Original subtitles

During the last few years, we've ventured into a lot of different fields.

We've had the opportunity to meet and work with a lot of wonderful people.

I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing, that it was all started by a

mouse.

It's magical to be able to channel all of your energy at this character.

We can fill with all of our hopes and dreams and all of our love and all of

innocence that we experience and then eventually lose and would like back.

Mickey was everywhere when I was a kid.

He was just, like, part of my DNA.

He's plastered over every T -shirt, every billboard. He speaks multiple

languages. He is everywhere.

Everywhere. It's overwhelming.

Like, leave me alone.

Oh, no.

Okay, let's do that again.

What is it about Mickey Mouse?

He started as this simple character.

But over time, he gets so big that he becomes this reflection of who we are,

the good and the bad.

How is that even possible with this little mouse?

The life and ventures of Mickey Mouse have been closely bound up with my own

personal and professional life.

He still speaks for me, and I still speak for him.

When I first got to the studio to do the genie in Aladdin, I didn't know what to

expect with Mickey.

It felt like he was encased in amber, where they don't want to do anything

him, you know.

There we are, the hat building.

Sometimes people ask, aren't you unhappy that you're not on one of the features

right now?

I said, I'm getting to animate Mickey Mouse.

Walt used to say, don't forget, it was all started by a mouse.

So no matter what we're capable of doing now, Mickey takes us back to our org.

This process of hand -drawn hasn't really changed for a century.

You know, the process of drawing the characters is exactly the same.

But back when the great Mickey cartoons were being made, the Disney studio had

maybe 100 animators to do Mickey and his pals.

These days, to do a new hand -drawn Mickey project like the one we're

now, we have three.

Me, Mark Hand, and Randy Haycock.

Randy did characters like Clayton and Tarzan.

He did a lot of Pocahontas.

And then Mark Hand is really known as the princess guy.

And the list is endless.

We've always wanted to do something where we see all the different Mickeys

together. That's never really been seen in a film before, so that's what we're

doing on this project.

And we're calling it Mickey in a Minute, where he's walking down the hallways of

Disney Animation, and he gets sucked into a whirlwind that kind of sends him

through his most iconic moments, until finally he gets spit out at the end as

Steamboat Willie.

It's going to be a lot of work. I mean, basically, we're going to be making

about 1 ,500 original drawings of Mickey for about one minute's worth of screen

time.

But trust me, it'll be worth it. You'll see.

And this is Mickey as he was designed by Walt and Ub Iwerks.

Not exactly the Mickey we recognize today, but our kind of...

Proto Mickey.

And yes, he still had a tail.

Whoop! There we go.

It was a beautiful farm in Marceline, Missouri. 48 acres.

My chore was to keep the horse going around the circle, and then part of it

would be feeding the cane in the squeezer. You see?

Walt lived here in Marceline for five years.

It was a short amount of time.

But those very few years were Walt's childhood.

His family was poor, and his father, Elias, was extremely strict.

And so art for Walt was an escape.

Walt would take his drawing materials and go down to a special tree,

his dreaming tree.

He would spend hours under that tree and just laying in the grass, a thing that

Walt called belly botany.

I don't know if he's ever laid in tall grass on a farm, but there's a lot

happening around you.

Whatever happened to run or crawl or fly by, he would quickly try to sketch.

His little sister told me, Walt would do a series of drawings for her,

and then he would make a really good story up to go along with it.

I can just see those great juices happening underneath his tree.

It was that happy place.

It was where that spark happened.

I love it.

Let's go. I like that.

So, like, all the possibilities of what you would want on your arm.

Why did you choose Mickey Mouse?

I feel like Blood, Sweat & Tears was put into Mickey Mouse by Walt.

You know, he was Dirt Ford.

Dirt Ford was like a dream.

It's just like, nope, I believe in that mouse.

Right. You get a lot of people coming in here asking about Disney and stuff.

Yeah, there's a few.

DJ, correct me if I'm wrong. This was Walt and Roy's studio in the early 20s?

Yeah. This is the place.

I know way too much about the history of this now, you know, with Walt and his

brother starting the Disney Brothers studio here.

Walt was chilling right here.

Right here.

And now, this little rad dude.

So, imprinted in everybody's brains, like, we all got a weird different

about it.

Mickey Mouse to me is light.

There's like a lot of dark in the world.

Especially nowadays, things tend to be getting a little bit darker.

And he's just keeping hope in the world.

So this is the very first officially licensed Disney book ever published.

imaginatively titled Mickey Mouse Book.

What you've gotten here are games.

Probably the most interesting, though, is the story of how Mickey meets Walt.

Falling from Mouse Fairyland, crash landing on Walt's roof.

Like Santa Claus, Mickey hops down the chimney.

Who does he meet in the house?

None other than Walt Disney himself.

