Six Facial Expressions and Seven Dwarfs

I was doing some thinking and combining the other day, and I realized that the six basic facial expressions seem to superficially correlate to the Seven Dwarfs of Disney's 1937 animated film.

Here are the Six Basic Facial Expressions

Happy

Sad

Angry

Afraid

Disgusted

Surprised

I've always been puzzled that "neutrality" doesn't seem to count as one of the Six.

Anyways, then there are the Seven Dwarfs. A quick Google Search on the seven dwarfs reveals a myriad of explanations for what the different dwarves represent. One popular one is the Seven Stages of Addiction, or the Seven Stages of Cocaine Addiction, and was parodied in the Simpsons as the Seven Duffs, or Seven different kinds of attitudes when one is drunk. One of my favorite Google results was a clinical diagnosis of a different mental illness for each of the dwarves, along with a prescription of medication to solve each dwarf's problems.

The consensus of thinking people seems to be that there is no real system to the dwarves, but that they were chosen pretty much at random by the Disney team. However, the criteria of an animator and creator of a cartoon is driven by some desires. Cartoons are by their nature, iconic. In order to be memorable and interesting, and funny, characters, the dwarves need to stand out. They also need to be distinct from each other. Disney had the right idea in portraying the fairy tale this way, and I'm frankly surprised that the dwarves didn't have names before Disney.

As animators, Disney probably were aware of at least a variation on the Six Facial Expressions. I'm not sure when the idea first came out, but if you begin to do some tweaking, you get some interesting results.

1. Happy and Joy pretty much work on a 1-to-1 correlation. Happy and joy are also covered in the Four Humors as "sanguine".

2. Grumpy seems like he should be a combination of Anger and Sadness. Perhaps Disney didn't want to get too depressing, and so they combined these expressions into a single dwarf, so that the rest of the dwarves could be relatively positive, seeing as they are "good guys" in the story. Personally, I would have split this dwarf into two: Sulky and Feisty. Of the Four Humors, these cover "choleric" and "melancholy".

3. Sleepy, described in the Four Humors as "phlegmatic", has no correlation in the Six Facial Expressions, which gets me to thinking that perhaps there should be a seventh. However, since I'm not an artist, I'm not sure I could say whether sleepiness is a real effect on the facial expression or not. When you imagine a sleepy face, you see bags under the eyes, perhaps from a swelling of the blood vessels there. You may also see droopy, or half-closed eyelids, and a slight slackening of the jaw, followed by drooling at the extreme. Sleepiness might also tend to affect the rest of the expressions, as a sleepy person is less capable of being taken to extreme stages of anger, disgust, happiness, etc. When Sleepy experiences other emotions, his eyes tend to close quite readily. A happy sleepy closes his eyes in contentment, and an angry or disgusted sleepy shuts his eyes in an attempt to shut out the source of his emotion.

4. Also brought to mind by the English association of the word "phlegmatic" is, of course, Sneezy. But I'm not sure sneezing is specifically associated with that particular one of the Four Humors. Either way, I was at first puzzled as to what Expression to assign Sneezy, but it became obvious when I looked at what was left. Sneezy is an example of Disgust, of course. Sneezy is somewhat unique in that his expression is less voluntary than the rest of the dwarves, (except perhaps Sleepy) he can't help the "disgusted" look on his face, when his body is preparing to expel a real or imagined intrusion of particles.

5. Bashful and Afraid correlate quite well. We seem to have exhausted the Four Humors at this point. Perhaps Bashful is just a variation on Sneezy, or Bashful and Sneezy come from a common parent named Aversion. In which case, we're talking "phlegm" again.

6. Dopey also seems to lack an analogue in the Six Expressions, until we look at what's left if we've eliminated the previous ones. Surprise is the only expression not yet covered. It is tempting to call Dopey just another Sleepy, but that would get us nowhere. Instead, I prefer to think of Dopey as young, ignorant, and curious. At the very least, Surprise fits if he's delighted by everyday things, like flowers and birds. Probably the weakest correlation so far, but I'll take it.

7. Last, and possibly the odd dwarf out, is Doc. What does Doc feel? He's not Happy, although like the rest of the dwarves (even Grumpy), he contains an element of jolliness. Well, apparently he's some kind of Doctor, or at least enough like a doctor to earn his nickname from the rest of the dwarves. He wears glasses, also indicating that he's a dwarf of learning. I really want to call Doc the Neutral dwarf, since all the expressions, plus Sleepy, are used up. But Doc also has a bit of that element of Surprise that comes with learning. He might just be an older version of Dopey in that respect. But what if we had a dwarf called Pensive? Wouldn't he fill the same role as Doc? And couldn't we say that his expression would be "neutral"?

So my version of the Seven Dwarfs becomes eight dwarfs, since I've split Grumpy into Sulky and Feisty. And my version of the Six Expressions becomes eight expressions, since I've added Neutrality (pensiveness, Doc) and Sleepy.