"You can't pick it up. You can't smoke it."
I mean, you COULD. But I wouldn't recommend it.

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.

Old Mickey Mouse cartoons and Loony Toons really remind me of the myths of many indigenous coutures, using anthropomorphic animals to tell human stories.

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.

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.

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"?

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.

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.

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.😉

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!

What about Wind in the Willows? Whatever my English teacher used to say, Mole, Rat and Toad ARE animals. They are not just placeholders for people. Humans do appear in the story, and Graham is very clear about the distinction. And yet Toad drives a motor car, Rat rows a boat and Mole owns a bust of Garibaldi. It's impossible to say what's going  on and that's the charm of the book.

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

5:47 Does that mean 3D texture maps are technically cubism?

People who are confused about the Hello Kitty announcement have forgotten what it's like to be a child. In her imagination, she ABSOLUTELY is a kitty. No costumes, no anthropomorphic shenanigans, no Moreau-esqe genetic mischief. She IS a cat. 😊

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.

16:10 People absolutely identify with cats. Both anthropomorphized and zoomorphized characters, and even the actual animal (many people relate to real-life cat behvaiour)

The somewhat derogatory term for this in some furry circles is "zipperback", because it's like they're people in costumes so unconvincing you might as well be able to see the zipper on their back.

That other painting should have been called “Hallelujah it’s raining men”

It always bugged me how Mickey and Donald were considered a mouse and duck but Goofy wasn't considered a dog because he's anthropomorphic/different compared to Pluto as if Mickey and Donald aren't ALSO anthropomorphic/different compared to regular mice and ducks which they've both been seen next to in several cartoons.

I know that Porky Pig cartoon you showed at 930. It's considered a controversial and anomalous but that was never meant to be put in a cartoon.

He hits his finger on his hammer, yells in pain, and stutters so badly that he can't finish the line. "Son of a buh buh buh, Sun of a buh buh." Then he breaks the fourth wall and speaks to the audience: You all thought I was going to say Son of a Bitch, didn't you?"

2:04  "Mickey Mouse isn't a mouse."  -  Shows picture of a rat...