Walt would love to tell tall tales. The story about how Mickey came to be.

He told it in different versions over the years himself.

Walt, you're a man who's famous for many things, not the least of which is

building a better mouse.

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood

at a time when the business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest

ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.

Walt was in trouble for Mickey Mouse.

Walt and his studio created Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

I'd argue that Oswald is certainly a lucky rabbit, but the luck isn't always

good.

The actual Oswald contract does not give Walt Disney the rights to that

character.

And so Walt Disney was pushed out of the equation.

It was all about that mythological moment when he's on the train and he's

told his entire studio has been hired away from him.

that Oswald doesn't belong to him anymore, and it's crushing.

But out of that comes hope.

He said, okay, we've lost everything.

Let's start again.

With the retelling of that story on the train over and over again and the

different inflections, it becomes myth.

This is myth -making.

Walt realizes the importance of linking himself to that mouse through developing

at the same time.

Legend has it that on that train, Walt wanted to call Mickey Mortimer Mouse,

but his wife Lillian suggested Mickey Mouse.

I think that's probably one of the most important decisions anybody ever made

for a character.

But they still had a few Oswalds to produce, so they couldn't necessarily

broadcast that far and wide that they were going to be working on a new

character.

So that very first Mickey Mouse short was made in their garage.

Walt had to turn to the people that he trusted the most.

Of course, you have Ub Iwerks, that's a lead animator.

Walt and Ub.

complimented each other.

You know, Ub could do things that Walt could not.

First of all, animate like a demon.

It was said he could do 700 drawings a day, which is unbelievable.

Ub Iwerks, meanwhile, remembered a different scenario where Walt came back

the train and said, we need a new character, and they tried out various

and settled on a mouse.

Either way, there's this famous sheet of...

different designs of Mickey.

And two of them are circled.

Does it matter if Mickey was created on a train or at an animator's desk?

What matters is that hope from despair story that we can all resonate with and

go, you know what, yeah, I've got to pick myself back up by my bootstraps and

keep going because...

If Walt can do it, I can do it.

In so precarious a world of new possibilities and increased competition,

planned to go all out on sound, and those plans came very near spelling a

disaster for us.

Mickey was not an overnight success.

Walt had made two cartoons prior to Steamboat Willie, Plane Crazy and

Gaucho, and he couldn't find a distributor for them.

Then came a very important breakthrough.

In 1927, as sound came in, he set out to make the first sync

sound cartoon this country had ever seen.

To launch our picture impressively, I'd hired a full New York orchestra with a

famous director to do the recording.

The upshot was that I had to borrow on my automobile, and Roy and I had to

mortgage our homes as well to cover the cost of that first synchronization for

Steamboat Willie.

And everybody had to synchronize and hit that thing right on the button. And we

had a way of doing it, though. We had a little kind of a little beat that worked

up and down, and they were all musicians working for me, so...

They could follow those beats, and when it came to a certain number of beats,

they would go, ah, or they would go, bang, or they would go this, or they

pop one of these pop guns, you know.

And when it was finished, the picture wouldn't synchronize with the sound.

And we had to do it all over.

Finally, when all of those elements came together, that put Mickey into the

stratosphere.

to be the thing that you would never forget the experience of having.

And

nothing

would ever be the same after that.

With Steamboat Willie people would probably just be floored by what they

When this movie came out, there was nothing like this ever done.

And once in a while in our lifetime, we see a movie like that, and it changes

everything. I mean, for me, in my childhood, it was like Star Wars.

And I think Steamboat Willie probably had a similar impact.

Mickey became a movie star on the same plane as Douglas Fairbanks or Charlie

Chaplin.

He was somebody they went to the movies to see.

And as his character developed, he became a

rescuer to Minnie Mouse. Take it easy.

A hero stacked up against peg legs.

And a very resourceful character.

It's no accident that Walt Disney was the first voice of Mickey Mouse.

Yeah. It's me, I guess.

The optimist.

The curious kid who never grew up.

The guy who was intrepid, who never let anything stand in his way.

That's Mickey Mouse.

But that's also...

Walt Disney.

And in a way, Mickey's earliest cartoons are really from Walt's

memories as a farm boy.

Walt poured himself into this character, and the character embodies Walt Disney

himself.

So you cannot separate the two.

In the early shorts, there was a sense of adventure.

a sense of doing something exciting that somebody else wasn't doing.

Fairbanks and Chaplin were such fans that they both made arrangements that

several of their films be paired with Mickey Mouse shorts at their premieres.

What?

No Mickey Mouse!

What kind of a party is this? What? No, Mickey Mouse was the complaint of people

going to a movie theater and realizing they're not showing a Mickey Mouse

cartoon. What's wrong with you people?

He really was a sensation.

And the merchandise showed up everywhere.

And that was a brand new thing.

