Deconstructing Mickey
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Mickey Mouse is one of the world’s most recognizable cartoon characters, with those dinner-plate black ears, the plucky disposition, and a penchant for adventure. He was the first animated figure to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He’s even won an Academy Award.
None of this was an accident. Everybody’s favorite mouse was deliberately manufactured by artists at the Walt Disney Company to become a star.
How did they do it?
Aspiring cartoonist Brandon Rains plans to find out. With his sights set on a career in animation, the UO senior dove deeply into the question of what makes Mickey Mickey; he has emerged with his own quirky creation, a grandmother-with-an-edge, who represents Rains’ first step toward creating the cartoon world’s Next Big Thing.
Focus on What Matters—to You
Rains, a major in cinema studies and digital arts, credits Priscilla Ovalle, associate director of the cinema studies program, for inspiring him to chase his dreams. In an early draft of a research paper for Ovalle’s English course Race, Sex, and Stardom, Rains mentioned his hope of becoming a cartoonist; you should focus here, Ovalle urged him—that’s where real research can be done.
Boom. Rains had assumed research meant pursuing questions important to professors—it was mind-blowing, he said, to be encouraged to dig deeply into an area that actually mattered to him.
“It was incredibly helpful—it was like coming up with my own course,” Rains said. “Because I was able to just go ahead and do essentially whatever I wanted, I was able to find a lot more.”
Rains examined the evolution of Mickey Mouse from his original conception and first public appearance in the animated short film Steamboat Willie through his transformation in the late 1930s. He analyzed the mouse’s design, mannerisms, voice and personality, constantly asking himself, “how did this contribute to the character’s commercial success?”
Consider the first few seconds of Steamboat Willie—Rains spent more than a year on this sequence alone. In the title frame, the words “Mickey Mouse” appear in huge, distinctive letters, dwarfing all other text, signaling his stature to viewers. In the opening scene, the mouse is quickly established as appealing—Mickey is drawn in friendly curves and circles, whistling a catchy tune while he bounces merrily along at the wheel of a steamboat. Meanwhile, the antagonist—a cat—is drawn twice his size, looming and ominous, an unsavory collection of jagged lines and sharp edges.
She Can Knit a Mean Quilt
Rains took what he learned about Mickey Mouse in cinema studies and applied it to his course work in digital arts, creating the cartoon character Opal (left)—a 60-something grandmother who can knit a mean quilt, but can also trade shots with the best of them at the corner bar. Everything about Opal—from the way she is drawn (lots of curves and circles) to her adventurous spirit—was informed by his research in Ovalle’s class, Rains said.
Rains’ blending of the two disciplines is “exactly what I had hoped for,” Ovalle said. “It was an interesting question, whether my course could be productive for (his career plans). He started thinking about Mickey Mouse and how the research paper could help him in a tactile field like animation. It really empowered him.”
Rains exemplifies Ovalle’s focus on research projects with a purpose. She encourages students to study topics in cinema studies that will move them closer to what they hope to do for a job. She calls her classroom a “professionalization space”—a place to make professionals. Students practice liberal-arts skills—critical thinking and analysis, for example—with an eye toward possible careers.
“In the classroom, there’s a tendency for students to feel that the end goal is a short-term product: ‘I’m going to write a paper, get a grade, get credit and graduate,’” Ovalle said. “I’m trying to help them learn that the skills they are developing will serve them as they go out into the world.”
Rains (right) is spending this year at the UO’s White Stag Block in Portland, where he’ll earn a bachelor’s degree in fine arts—with a specialization in animation—to complement his 2015 degree in cinema studies.
Then, he’ll start looking for jobs in animation. Regardless of whether he ends up with a large company or a small one, Rains is sure of one thing: his research on cartoon characters will continue.
He credits Ovalle with “this idea of not having separation between me as an animator and me as a researcher, or even me as a digital artist and me as a cinema studies student,” Rains said. “Artists are researchers, too. That’s how we, as artists, are even able to create.”
—By Matt Cooper