OF MICE AND THE MEN WHO DRAW THEM

Never mind the return of King Kong: Mus domesticus (better known as the common house mouse) strikes again.

American animation studios have released so many mice in the last few months that theater screens have begun to resemble Hamelin before the Pied Piper. Fievel and the other members of the Mousekewitz family in Don Bluth’s “An American Tail” arrived on the heels of Disney’s “The Great Mouse Detective.” “Mickey’s Christmas Carol”--starring the most famous mouse of all--recently made its annual appearance on television.

Every animator secretly hopes to emulate the success of Walt Disney--whose studio was built on one mouse. But even Mickey’s enduring popularity can’t explain the overwhelming preponderance of mice as cartoon characters.

“It’s a terrible to thing to say, but mice are easy to draw,” observes commercial animator Bob Kurtz. “All you need is a triangular shape with a little black dot for a nose, wide round ears and a tail, and you’ve got it! Once you stick on the big round ears, people will accept anything as a mouse.”

“It’s not that we keep coming up with reasons to do another mouse picture,” says Glen Keane, a young animator at Disney who designed many of the characters in “Mouse Detective.” “The best stories for animation seem to use mice--a lot of children’s books feature mouse characters. Personally, I’m sick of drawing mice.”

But children’s literature and folk tales--the traditional source of stories for cartoons--don’t offer many alternatives.

“In folklore and legend, the mouse is never the attacker--those are rats,” says Frank Thomas, one of the key group of animators Disney referred to as “the Nine Old Men.” “A mouse is always depicted as a helpless little guy. Since he has no teeth or claws or horns or strength to fight back with, he has to live by his wits--which puts him in situations that can serve for ‘Mr. Everyman.’ ”

“What other animal could you use?” he adds. “Raccoons are cute, but they have teeth and claws. A fox is too smart. Puppies are cute, but a dog has too much drive. The success of all the cartoons with mice has reinforced this Mr. Nice Guy concept. In reality, they’re nasty little critters, although they’re cuter than the dickens.”

“It’s odd that mice are perceived as endearing in animation but terrifying in reality,” says Warner Bros. cartoon director Chuck Jones, who made a few films with the mouse characters Hubie and Bertie. “Nobody’s comfortable with a mouse in the house: Even grown men will run for the hills if there are mice in the house.”

Another reason for the abundance of mice is, as Kurtz suggests, that they’re easy to draw.

“For almost any other animal, you have to know a lot more about anatomy,” says Ollie Johnston, another of “The Nine Old Men.” “You have to keep the anatomy of most four-legged animals accurate, unless you dress them up in clothes. You can treat mice as little humans.”

On the screen, an animated dog or a cat standing on its hind legs just looks like a dog or a cat in an uncomfortable position. (To make Garfield walk upright, cartoonist Jim Davis has to distort the anatomy of his cat’s limbs and give him odd, human feet.) But if an animator stands a mouse on his hind legs, audiences accept the character as a miniature human. The snout becomes a large nose; the forelimbs, little arms; the forepaws, tiny hands.

“When I drew Bernard and Bianca in ‘The Rescuers,’ I imagined anatomically correct mice,” continues Keane. “But I didn’t think of the characters in ‘Mouse Detective’ as mice--they were real people to me.

“When you look at Mickey Mouse, you don’t think ‘mouse,’ you think ‘cartoon.’ That simple approach to drawing a cartoon character based on a caricature of a mouse led to the mice in cartoons done today. They don’t look like real mice: They’re caricatures of caricatures of caricatures. It would be nice to start again and see if someone could come up with a new way of doing mice-- that would be a challenge.”

In fact, the current infestation of on-screen mice may have passed its peak. Don Bluth has moved to Ireland, and is reportedly making a feature about dinosaurs. “Oliver,” the next Disney cartoon feature, has a cast of dogs. Still, a sequel to “The Rescuers” is also in the works. And foreign mice may arrive to take up the slack, in the dubious tradition of San Rio’s “The Mouse and His Child” (Japan, 1982).

After considering the rodent-ridden history of animation, Kurtz concludes, “When you think about how many cartoon mice have been done, it’s amazing that Jiminy Cricket didn’t turn out to be a mouse!”