And there were a couple companies that were on the verge of bankruptcy. And

Mickey Mouse actually saved those companies from disappearing.

What would another culture from another planet think of us?

Seeing Mickey on everything.

They might say, take me to your leader, and it would be Mickey.

Let me get this out of the way.

And here it is, folks.

Mouse heaven.

I collect images that embody a life force.

Now, the more abstract they are, the more they are imbued with that life

Because you're offering just a bare essence, so you can clothe it in

your imagination can bring forth.

Which kind of gets us up to Mickey.

Mickey is pure, absolute geometry, made up of nothing but circles.

This total abstraction is probably the most universal symbol.

ever created by man or mouse.

Three simple circles, a quarter and two dimes, and it's recognizable the world

over. What I've collected is simply the history of this phenomenon.

So I think if an archaeologist was to find this place in the far, far distant

future, they would be convinced that this was a shrine to the great god

Welcome to Earth.

I have to tell you about this mouse that will change your life.

He's a mouse.

That wears clothes, though.

White gloves, black fur, I guess it would be. Red pants, yellow shoes.

Big ears, you know, and he's always smiling.

He has a very particular voice.

Oh, boy.

He has a girlfriend, Minnie.

He likes Minnie, I know that.

I think that they're dating.

because there's no ring on them and then his other friends are daisy goofy

donald and when he has a dog named pluto and not to be confused with goofy

because goofy is a also sort of a dog but he's more of a dog man um and that's

just the world we're living in everybody

Mickey and I just became inseparable.

We love a mouse. How crazy is that? That's a little absurd.

In

the

world's film capital is the studio that stands as a monument to the great genius

of Walt Disney.

Master of a new form of popular art.

That extra revenue from the Mickey Mouse merchandise really allowed the studio

to experiment and improve.

First thing I did when I got a little money, we set up our own art school.

Art schools that existed then worked with the static figure.

Now we were dealing in motion, movement, and the flow of movement, the flow of

things, you know.

Action, reaction, all of that.

I put all my artists back in school.

And out of that school have come the artists that now make up my staff here,

more than that, the artists that make up most all of the cartoon outfits in

Hollywood.

Mickey has taken the world by storm. The great thinkers, the great artists, are

all stepping back and acknowledging that this is something otherworldly and

important.

What is the power behind this character?

I think Mickey appeals for a lot of different reasons, but if I had to pick

It's the way he moves.

It's how he does things that make him compelling to watch.

He has a spirit to him dating all the way back to Steamboat Willie that is

playful, inventive, resourceful, and fun.

But his imperfections are as much a part of his character.

Mickey wasn't perfect.

But he would always find a resourceful way to get out of situations.

His movement is defining who he is. And that

is what the Disney studio has specialized in ever since.

You're not just creating movement for movement's sake.

You're creating movement that defines that individual's personality.

People tend to forget that Mickey Mouse started in the roaring 20s, but almost

immediately a depression fell on the United States.

America, the land of shattered dreams, a place of deep despair and real fear.

Millions of Americans homeless, hungry, and without hope.

Because of the crisis, the majority of kids were spending their time without

parents.

They were left free to do what they wanted during the day.

And movies were the cheapest entertainment you could get for a child.

So if you're a kid, the one thing you could be guaranteed of was a Saturday

matinee.

It was the highlight of your week.

I fell in love with Mickey.

Because I went to the movies almost every day with my sister and brother.

And you had a double feature and a cartoon in the middle.

So you were there for hours out of the hands of your parents.

And there was a cartoon. And when I started that cartoon, first a big head

appear with radiant lights coming out of it.

Remember I said... saying we knew it was coming and Jackie would grab you by one

arm and I would grab you by the other arm, and you went into a frenzy.

Wow, I get goosebumps every time.

Mickey becomes the icon of how to truly survive the Great Depression.

The American dream has suffered, but Mickey is able to bring that back.

He's able to return us to a sense of perseverance.

There was no other character having that grip.

on a map.

And that popularity spins out into things like the Mickey Mouse Club, where

could get together and watch Mickey cartoons together and laugh together.

And now they're all waiting for Mickey himself.

Here he comes.

Mickey weathers the depression, but he's got to change and transform.

Because America and Mickey, they change together.

There's almost 100 years of Disney animation history within this building.

We have approximately 65 million pieces of art in our collection.

And every box holds a spark of creativity.

So here we've got Steamboat Willie.

That's a nice one.

Mickey as he's falling in the soap bucket.

And it's so simple.

You look at the hands.

They almost look like just little pinwheels.

Yeah.

It's the spirit of Mickey, just really simplified to an essence.

You'll be able to see an evolution of Mickey here.

So we're going five years later.

So you can see there's a little bit more to him.

It's the same character.

But you can tell that a different animator did this.

The hands, for example, they've added the white gloves.

