• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Why Do Cartoon Characters Tend To Have Only Three Fingers? And Why Do They Wear Gloves?

December 11, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

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 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.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

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. 

Advertisement

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. 

Advertisement

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.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. No ‘magic wand’ to fix Lebanon crisis, new prime minister says
  2. Despite preparation, California pipeline operator may have taken hours to stop leak
  3. Tales Of A Black Dead Sun Survive Generations After A Total Eclipse
  4. Italy’s “Tomb Of Cerberus” Has Been Opened, Revealing Incredible 2,000-Year-Old Mummy

Source Link: Why Do Cartoon Characters Tend To Have Only Three Fingers? And Why Do They Wear Gloves?

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Long-Period Radio Transient Signals Puzzle Astronomers – One That’s Speeding Up May Be The Strangest Yet
  • Mariner 4: 60 Years Ago Today, NASA Changed How We Study The Solar System
  • Odd Flashes Of Light Have Been Seen On The Moon For Centuries – Some May Still Defy Explanation
  • Impact That Made Meteor Crater May Have Triggered Giant Grand Canyon Landslide
  • Get Ready, Skywatchers: A “Dazzling” Total Lunar Eclipse Is Coming In 2025
  • How A Man Won The Lottery 14 Times Using Unbelievably Basic Math
  • What Are The Amazon’s “Flying Rivers”? And Why Every Single One Of Us Relies On Them
  • Curious New Microbe With Tiny Genome Toes The Line Between Cell And Virus
  • We’ve Just Found Out Where The World’s Longest-Living Vertebrate Has Its Babies
  • For The First Time, An Animal Has Been Shown Responding To Plant-Produced Sounds
  • Deep Ocean Currents Have “Weather” And Seasonal Changes That We’re Only Just Learning About
  • Stratus: What Are The Symptoms Of The Latest COVID-19 Subvariant To Spread Around The World?
  • In 1927, Henry Ford Tried To Build A Town In The Amazon And Things Went Very, Very Badly
  • Human Botfly: Say Hello To The Parasite That Would Love To Get Under Your Skin
  • Is The Weather Making Your Headache Worse?
  • “Zoning Out” Actually Helps You Learn? Data From Up To 90,000 Brain Cells Says So
  • Over Past 250,000 Years, Three Major Waves Of Human-Neanderthal Interbreeding Have Been Identified
  • Zebrafish “Catch” Yawns Just Like Us – We Might Need To Rethink Evolution To Account For That
  • 80,000-Year-Old Neanderthal Footprints Reveal How Children Hunted On Beaches
  • 5 Animals That Have Absolutely No Business Jumping (In Our Very Humble, Definitely Unbiased Opinion)
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version