Toontown‘s most famous couple lives a little unconventionally – in side by side houses rather than a shared home. But this affords them the opportunity to make their living spaces completely reflective of their personalities and styles, which don’t exactly match. Let’s take a closer look at Minnie’s House.
Like Mickey’s House, Minnie’s home has no basis in an animation, so its design was imagined specifically for the parks. Imagineers pulled from architecture shown in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and drew inspiration from shapes and design elements in Mickey and Minnie’s library of cartoons. While Minnie is most often pictured wearing red and white polka dots, she’s been depicted in each color represented throughout her home: pink, purple, and green.
Like Mickey’s home, Minnie’s house has few straight lines. You’ll see tons of curved angles, from the roofline down to the foundation. And there’s a common shape you’ll see throughout: a heart. This symbolizes that she’s Mickey’s sweetheart, and just seems to be a shape she likes in general.
Inside Minnie’s home, you’ll see photos of Mickey from different animation eras, from the simpler styling in the 30s to cute couples photos matching their present day animation styles. Fun fact – while Minnie has always been Mickey’s love interest, she didn’t start out as his girlfriend. In fact, in her first appearance, Plane Crazy, Minnie parachutes out of a plane to get away when Mickey tries to kiss her! It wasn’t until her fourth appearance, Minnie’s Yoo-Hoo, that Mickey refers to her as his “sweetheart” and the two are established as a couple. I doubt it was intentional, but I do find it funny that the older illustration styles in the home show Mickey alone, and we only see a photo of them as a couple in the more contemporary illustration style.
Minnie’s home is much smaller in scale than Mickey’s, but she makes up for it but having much for lavish outdoor space. Her home is surrounded by lush trees, flower beds, climbing roses, and a lovely terrace for afternoon tea. This stylistic choice serves a few purposes; it helps draw guests’ eyes to Mickey’s house first, and provides a meet and greet area for Minnie without having to change the scale of her home.
Side note – it also gives Pluto space to play. In the original cartoons, Minnie was actually Pluto’s first owner, not Mickey, and his original name was Rover. It wasn’t until The Moose Hunt that Pluto was renamed and established as Mickey’s dog.
And finally, if you step to the side of Minnie’s house, you can appreciate the use of forced perspective commonly used throughout Toontown (and the park at large). The size of the second floor doesn’t make much sense compared to the size of the first floor, and the dramatically curved roof doesn’t leave much head room. But all of these angles and lines work together to create an illusion, not just that you’re looking at a “real” home, but that you’ve stepped directly into a land of cartoons. After all, why can’t a toon have a curvy house?
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