And this, Mickey, is just that much more three -dimensional and organic.

You would take an animator's drawing of Mickey, put it on your light box, and

then improve it.

improve it by making that pose stronger, making that line of action more

defined.

But there's still something personal in it that you're bringing to the table.

The very first animation I did here at the studio back in 19... We won't talk

about that. It was a long time ago. But the very first animation I did was

Mickey Mouse.

I felt it then and I feel it now with this short.

And we're able to keep him alive.

And we're doing it in the way Mickey should be done.

I don't know if I can flip these because the papers are coming.

The character of Mickey, the personality of Mickey.

Being hand -drawn is part of who he is.

And if people recognize that, you know.

there will always be a reason for us to keep drawing him.

And those early animators, as crude as it was, they were discovering the

language of animation.

Well, Walt, how is Snow White of the Seven Dwarfs coming along?

Oh, it's come along very well.

It's going to run for one hour and a half.

No cartoon production has ever run that long before.

That's why we feel justified in putting $1 million into it.

In terms of animation, Mickey opened a lot of doors for Walt.

And Walt was always looking for new doors.

You know, it makes me dizzy to think of the millions of drawings necessary for a

production of this kind.

Disney needs to expand hugely.

And so the studio goes from a small group to 300 people.

And that change really transforms the studio.

No longer can Walt... be involved in every mickey short his entire focus

over to snow white snow white was not taking place in the same universe that

mickey lived in but at the same time mickey never goes away he's always right

there by walt's side whenever he takes on a new enthusiasm

mickey

mouse's Probably the most difficult character to ink because of all the

That's the most difficult part of inking is inking circles.

And Mickey Mouse is full of circles.

Your job as an inker is translating the animator's work onto the cell. You don't

have any room.

to go outside of that because if you do that you change their intention you

change their work they say it takes about 15 years of

consistent inking eight hours a day five times a week for 15 years to become a

master anchor there's only a few of us in the income paint department now but

used to be hundreds and for a long time it was all women the thousands of pencil

drawings go to the inking department Here, hundreds of pretty girls cover the

drawings with sheets of transparent celluloid. Then they painstakingly trace

every line of every drawing in ink, following exactly in every detail the

original animation drawing.

The role of the inkers and painters gets glossed over into this log line of

pretty girls who traced and colored.

When what they were accomplishing was mind -blowing.

These women were artists in their own right.

In the studio paint laboratory, all colors used are made up from secret

formulas.

Expert chemists develop more than 1 ,500 different shades of color for Snow

White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Color forever transforms the world of Mickey Mouse.

Pastel, this is flesh, this is tongue, marigold is shoes, lobster is pants.

We are not really brushing.

It's actually dropping a glob of paint and then we just push it to the edges

because we want to make the paint look as opaque as possible.

When I'm inking or painting Mickey Mouse, it just takes me back to when

first created Mickey So

now that we're done

with it, this is what it looks like from the front

Once Mickey becomes an international children's star, there's certain things

cannot do.

Parents of Mickey's younger viewers wanted Mickey to clean up his act and

as bad an influence.

He can't be a bully. He can't punch people. He can't behave in any way that

would be considered bad behavior.

It pushed Mickey into a straight man role.

Where almost any kind of flaw is seen as out of character.

And so, Donald Duck appears.

The duck came along as a result of too many taboos put onto Mickey Mouse.

People didn't feel that Mickey could blow his top like the duck.

He had to maintain a certain dignity.

So in order to give ourselves a latitude, we created this terrible,

Duck.

Story

after

story was rejected for Mickey because he was perceived as being a little bit too

silly in them.

They found out Mickey is probably best paired with Donald and Goofy. A moose! A

moose! And have this little trio.

Hot dog!

Now do your stuff.

I'll take care of the rest.

There are many, many great ones that include the three of them that work

well because their personalities rub off against each other.

But it became evident that Donald is getting Mickey's anger and Goofy gets

Mickey's silly side.

And if Mickey is the responsible one, he pretty much has to take a back seat.

But then where does that leave Mickey?

This part of a short that I'm animating is from The Brave Little Tailor.

He's trying to get his arm out of his sleeve. Can't get it.

Comes into his arm right here.

And I've got to get all that done in 297 frames. So I've only got 100 frames to

get the rest of it.

I think I was here 25 years before I actually animated Mickey.

It seems a shame because, you know, you work at Disney.

You should be animating Mickey all the time, I think.

When Eric gave me the sections that I was going to do, I got really excited

because that was my favorite Mickey that made me want to be an animator.

So that was exciting and intimidating all at the same time.

As Mickey evolved, what used to be his eye, when you get to Fantasia,

just became this little thing here. And so you would end up with the pupils.

Fantasia Mickey's important because with the whites of his eyes like this, it

made him a lot more expressive.

