Mickey Mouse Turns 85, Walt Disney Studios Releases Preview of His 'Vintage' Short Film [VIDEO]
It has been 85 years since Mickey Mouse introduced himself via the short film "Steamboat Willie." Now, modern-day Walt Disney Animation Studios goes back in time with a short film starring Mickey Mouse himself.
Last Monday, Walt Disney releases the first few seconds of the seven-minute black-and-white animation short entitled 'Get A Horse,' which looks pretty much like how Walt Disney made him some eight and a half decades ago.
In an interview with Jim Hill of Huffington Post, the production team behind 'Get A Horse' is to recreate Mickey the way Walt and co-animator Ub Iwerks would have made them years ago.
"We worked with some really talented people here at the Studio to make an authentic-looking Mickey Mouse cartoon from the late 1920s. Something that Walt & Ub would have put together, back when everything was done on deadline and Disney Studios didn't have a whole lot of time or money to spend on the production of these shorts," says Lauren MacMullan, the director of the said production.
The project started out when the studios was exploring new ideas for a new Mickey Mouse cartoon. Upon the persuasion of Rich Moore of 'Wreck-It Ralph,' Lauren pitched an idea which stemmed off from her experience watching black-and-white Mickey cartoons.
For this project, Lauren and producer Dorothy McKim signed up Eric Goldberg, who animated the Genie in the award-winning Disney feature 'Alladin.' Goldberg is best described as having the ability to get inside other artists' heads to replicate their animation style 'with an often eerie accuracy.'
Goldberg talks about how he made the film short look like it was lifted off the late 1920's. "I had to set my mental clock back to the late 1920s. For there are a lot of animation techniques that are used today that weren't invented yet or weren't commonly employed by people who worked in animation back then."
Part of the making of this vintage magic, as Goldberg shares, is the deliberate mistakes inserted after running the shorts. "We'd tell Gina Bradley, our head of scene planning, that she needed to go back into a particular scene and -- for just two frames -- make the buttons on Mickey's pants go from being white to black. Oh, us hand-drawn guys had a ball working on the first two minutes of this short."
Meanwhile, Disney Channel celebrated Mickey's 'birthday' with greetings from other Disney characters throughout the day last Monday and back-to-back episodes of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. The day culminates with the premiere of the first-ever extended episode of Mickey Mouse cartoon shorts entitled 'Potatoland,' which follows the misadventures of Mickey and Goofy as they travel to Idaho to visit Potatoland.