Isolde Schmitt-Menzel has died: The Mouse Lady – Media

Actually, this mouse should have been grey. When the graphic artist Isolde Schmitt-Menzel was commissioned to illustrate a Mause story by the then very popular author Ursula Wölfel in the early 1970s, the color scheme was actually clear. Mice are grey. But part of artistic freedom is to put a fresh shirt on mice, and so Isolde Schmitt-Menzel’s mice became colorful, there were also yellow and brown ones, but one was orange, that was the main mouse. Orange was the color of her time, in the early seventies lampshades were orange and ashtrays and cream jars and Munich’s Schwabylon temple of consumption and even that mirror-Canteen, in which the big reporters fortified themselves for further heroic stories. However, only Schmitt-Menzel clearly explained what this color is all about: “Yellow stands for intelligence. And red is energy. The two things together in my mouse was my aim, because I’m the same.”

No one could bat their eyelashes smarter

At the time, the head of WDR children’s television, Gert K. Müntefering, asked the artist to come up with little stories about this mouse, storyboards, everything was animated by Friedrich Streich, and so the mouse came on television, on Sunday mornings in the children’s program. The mouse sequences were the so-called separating element between the laughter stories presented and the factual stories. At that time, a distinction was not only made between U and E in pop culture. The first hundred or so mouse spots were significantly influenced by Isolde Schmitt-Menzel, the premiere was in March 1971. It was (laughing story) about how to make friends with an octopus. And (non-fictional history) how stainless steel spoons are made. In between, the mouse, in its very first contribution, painfully bumped its nose against the edge of the television picture, it finally had to test and get to know the limits of its new habitat. But even then she used her tail, which could be unplugged if the situation required it, with virtuosity. Hanging helplessly from a balloon, she kept swinging until the tip of her tail burst the balloon, then she had solid ground under her feet again.

The “mother of the mouse”: sculptor and graphic artist Isolde Schmitt-Menzel.

(Photo: Jan Woitas/picture alliance/dpa)

In the meantime there were disputes with the broadcaster, it was about exploitation rights and thus also about money, later the tone became more forgiving again. Isolde Schmitt-Menzel’s mouse evolved, soon she had the characteristic batting of her eyelashes, the sound for which was made with castanets. Soon the panting and trumpeting elephant was added, which had also emancipated itself from the natural elephant color and was impressive with its rich blue. Schmitt-Menzel was by then the respected visual artist she had been before. In one of her rare TV interviews in 1996 she said: “I also made horses and cats, not just mice.” After all, nobody wants to be reduced to a rodent. But it’s an enduring achievement to have brought a mouse that never said a word to the gibberish and self-promoting medium of television.

The sculptor and graphic artist Isolde Schmitt-Menzel died on September 4th at the age of 92.

source site