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Mickey mouse shorts1/10/2024 ![]() “After arriving in Los Angeles, he discussed his ideas with animator Ub Iwerks, his longtime friend from Kansas City, and chose a mouse.”Īlthough it’s not clear who did what when it came to putting pencil to paper, this earliest-known drawing of Mickey (pictured above) is credited to not just Walt, but Iwerks and then-apprentice animator Les Clark. ![]() “As Walt liked to recall, on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood, he brainstormed ideas for a new character,” The Walt Disney Family Museum notes in its Mickey Mouse exhibition catalogue. In February of 1928, Mintz hired away almost all of Disney’s animators and the brothers lost Oswald. Oswald proved more successful than Mintz could’ve imagined. ![]() The earliest known drawing of Mickey Mouse, Walt Disney c. Winkler’s Winkler Pictures (now Screen Gems) when he married her. The Oswald character was Universal Pictures’ star, and Walt was beholden to film producer and distributor Charles Mintz, who unceremoniously took over Margaret J. At the time, (what’s now) Disney simply didn’t have the financial resources to churn out pictures. The fully animated Oswald shorts weren’t long for this world, however. Just two decades earlier, Walt and his brother Roy Disney owned a modest cartoon studio, if you can believe that. Before the iconic mouse was born, the brothers worked on a variety of other projects, including the Alice Comedies series - which, in a pioneering move, blended live-action and animation - and the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit series. ( Well, maybe not rainbows, because, you know.) In fact, in a 1948 radio broadcast, Walt Disney referred to Mickey as a symbol of his independence. While Mickey Mouse is a mega-success now - and while Disney owns more characters and properties than we can possibly count - things weren’t always sunshine and rainbows. Of Mice and Rabbits: The Birth of Mickey Mouse On November 18, 2018, Mickey Mouse turned 90, and now, as he nears 100 ( and a landmark copyright expiration date), we’re taking a look back on the origins of Walt Disney’s most well-known creation. The other featured artists ranged from the likes of pop art authority Andy Warhol to San Francisco-based muralist Sirron Norris although they varied greatly, the works in this aspect of the exhibition underscored not only Mickey’s continued relevance, but the way in which the character has become much more than a brand ambassador. In 2019, The Walt Disney Family Museum displayed a 2014 version of Hirst’s painting, Mickey for Bob, alongside other depictions of the character as part of a special exhibition-meets-Mickey-retrospective, Mickey Mouse: From Walt to the World. Undoubtedly, this speaks to Mickey Mouse’s timelessness. “I love that the imagery is so powerful that it only takes twelve different colored dots to create something so instantly recognizable.” “It’s using simple means to capture the very essence of his form solely through the power of color,” Hirst said of the painting. Despite Hirst’s relatively abstract approach to recreating Mickey on canvas, it’s still immediately clear who the artist has painted, even if you see the work removed from any Disney-related context.
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