And I'm going to stretch his ears a little more here because he just became

little more pliable from this point on.

We wouldn't have a Fantasia if it weren't for Walt's concern for Mickey

He was worried that Donald and Goofy were overtaking Mickey's popularity, and

wanted a vehicle to bring Mickey back in the limelight again.

And so originally Fantasia was just going to be the Sorcerer's Apprentice

and it then blossomed into an entire...

innovative feature film that's still never been equal.

Santasia is something that was a huge gamble.

You have so many different styles.

It's something that, in theory, shouldn't work.

The greatest thrill of his acting career happened on the night of November 13,

1940, at the same theater where he made his first appearance as a ragged,

shoeless mouse almost ten years before.

Some of the old animators said that when they heard that Walt wanted Mickey to

be on this rock conducting the universe, they thought he'd gotten kind of crazy.

Because Mickey, most after all, is a cartoon character. You don't conduct the

universe.

Mickey conducting the universe, you can translate to Walt conducting his own

universe. Because by that time his company had grown to thousands and

of people looking at the studio.

So I think Walt became Mickey then.

There's some scenes in Sorcerer's Apprentice where he knows he's screwed

front of the sorcerer.

The subtlety that they get on his face, I think that's where the character, it

is absolutely the perfection.

Artistically, Walt achieved everything he wanted to with Fantasia.

But when the movie came out, it was a failure.

Artistic success, financial failure.

Certainly an artistic success. Well, some people would question that, too.

Fantasia was Mickey's culmination and his termination.

That sorcerer swatted him with the broom and he scurried off of the stage and he

never quite came back again.

The story of Walt and Mickey wasn't just one continual success after success.

It was stumble after stumble, failure after failure.

But Walt believed that if he worked hard enough, he could overcome every

obstacle.

There are two main animators who were really, really important in Mickey's

Ub Iwerks and Fred Moore.

It was Moore who redesigned the mouse more than once.

And after Fantasia, the studio is talking in terms of a comeback.

From Fantasia, Freddie Moore took him even further for even more

fluidity and more character.

They gave him a loose, rangy kind of movement, and they had him deliberately

clowning around.

Everything's kind of working.

to this s -curve here i'll clean up your yard all right but no more clowning

they were trying to make mickey funny again you know let him play a clown once

in a while like when he's doing his goofy dance in mickey's birthday party

when he's raking up leaves in the little whirlwind you know it's okay for him to

make mistakes or act foolish once in a while in that year

The movement, the organic qualities, the fluidity of the animation was

never better.

They could do with Mickey.

This new Mickey seemed to hold the promise of freeing him from that role of

being the serious, responsible one all the time.

But that version of Mickey didn't last long.

Hi -ho, hi -ho, hi -ho, hi -ho.

We all must help you know.

We'll win the war with 5 -4 -4, hi -ho.

Hi -ho, hi -ho.

We all must help you know.

We'll win the war with 5 -4 -4, hi -ho.

The whole world is aflame.

All the peoples of the United Nations are fighting the savage enemies of

freedom.

In Hollywood, Walt Disney has turned over almost the entire facilities of his

studio for the production of Army and Navy instructional films.

4 -8, sequence one.

Let her roll.

Walt, being the patriot that he was, supported whatever the government and

military wanted. Don't throw away that bacon grease.

Fats make glycerin, and glycerin makes explosives.

Whether that was creating shorts for home front or propaganda purposes.

Will our own cities and homes be bombed?

Or training films and educational films for the military.

As the boat is pulled back, the magazines break.

They were designing insignia for different military and auxiliary units

the world.

Over 1 ,200 were made.

You have groups writing to the studio saying, we want Mickey to help get us

through this.

Before the war, Hitler liked Mickey, Mussolini loved Mickey, Hirohito loved

Mickey, but when America enters war, Mickey ends up banned.

A little fellow's grin was too infectious for Nazism.

Hitler thunderingly forbade his people to wear the then popular Mickey Mouse

button in place of the swastika.

Hitler understood what Mickey symbolized.

Independence.

liberty, freedom, America is Mickey.

Mando Duck, here are your orders.

You will parachute at position B -4.

But with the wartime shorts that are produced to create morale, almost all of

those are done by Donald Duck.

Mickey's presence in World War II tended to rely on the home front.

You see him on support posters, getting people to carpool, rationing, selling

war bonds, supporting the war effort, not from the front line, but at home.

If you were a child at that point in time or a family, who better to look to

than Mickey Mouse for that sense of comfort?

But you as a creator,

Don't control what happens to your products.

You don't control what happens to your characters.

And so when wartime came, Mickey was already there.

There was a village in Poland in which the entire village was destroyed by the

Nazis.

And there are images left from that village that...

create a collection of the life of the village before the horror.

And in one of the photographs is Mickey.

