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When I designed the first Red Nose Gang characters in 1992, I considered putting a note in the instructions explaining why the hands only Clown's hands

had three fingers instead of four. Then I decided not to, because surely everyone would be aware that similar comical characters which appear in stop-frame animation films and cartoons, almost always have three fingers and a thumb. However, several knitters have questioned – why only three?

What surprised me was that these people probably watch The Simpsons and the Flintstones and must have seen Postman Pat, Bob The Builder and certainly Mickey Mouse and friends – all of which have three-fingered hands. Then I realised that they probably weren’t aware of this fact, until they themselves actually knitted the three-fingered hands and wondered – why?

One of the main reasons involves proportion. Very few cartoon characters are proportioned like real-life people or animals. To put it generally, an average human adult is divided into seven parts. The head is one part, the body and legs three parts each.

Characters such as Postman Pat and Bob The Builder roughly have ratios of three parts only – head, body and legs. If these characters had real-life proportions they would not be comical nor would they be as cute and endearing. Babies and toddlers are attractive because they have similar proportions, or perhaps I should say that cartoon characters have the same proportions as babies.

The facial features on cartoon characters are also simplified, focusing on the most expressive parts – the mouths and the eyes. Which brings me to the hands. The three-section cartoon proportions reduce the detail in every part of the characters and three fingers work very well with this three-part ratio. We have photographs of the Clowns from knitters who have added the ‘missing’ fingers. These certainly show that the extra fingers don’t work – they just look peculiar. Three chubby fingers look just right, four chubby fingers are quite simply cumbersome.

In any case, cartoon characters don’t have to relate to real life – they are caricatures. Consider Disney, who put together a mouse, a duck and a dog (Mickey, Donald and Pluto) and made them relate to each other in proportion. I wonder if anyone wrote to Mr Disney to point out this impossible combination?

Footnote
After I had written this piece, there was a very entertaining documentary on BBC2 television titled ‘The Reluctant Dragon’, which was made in 1941. It featured Robert Benchley, a famous American humorist who went on a tour through all the departments at the Disney Studios.

At one point Mr Benchley watched one of the cartoon artists drawing Goofy.
Mr Benchley questioned, ‘Only three fingers?’ The artist replied, ‘Yeh, saves time and looks better.’ That’s it in a nutshell!