Noodle arms & gloves… a staple in traditional animation.

Rubber hose animation

What I like to call ‘noodle arms and legs’ the rubber hose technique is a common practice that was used in traditional animation. This technique was used as a way to simplify the process of posing animated characters bodily features such as arms and legs without having to worry about sophisticated poses which knees and elbows caused for animators. This technique is said to be conceived by Bill Nolan with his animations of Felix the Cat in the 1920s.

One of the most iconic characters that was drawn with this style of animation was Olive Oyl.

The rubber hose technique often shows the over-stretching of limbs and showcases characters doing ridiculous poses due to the unnatural flexibility of their bodies. This gives a very comic look to the films and gives a lot more whacky characteristic to the characters.

This technique eventually was eventually faded out of use for cartoons due to the demand of more realistic, human-like movements that Walt Disney demanded for his own characters. due to this success other studios followed suit and the rubber hose style was left as it wasn’t realistic enough for the characters.

Gloves

Gloves are a very common theme for many cartoon characters throughout history. However, from a logical standpoint looking at a character, they don’t make sense. Why humanised mice, rabbits and dogs wear gloves is a very peculiar topic, though it isn’t actually to do with the character design, it is more to do with character limitation, though there is also a racist background behind this also.

This video essay explains that the main reason for the gloves for a lot of the characters is down to characters being black in colour and it being hard to differentiate between their hands and their bodies, especially in motion. In the book The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney. Disney is quoted saying that;

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

Though this is a simple way of finding a solution to the problem with mixing hands with other body parts, the white gloves were significant for a another type of show of a similar era. Vaudeville shows in the 20s were shows that featured mixed forms of entertainment including comedy, music, magic etc. A comedy show that was a regular feature for the vaudeville lineup was minstrel shows. Minstrel shows were acts where caucasian men applied blackface and made fun of black stereotypes. This included being stupid, acting animalistic and sold the racist portrayals of blacks as the main punchline for their show. One of the main features of the characters was always white gloves, very similar to the ones Mickey Mouse wears. The gloves were often to show what they “minstrel” characters were doing with their hands and became very recognisable with the shows.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma04/wood/ykid/blackface.htm

 

Thoughts and Recognitions

For the rubber hose technique, I’d like to include similar styles to the cartoons of old and have this kind comic style with my own animations. I feel this is a very good method and is very stylistic in choice. I think it would add a good level of detail to my work and help with the artistic style.

As for the gloves, I wanted to research into this as I figured hands would be a problem within my own work as they are very problematic features, especially as I don’t aim my characters to have line-work surrounding the body parts, splitting each limb apart. I think due to bad history behind the white gloves idea I will definitely avoid that technique. It is very easy to ignore the history and purely state the reasoning similar to the Mickey Mouse glove situation however, I do respect that the gloves are recognised with racist backgrounds and would rather not include them for ethical reasoning.