Mickey is celebrating its 90th spring. The mouse with big ears, born November 18, 1928 the first cartoon speaking of Walt Disney, Steamboat Willie, is a hero in constant evolution. A year after its emergence in triumph at the Colony Theatre in New York, the character to the sleek, black-and-white, without a shoe, designed with the help of two pieces of 25 and 10 cent, was earning her first pair of gloves white.

Mickey mouse in the short film “Steamboat Willie”. Disney

A change, like all the others, dictated by the necessities of the animation of the time. “The body of Mickey mouse was black, and his hands also. If he made movements, we could not distinguish between his body and his hands. The draughtsman has, therefore, drawn white gloves in order not to be wrong”, explained, in 2014, in Figaro Philippe Marcilly, an archivist at the Journal de Mickey, who was celebrating his 80 years .

In 1935 Mickey appears for the first time in color, in the cartoon Fanfare .

Four years later, his face becomes more expressive when their eyes, represented simply by two black dots, are ornamented with two large notches, with more white around it. The character gains in expressiveness. At the beginning of the 1940s, the artist Fred Moore modernises, by making him wear clothes to give him the representation of the American type. It becomes more realistic. Over the years, the small mouse goes from the physical angularity of his birth to be rounded and seem more and more childish.

Movies, tv, books, or video games, Mickey is everywhere. Notably, he was one of the iconic characters of the movement of pop art in the 1970s. Dozens of artists, from Andy Warhol to Salvador Dali, passing by Roy Lichtenstein and Francis Bacon, are inspired. It has been revisited by the giants of the COMIC, such as Cosey or Lewis Trondheim. To celebrate its 90 years with great fanfare, the Monnaie de Paris has produced a collection of pieces bearing his likeness. From the top of his great age, Mickey has not finished deploying his aura enchanting.