2010-05-19 » Mickey Mouse and Pluto

I didn’t get enough done on Bob that I could write a whole post about. I did some work, but I’ll write it next week, combined with the work I do between now and then. Some readers might be tired of reading about him every week anyway. What I’ll do this week is attempt to answer (or at least discuss) a random question submitted by one of my readers. The question is: ‘Why is Mickey Mouse bigger than his dog Pluto?’

The first thing I tried to determine is whether or not the premise buried in this question is true. In the image above, it’s not so easy to tell that their sizes are so different. However in this picture from Disney World, it appears Pluto is actually bigger:

in this one I think you could argue he’s smaller:

this could be a trick of perspective and/or pose. Since I think the real question is why doesn’t the proportion between the two match what one would expect a priori — which would leave the mouse much smaller than the dog — I’ll not worry about whether Pluto is smaller or slightly larger and focus on why they don’t match proportions you’d expect.

I think this picture might shed some light on the subject:

In anthropomorphizing Mickey it seems Disney intended for him to approximate a slightly shorter than average human. I think Disney probably originally thought to make Pluto the same size as their other characters. However, as Pluto is supposed to be Mickey’s pet, he therefore had to be caninomorphized slightly in order to be distinguished from the anthropomorphic characters.

In conclusion: It is my contention that if Pluto is slightly smaller it’s because they made a compromise between making him approximately the size of the other Disney characters (human size) and making him dog sized which would have been even more strange.