And it's a shocking image within the Holocaust Museum to see this being

Mouse creating pleasure for this community right on the cusp of the war.

Children in the camps were dressed up in Mickey Mouse costumes, staging Mickey

Mouse plays, drawing images of Mickey Mouse.

There was actually a comic strip written by someone in the camps,

which covered the daily life through the perspective of Mickey Mouse.

And at the end, he erases Mickey and says, Mickey's gone, back to America.

And the person who drew the comic strip was then killed.

Mickey was in the Holocaust because Mickey represented the possibility of

escape, of joy, of happiness.

And those dictators understood very well that was not what they were offering.

You kind of have to think of Mickey as like before World War II and then after

World War II.

It's two very different careers.

Well, here we are, Pluto.

Boy, what a dream place.

Come on, your highness.

Utopia is yours.

This migration to the suburbs, variously estimated as from 40 to 80 million

people. Many people complain about the post -war Mickeys being domesticated.

But Walt Disney is a very different person.

Walt, as a suburban house, has a very set conservative life, really.

And he's a person now who's gone through nervous breakdowns, possibilities of

financial ruin, a strike.

He gets involved in HUAC.

And that changes in the Mickey we know.

It makes him a much more contained character than he was in the early

And America is moving in that direction, too.

We don't want chaos.

We want to feel safe. We want to feel familiar and protected.

Okay, poodle, let's get our dirty.

1953 was his last short, and I've heard him described as just being a little

man.

He acquired a decent house and a mortgage, and he just became your

mouse next door.

There is a continuing trend to more time off, which means more time to consume.

It's a completely new idea in automobiles. The daring, dazzling 1955

Come on!

When I first saw these, I did a complete double take.

Mickey was even drawn this way.

The new 1955 Rambler offers complete year -round air conditioning.

They're sending the signals that Mickey and Minnie are married and they're

driving in the front of the Nash Rambler and there are their two kids sitting in

the back. And it's like, wait a minute.

Live a little, drive a Rambler.

Apparently they had made a few commercials before Walt.

saw them. What had happened was a fan had written to him saying, Dear Walt,

did you do with Mickey?

And he found these commercials and looked at them and just went, Stop.

That's not Mickey. We're not doing that anymore.

Walt was getting so busy that he didn't always have time to stop what he was

doing and go to the soundstage and record Mickey's voice.

And doing that falsetto voice of Mickey was becoming harder.

He actually had to go to a doctor for the vocal strain.

Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go.

Hi.

How are you? Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Yeah, I'm excited to work on

this. You know, you could do this for a living. You sound just like him. I would

hope to.

Thanks, thanks.

So you've read the script.

It's kind of a fanciful trip through Mickey's career.

It starts with him walking through the halls of the animation studio, and he's

looking at his past glories on posters.

So why don't you go through it, and we'll see what we get.

All right. Okay.

One, take one.

Aw, there's Pluto.

It's Minnie.

Pete, try another one where you're just a little more casual, a little slower.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Oh, I remember that.

Those are great. Try one more that's just a hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm. The responsibility is huge because I'm just playing a part in continuing

this legacy that started with Walt back in 1928.

Hey, Pluto, here she comes.

Hi, folks.

Hi, folks. This is Mickey.

I'm Mickey, too. You are?

I thought so. Jimmy McDonald, the second voice of Mickey, told Wayne, remember,

kid, you're only filling in for the boss.

And that's how I look at it.

Come on. We've got to hurry.

Come on. We've got to hurry.

Oh, gosh.

Gosh. Oh, gosh.

I will never forget that.

Essentially, I'm emulating Walt's performance as Mickey.

Hot dog.

Hot dog.

You know, the coal is floating around him like asteroids, so he's trying to

for them.

Gotcha!

Great.

I'm sitting there, and I'm listening to Brett doing the voice, and I'm thinking,

oh, man, he's nailed it.

He's really got him. And I hope that as well as Brett nails the voice, we nail

the visuals.

working on. This short is kind of Mickey heaven because you get to play with all

these different styles as do the other animators who are working on it.

So in this particular case this is a Mickey from the 1950s

and this sequence was animated by John Lounsbury and to be honest

this is the first time I've drawn a 1950s Johnny Lounsbury Mickey.

You know, I'm learning as I go.

Most

Hollywood

producers were terrified of television.

Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse present the Mickey Mouse Club.

Walt goes in the opposite direction and embraces television.

He relished the idea of getting into a new field like that.

Hi, Mouseketeers. What would you like to have me draw?

Mickey Mouse.

It made it a lot easier to have this.

audience identification with a character that they had known for all those years

and had become a part of their lives.

Once again, Mickey provided the momentum that made all of that possible.

Walt, I think, very quickly realized that the power of his creation had life

beyond the walls of the studio.

And he would get fan mail. People would ask, how can I meet Mickey and Vinny?

