Jonathan Franzen quoting Scott McCloud:
Scott McCloud, in his cartoon treatise Understanding Comics, argues that the image you have of yourself when you’re conversing is very different from your image of the person you’re conversing with. Your interlocutor may produce universal smiles and universal frowns, and they may help you to identify with him emotionally, but he also has a particular nose and particular skin and particular hair that continually remind you that he’s an Other. The image you have of your own face, by contrast, is highly cartoonish. When you feel yourself smile, you imagine a cartoon of smiling, not the complete skin-and-and-hair package. It’s precisely the simplicity and universality of cartoon faces, the absence of Otherly particulars, that invite us to love them as we love ourselves. The most widely loved (and profitable) faces in the modern world tend to be exceptionally basic and abstract cartoons: Mickey Mouse, the Simpsons, Tintin, and – simplest of all, barely more than a circle, two dots, and a horizontal line – Charlie Brown.
It’s common to point out that actors typically have large, exaggerated features (Jim Carrey and Al Pacino come to mind). I suspect it’s the case that this maximizes their resemblance to cartoons and minimizes the “otherness” Mcloud refers to. Successful actors are those who allow us to quickly and with as little translation as possible recognize the emotions they are trying to represent.
