. Kimball remembered:

In order to have Mickey’s head addressing the ball and at the same time smiling at the audience, I said, “What the hell, I’ll use our regular eyes… we’re using on the Dwarfs, Snow White, Goofy, Pluto… and put black pupils in them.” This really caused a riot. Fred Moore agreed that it gave Mickey more personality… [and] Walt bought it.

Disney Legend Ollie Johnston stated:

When some animators were pressuring Walt to let them change Mickey’s eyes so that more delicate expression could be handled, Walt asked Don [Graham, Chouinard art instructor teaching at the Disney Studio] to bring it up in his class to see what all of the fellows thought.

It was a difficult night for Don [as he] found himself trying to control a spirited discussion between authorities of varied opinions and even more varied personalities. Some felt the audience would never accept the new design and would wonder what was wrong. Others claimed that people would never notice. Some felt it would be all right to try it for just one picture and see what happened.

As the talk became more heated, one man [animator Bill Tytla] quipped, “Why don’t weust change one eye at a time?”

Society Dog Show
(1939) was the last short to feature Mickey’s “dot” eyes.

Officially,
The Pointer
(1939) was the first short released with Mickey having his now familiar pupils. (When that short started production, the original model sheets had Mickey with the older style eyes but they were soon changed.) However, a commercial short,
Mickey’s Surprise Party
, created for Nabisco and released months earlier for the 1939 New York’s World Fair and the San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition, featured Mickey with the new eyes, predating
The Pointer
.

In a 1975 interview with Disney archivist Dave Smith, Mickey Mouse comic-strip artist Floyd Gottfredson said:

When I first saw the pupils in Mickey’s eyes in model sheets in 1938, I liked it immediately although it was hard for me to do for a while until I got used to it. I’m sure that Fred Moore had more to do with developing it than anybody else.