Welcome.

I guess you all know this little fella here.

It's an old partnership.

Mickey and I started out the first time many, many years ago.

We've had a lot of our dreams come true.

Now we want you to share with us.

Our latest and greatest dream.

That's it.

Right here.

Disneyland.

As soon as Walt starts on another path and focuses his interest on Disneyland,

he goes through a major transformation as well.

He has to become the kind of icon that Walt is becoming.

Disneyland is your land.

Here age relives fond memories of the past.

And here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future.

There is something very personal about this whole quest that Walt is on.

Returning to his own sense of being a child.

And that Mickey Mouse.

The character that existed in his head and then on paper, that existed on the

big screen, could now be as close to every visitor at the park as it was to

That's Mickey Mouse, the inimitable little character that started this whole

story with Walt Disney 25 years ago.

The real star of it is Mickey Mouse.

I think there's an aura of magic around Mickey Mouse that makes you feel safe.

And I think within that... bubble you are since

nikki

connects generations we connect

our childhood memories to our adult memories and so when you encounter

mickey in the park you are not just you you are six -year -old you and

you are 80 -year -old you in the future and you are with your

grandmother and you are with your grandchildren and you are participating

timeless moment.

Mickey is the

walking embodiment of Walt's philosophies. And you can meet him still

persona of Mickey.

I do remember, like, driving up to it and having that feeling that, like, this

is where Mickey lives.

Oh, this is the sacred space.

It's like he made Disneyland.

It's like he just messed with, like, boom, boom.

At that time, I'm thinking he's like John Wayne or he's like a real true

star. He...

Spent his money, he bought this so people could come visit him.

And I actually got to meet him when I was five years old. Five years old.

ten. When I saw him in Tokyo Disneyland, I really believed it's him.

He's right down here.

And actually, I think the sweetest one is me and Minnie down here.

It's kind of a big deal when I see Mickey.

My husband literally pushed me out of the way. Push her out of the way so I

get to Mickey first.

Really happy.

when I got Mickey Mouse's signature.

Thank you for all the times you were there for me.

And you've always been my best friend.

I resonate with Mickey so well because there's an undeniable piece of Walt's

heart in Mickey Mouse.

Can you still make a noise like Mickey Mouse?

Well, uh... Mickey talks up like this, you know, kind of a falsetto.

Of course, he's an old mouse now in the falsetto.

Getting a little old.

Working

with

Walt, nobody had any idea he was ill.

Certainly not to the extent he was.

We simply didn't see it coming.

We never saw it coming.

After Walt's death, his wife Lillian said that it was difficult for

her to watch or listen to Mickey Mouse because there was so much of Walt in

After his passing, they pretty much just closed up the office.

They'd go in and dust and things like that, but it looks just the way it did.

We've tried to keep it as close to Walt as possible.

You know, with the passing of Walt, the studio honestly did not know what to do

with Mickey.

And for me, as a Disney storyteller, it was kind of eye -opening.

It almost seemed that they wanted to put the lid on Mickey.

Because Walt's values, Walt's ideas would be frozen in time.

The world changed. The culture changed.

And Mickey, he hadn't really changed with it.

Even Mickey Mouse has troubles these days. A band of yippies threatened

in the park all day yesterday.

The yippies said they had come to liberate Mickey Mouse.

Mickey Mouse was still very much alive outside the Disney studio.

You could not escape him.

Just like America splits in the 60s, Mickey Mouse splits as well.

There's kind of a surface meaning to him, but the more you look into it, the

more you think about it, the more levels there are to this symbol.

So there are two Mickeys now, Mainstream Mickey and Counterculture Mickey.

And those coexist in this one character.

It's on America's tortured brow that Mickey Mouse has grown up a

cow.

Now the workers have struck for fame.

Mickey becomes this irresistible symbol to the counterculture.

So if you have an issue with your parents, with authority, with America in

general, Mickey Mouse is your guy.

What Mickey provided was inspiration.

People were starting to use Mickey to reflect life around them in all sorts of

different ways.

And that really starts to deepen the character of Mickey Mouse.

I don't know why things persist in people's minds and memories.

Some things stick, some things don't.

I forgot I did that. That was Mickey Mouse by Leonardo da Vinci.

All significant art represents an attempt to understand reality.

I was against the Vietnam War.

And I thought we could do a little film on Mickey Mouse in Vietnam.

I was looking for a symbol that would represent every man.

And Mickey was sort of universal.

And so much a part of the American ethos.

Part of the factor was his innocence.

By that point, Mickey really had become an emblem of what America stood for.

But America is changing during that time. And in that short film, Mickey

manages to be the perfect symbol for that change, of innocence lost during

war.

By that point, we're so identified with Mickey. Mickey is so close to us.

that there's no other character or symbol that could sell that message so

effectively.

