Most of the famous cartoon characters that we grew up watching in our childhood have become like one of our family over the years, thanks to the place they occupied in popular culture. Many cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse, Homer Simpson, Tom and Jerry, SpongeBob and Looney Tunes and Stone Age characters are now familiar to all of us.
What if we told you that all of these characters have something in common that most of you don’t realize, or even care about? The common feature of these characters we mentioned – and many of the ones we haven’t mentioned – is that they all have four fingers. Well, what do you think might be the reason behind this long-standing animation tradition? Let’s see together.
The basis of the four-fingered drawing of cartoon characters lies in the fact that the five fingers do not look ‘aesthetic’
In fact, there is more than one reason why most cartoon characters are depicted as four-fingered; however, the most prominent of these reasons is completely related to the production process of the animation. Accordingly, it is much easier to portray the characters as four-fingered instead of five-fingered as they are in reality, and it saves time for the illustrators. Saving time for the illustrators also means that animation studios can get away with less expense.
However, this reason is more valid for the old times when the technology was not as active as it is today and the cartoonists were drawing cartoon characters with their own hands. The reason why the characters are still drawn with 4 fingers, although technology has made everything easier today, is a little different.
Accordingly, the drawing of cartoon characters with four fingers is largely due to ‘aesthetics’. The characters, which are usually depicted with rounded lines, would have an unpleasant image if they were drawn with five fingers rather than four. In fact, Walt Disney, the founder of the world’s most famous animation company Walt Disney Productions, stated that if Mickey Mouse had five fingers, his hands would look like “a bunch of bananas”. Another reason is that most cartoon characters are animals and they are not seen as having five fingers.
On the other hand, if we come to the reason why the characters in anime (Japanese animation) are mostly depicted with five fingers, unlike Western animations, it has different reasons in its own way. These reasons, apart from the fact that the lines of anime characters are closer to people, are essentially related to Japanese culture.
One of these reasons is that the words four and ‘death’ have similar pronunciations (shi) in Japanese, while another reason is related to the Japanese mafia known as ‘yakuza’. According to this, one of the main reasons why the anime characters are not depicted as four-fingered is the fact that the yakuzas cut off a finger as a punishment as a result of their inability to pay a debt or commit any other crime that does not require death.
946
