The Book of Mouse: A Celebration of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Read Online Free Page A

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).
Why Did Mickey Mouse’s Eyes Change?
    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