Are we mice or are we men?

The very things that hold you down are going to lift you up.

There are sixteen animated movies on my time line that feature a significant character who is a mouse or a rat. That's not a particularly high number. Even if I threw in some children's live action movies like Stewart Little, I don't think the numbers would compare to the number of musicals, or movies featuring orphans. I think they beat the number of princess movies, however, and their prominence is at least as persistent. Mickey Mouse, of course, showed up in short films pretty early on. Dumbo (1941) might have the first major mouse character in full length animated movie history. They are sprinkled rather spottily throughout the time line: a trend that keeps coming back. The latest rebirth of this theme was in 2008.

When an animator personifies an animal, they are either using the animal as a metaphor for some aspect of human experience, or a kind of journey that a human person can be on. Some animals are such symbols in our cultural imagination that they reappear over and over in stories that resonate with certain parts of the human experience. Mice and Rats are two such animals. They are more than just a fun idea for an animator to play with, they are archetypes.

In the movies we watched, and in others with which I am familiar, mice are often a symbol of the human experience of fear; smallness. Individuals feel inconsequential or helpless in a world too large and dangerous for them. But the stories that we tell about mice are ones in which the mice characters use great resourcefulness and courage to overcome a problem larger than themselves. They tent to be David and Goliath stories.

Rats, on the other hand, seem to have a nurture vs. nature complex, or a nature vs. grace story to tell. They are naturally scavengers, or thieves if you want to characterize it morally as they do in Ratatouille, and represent dishonesty, disease and evil in the human imagination. Their stories often center around this conflict of being who they are naturally, or rising above nature to live a more honorable life.
Generally, when there are mice and rats in the story together (like, say, The Great Mouse Detective), the mice are a more noble, less violent version of a rat. This is sort of an unquestioned fact of nature... or it might be racism.

In the eighties and early nineties one of a few big non-Disney names in animation was Don Bluth. 

Mr. Bluth is an interesting character. He also makes some very interesting films. Two significant ones feature mice and rats.

We watched Bluth's The Secret of NIMH (1982) and An American Tail (1986) (and also Anastasia as a non-Disney Princess).

The third film we watched was The Tale of Despereaux (2008).

NIMH and Despereaux both featured a side by side comparison of rats and mice and everything they symbolize.

In NIMH, the rats in the story have been altered in a laboratory to have human intelligence. They express it in terms of being able to read and use electricity, but the implication is that they now have moral agency. They have eaten the forbidden fruit and can know good and evil. Yeah. As plot premises go, this is big stuff. Their community is at a turning point. They must decide to act morally, at great sacrifice, or act on their unaltered rat nature and continue to steal and act violently.

The mouse protagonist, Mrs. Brisby, we must presume is not genetically altered, though we learn that her husband was. In which case we must assume that her moral responsibility is a part of her unaltered mouse nature. They acts with great courage, facing several larger animal who are directly threatening to her. I think the Owl is the scariest. On a side note, Mrs. Brisby is one of very few, if not the only animated protagonist who is a mother of several children. She is motivated to these feats of courage, determination and resourcefulness by love for her youngest child, who is sick, and the memory of her late husband. She is clearly terrified for most of the movie. But she pushes on. She ultimately inspires the rat community to chose the path of honesty and compassion.

The Tale of Despereaux features a mouse and a rat who are anomalies in their communities if not their whole species. Despereaux is a mouse who somehow never developed the natural tendency to be afraid of everything. Instead, he is enamored of a knightly nobility and honorable lifestyle. Roscuro is rat who is not naturally malicious or dishonest, but ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time and sets off a chain of events that makes a lot of people miserable.

Despereaux is banished for his oddness. Roscuro is adopted by a rat community who is determined to teach him to be cruel.

Roscuro eventually succumbs and decides to live according to his society's less than noble expectations for him as a rat. Honest mistakes lead to malicious revenges and more misunderstandings.

Despereaux is the chink in the pattern that lets grace into the story. The screen writers express this grace as forgiveness. The chain of hurt and malice is broken because one mouse inspires the people around him to rise above their natures or the stereotypes by which they judge each other, and forgive each other.

An American Tail was among my favorite movies when I was little. Right up there with The Little Mermaid. And both these movies held my attention mostly because of the music. I was pleased to find that An American Tail stands up to an adult viewing very well. I still like the score a lot. But I digress.

The protagonist of American Tail, Fievel, is similar to Despereaux in that he seems to defy his nature by being virtually fearless. Well, Fievel shows more fear than Despereaux who really seems to have been born without a fear gene, but Fievel's main attribute is clearly curiosity and resourcefulness. He needs a shot of courage also in order to get through the journey he is on in the story, but mostly, he gets by in a kind of clever oblivion to the danger he is in. My explanation for his unquenchable spirit was that he can't be much older than six.

This story is more explicitly a metaphor or allegory of human experience. Specifically, it shows, amazingly for one movie, a wide rang of early twentieth century American immigrant experience. From high and unrealistic hopes of America as a promise land in which there are not cats, to name changes in Ellis Island. Some of the themes explored, or at least nodded at are discrimination, separation, wide ethnic and social diversity, exploitation, and even the emotional distance families attempted to maintain while they grieve for a lost loved one, the loss of their old way of life, and dashed hopes. It's really pretty heavily packed with history and images of the American experience. And the characters that must collaborate to assert their freedom in America are mice. It is really a celebration of the human spirit that can rise up even under the immense oppression of being a stranger in a strange land. 

We keep coming back to mice and rats because they remind us that we are capable of making a difference, rising above our flawed nature, and facing challenges far greater than we think we can overcome. They might be a southern symbol of Northern Courage. Mice tell us that courage is possible. Rats tell us that redemption is possible.