CultureArtGreat Works
Klimt, Gustav: Water Nymphs (1899)
The Independent's Great Art series
By Tom Lubbock Friday 26 January 2007
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The ears of Mickey Mouse are a good lesson in two-dimensionality. Mickey's ears are simply two black circles. That's how they first appeared in Steamboat Willie, in 1928, and that's mainly how they've stayed. There was a brief period in the 1940s when Disney experimented with more realistic ears. But soon they returned to their pure and original form - two black circles attached to the top of his head.
The thing about these black circles is, they tell you nothing about the three-dimensional volume of Mickey's ears. You can see that, in some sense, they are round. But beyond that, you can read any solid form into them, or none. Are these ears meant to be flat discs? Or bowl-like concavities? Or spheres? No saying. They have an untranslatably two-dimensional existence.