Mickey Mouse's peculiar ears

November 18, 2015 3:57 AM

When Mickey Mouse is animated in 2D, his ears are always two black circles facing the camera. Disney once experimented with more realistic perspective ears, but went back to the old style.

And now with 3D Mickey we have these very noticeably peculiar ears: the ears are always facing the camera and rotate and move around Mickey's head as if unattached and floating.

In 2D it doesn't look weird, but in 3D it looks very wrong. What was the decision behind this?

posted by gorcha to Media & Arts (10 answers total)

I have absolutely no insider perspective on this. But if I were to guess, I'd say 3D rendered ears with more "realistic" perspective would probably stray too much from Mickey's traditional look, even if his 2D fixed-orientation ears seem incongruous and look odd in otherwise 3D rendered world. Basically, with more realistic 3D ears, he might look less like the Mickey we all know.
posted by 2N2222 at 5:52 AM on November 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

I always assumed that the reasoning for the always-forward ears was that it was easier to animate, and that it preserves Disney's visual branding (those three little circles are EVERYWHERE at Disney's parks) better than the realistic-perspective ears.
posted by Strange Interlude at 6:03 AM on November 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm with 2N222. Viewing a true 3D Mickey in profile (with the ears nearly invisible) would look very bizarre.

It's almost certain that the animators tried this at some point and were horrified with the results. What you're noticing in Disney's solution may look "wrong" to you, but I think to a lot of kids this looks completely right and goes unnoticed, which is the best way out of the problem.
posted by JoeZydeco at 7:23 AM on November 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

It's part of the Disney/Mickey branding. His head will always look a certain way from the front, or from the side. If you look at silhouettes it makes more sense, from a branding perspective.
posted by Fleebnork at 8:34 AM on November 18, 2015

In his role as King Mickey in the Kingdom Hearts series, he has realistic perspective ears, but since he primarily shows up in cutscenes, the choices for camera angles pretty obviously are made to show two ears as much as possible, once you start paying attention to it. Example.

Kingdom Hearts has tons of odd little choices where, in order to make the bizarre crossovers feel more cohesive with each other and the Final Fantasy games, character and environment designs are tweaked in ways that aren't perhaps exactly to Disney style bible standards.

For something as on-brand as the Clubhouse show, I am guessing that visual standardization is key, and that three circle motif is more important to preserve than Donald's commitment to pantslessness. Mickey in different roles can vary in subtle and not so subtle ways. In the case of his Clubhouse presence, he has to be more classic than classic, more elastically cartoony than elsewhere in the contemporary Disney presence, and the ears are communicating that from every angle.
posted by Mizu at 8:37 AM on November 18, 2015

Great point, phatkitten. I have been replaying these games in the last month, and I think it says something that I have never noticed that at all, that the ears switched away from that flat perspective when he shows up in the second game. It's possible that during other iconic backlit moments this happens again - now I am totally going to be paying attention. Like with anything else in animation, everything is a deliberate choice. I think for the most part the choice to do the flat perspective ears in 3D is a good one if your priority is preservation of that iconic silhouette. But it can be hard to hit the right balance - if the rest of the environment feels too realistic, it won't fly. So gorcha, I think you are just having a subjective disagreement about a style choice when you feel like it looks "very wrong".

I can't find anything official about any of this, either, but I do know animators who are friends with animators at Disney and man have I heard stories about their style bibles.
posted by Mizu at 9:56 AM on November 18, 2015

Mouse ears are a registered trademark of Walt Disney Company - they're included even when they're minimized in Disney branding.

(Thanks for asking this question, the 3D ears bother me a lot, and I'd love to know more about the design decision behind them, if anyone can dig that up.)
posted by filthy light thief at 11:50 AM on November 18, 2015

Huh. The 3D Mickey with ears following the 2D rules looks perfectly fine to me, even when I'm looking for it. It's just How Mickey's Ears Look, you know?

And while I'm not currently working in animation, I have heard enough stories about slavish adherence to model sheets or random executive dictates to be pretty sure that any deviation from model sheets older than anyone involved in making the cartoon will be really harshly judged. Mickey isn't just a character, he's the brand identity of one of the largest entertainment companies in the world. The number of people ANY representation of him has to pass through is probably insane.
posted by egypturnash at 7:10 PM on November 18, 2015

IF you go on Netflix, there is a collection of new Disney animated shorts, the ones that have been running in front of the most recent Disney animated features. Near the end of the shorts (I believe) there is one that starts out in the style of a very old Mickey Mouse cartoon, where Pete throws Mickey out of the screen, in a very cool 3D effect. He is instantly turned into a color CGI version of himself.

Before the cartoon begins, there is an introduction by the animators of the cartoon. They specifically call out how they had to make new rules about how to render Mickey's nose in 3d, so that it would work the same as in 2d. There might be more of that interview somewhere, including possibly some talk about the ears.
posted by nushustu at 7:39 PM on November 18, 2015

Here's the commentary nushustu was talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QayINvfLKds

Full cartoon: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1euywx_mickey-mouse-get-a-horse-2013_shortfilms
posted by Green Winnebago at 12:38 AM on November 19, 2015