Ahh ok so I know this is an artblog and I never reblog anything, but I had to chime in!
So the whole white glove thing comes from early black & white animation, most notably the Mickey Mouse shorts, but also the Looney Tunes and the Max Fleischer toons. The gloves serve two purposes:
One; the gloves are big and makes those over-the-top hand gestures more prominent. It allows the characters to be more expressive, which is necessary for some of the mute cartoons.
Secondly, these characters tend to be completely black, like Felix the Cat (who was one of the inspirations for Mickey). The black color is easier to animate, but you end up with a problem: if their hands were over their bodies or a dark background, you wouldn’t see them! In Mickey’s first appearance in Steamboat Willie, Mickey and Pete don’t have their gloves, and everything kind of bleeds together.
Adding the gloves in the later shorts, you can see the distinction between his body and hands. Problem solved!
Even after technicolor cartoons arrived, the gloves stuck.
Apparently, Bugs Bunny didn’t wear gloves for a bit after the color cartoons came, but audiences asked why he stopped wearing them so the animators changed it back.
