To celebrate Disney’s 100th anniversary, the studio released a brand new animated short featuring one of the company’s oldest and most forgotten characters, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
If you’ve heard of Oswald, it could be because the character appeared in the 2010 game Epic Mickey. Walt Disney and animator Ub Iwerks created the spunky rabbit in 1927 while their fledgling animation studio was under contract with Universal Pictures. Oswald starred in a number of popular short films, but when Universal claimed it owned the character and continued to produce Oswald shorts without Disneyhe retired the bunny from his own stable of animation figures and created Mickey Mouse as a replacement that his company would own.
Oswald returned to Walt Disney Corporation ownership in 2006, and while the character later appeared in games, merchandise, and in the parks, this is his first appearance in an animated short since.
“Oswald is such a brave rascal. We wanted to bring Oswald back, and in short, he literally returns to his original home, the big screen,” says director Eric Goldberg. “We wanted Oswald to do the whole ‘squash-and-stretch’, ‘rubber-hose’ animation style to celebrate this first generation of Walt Disney artists.”
The short film is currently available on youtube.
