The Bizarre Reason Cartoon Animals Aren't Animals
78K views · Oct 30, 2025 · Film & Animation
Comments · 941
@Ridley882 · 10 months ago
"You can't pick it up. You can't smoke it."<br>I mean, you COULD. But I wouldn't recommend it.
124
@mojaveartifacthunters339 · 10 months ago (edited)
Bugs bunny is also who turned "Nimrod" into an insult. He wasn't calling him stupid, he was making fun of his lack of hunting success. They say the bible is the most read book, but if people actually read the bible, they'd have known who Nimrod was, and gotten the joke.
285
@ginnyjollykidd · 10 months ago
Animated characters shaped like animals but acting like people are like the characters in Aesop's Fables that are animals but think and speak like people.
37
@spoke2639 · 10 months ago
Old Mickey Mouse cartoons and Loony Toons really remind me of the myths of many indigenous coutures, using anthropomorphic animals to tell human stories.
116
@macsnafu · 10 months ago (edited)
When I saw the tagline about Mickey Mouse not being a mouse, the first thing I though of was Magritte's "not a pipe" picture.<br><br>Your point about anthropomorphization is well taken, because how the artists think about the characters affects the kinds of stories they can tell about the character. Sylvester and Tweety is always about Sylvester trying to catch and eat Tweety. They're never going to run a convenience store together. But Bugs and Daffy could do a much greater variety of stories because their characters weren't limited to being a rabbit and a duck.
83
@MrWhitman · 10 months ago
The questions about Mickey, the answer is, "Actually, yes." There's a 1929 cartoon called "When the Cat's Away" in which Mickey and Minnie are portrayed as being small and living in a hole.
70
@rays7805 · 10 months ago
Is this like the episode of Pinky and the Brain where prosecutor Christopher Walken attempts to prove that The Brain is "simply, and also sadly, just an odd-looking little man"?
49
@geoffreyrichards6079 · 10 months ago (edited)
Granted, some of Mickey’s earliest animated iterations did depict him as being more mouselike than his later depictions. 1929’s “When the Cat’s Away” has him being the size of an actual mouse, living in a hole in the wall, and consuming cheese. But it was quickly dropped shortly thereafter, presumably because audiences were used to seeing him being more child-sized in height.
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@georgecisneros5281 · 10 months ago
You mean they’re toons! After all, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? pretty much already rather efficiently established all of their kind as a common form of entity, sharing a process of origin, though each having widely varied shapes, sizes, and behavioral “templates”, as it were.😉
79
@SuperLlama42 · 10 months ago
I seriously don't understand the bewilderment behind a humanoid animals and regular animals existing in the same space. You'd think people who can't fathom this kind of thing would have a panic attack if they ever saw a monkey in real life
4
@IdleLancer · 10 months ago
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkzHTemRfAk&t=124">2:04</a> "Mickey Mouse isn't a mouse." - Shows picture of a rat...
4
@rustystevenson5688 · 10 months ago
I agree with you that they are not what they look like. The thought of Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog being married is hilarious!
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