Every version of Mickey is

a version of all of us. It's a version of the society that we have all come

from.

And in the 1960s, America began to ask questions about itself.

Questions that many had ignored, and that included Mickey Mouse.

Just like Mickey's shorts in the 30s, where Mickey's performing in blackface.

Popular forms of entertainment show America has been divided since the

of this country.

But it's difficult to see Mickey...

part of that conversation.

It's a disconnection that happens as a viewer when I'm faced with that.

And those sorts of presentations.

And then, of course, you have many.

It's hard to watch those Mickey Shores with our eyes today.

But the last thing we want to do is to ignore, to hide.

to somehow imagine those elements of our identity don't exist.

That version of Mickey doesn't exist.

He speaks to the racism within our own society.

It's easy to say it is what it is. It's easy to say that it was just Walt being

the man he was at the time.

But given the cultural power that Walt had, some of the images he put out there

with Mickey did damage.

Mickey's supposed to love everybody.

Clearly in these moments, he's not loving all of us. He's not loving all of

And here is Mickey's official 50th anniversary portrait.

He's a little taller now, more grown up, and at the temples, just a touch of

gray.

Mickey's physical appearance has changed somewhat since Walt Disney created the

mouse back in 1928.

And over the years, Mickey's tastes have changed as well.

But Mickey Mouse seems to stay up with the times. And in the area of music, it

is only natural that Mickey Mouse would eventually go disco.

is truly iconic in the sense that he cannot be beaten.

So yes, he's going to have a disco album that's horrible and that comes two or

three years after disco's peak, but it's still going to be really popular and

successful.

I loved the Mickey Mouse disco when I was younger, and I would just, like,

in my living room. Watch out, watch out for Goofy. Watch out for Goofy.

But then on the other side, we see the punk appropriation of Mickey Mouse.

And we see the Ramones wearing Mickey Mouse T -shirts.

What are they doing?

I, myself, and my friends, when we were into punk and skateboarding, would wear

Mickey Mouse T -shirts.

There was a mixture of, I am making fun of something, I am also expressing

admiration for something, and my parents don't get that.

So it became kind of a secret language.

A lot of artists beginning to incorporate Mickey as a way of saying,

going to flood the culture with this kind of imagery, then it becomes ours at

some point.

He becomes a super symbol.

Mickey Mouse, we are told, is one of the top three icons of the 20th century.

The distinction he shares with Adolf Hitler and the Coca -Cola bottle.

Andy Warhol lifted the image straight as part of a series of screen prints

entitled Myths. Mickey Mouse is my favorite image because Walt Disney is my

favorite artist.

By the 1980s, things were getting weird for Mickey Mouse.

Because he had become almost this divine figure that you didn't mess with.

Recently, the Walt Disney Company heard about the painted characters at this

daycare center and two others in Hallandale, Florida.

Disney now demanding the removal of all its characters, the company charging

unauthorized infringement of its rights under the U .S. Copyright Act.

Do you know what they're going to do to Mickey Mouse?

What? They're going to take him away.

Despite their objections, the daycare centers say they'll have to paint over

cartoon characters because they can't fight the power of the corporate mouse.

Our legal protection of Mickey has inevitably led to some uncomfortable

situations over the course of the company's history.

I wouldn't say that we've handled every situation perfectly, but there's really

no precedent for a creation like this when it comes to copyright.

Mickey's one of the most popular characters in the world, and there's

question that we've had to learn as we go.

Disney's been very protective of Mickey.

And it's interesting to think about how Walt's own experience of losing Oswald

early on helps to define the trajectory of the studio.

You sign this contract.

See the signature there? Walt Disney. And right here, it says that we own

the rabbit.

Disney as a company was created out of tremendous loss.

And I think that will give some context to why the company has defended Mickey

so carefully over the years.

We understand that copyright is a part of the Mickey Mouse story.

The challenging thing is that from a practical perspective, your copyright is

only as good as your ability to enforce it.

It's a balance. It's one that we continually work to get right.

I am wholeheartedly against the infringement of copyright.

So much so that I had that phrase trademarked and then I had it emblazoned

Mickey Mouse show.

Where does something this big and this important to society become just owned

society? There is a level of Mickey that, you know, we all own.

Disney, the company, was very strict about copyright and legal issues, but I

never personally associated it with Mickey himself.

There's the ambassador of the company, Mickey, and then there is that little

more rambunctious nature of Mickey. There are two Mickeys, because like

else would, Mickey has to act a little bit differently in different

environments.

And how do you not love Mickey's Christmas Carol? The soul of Mickey in

movie is still the pure soul of the film.

Walt Disney Studios, home to characters and stories spun from pure cinematic

magic. But up until 1983, the Disney character who started the whole

operation hadn't made a movie in 30 years.

When we created the picture, there was amongst us a sense that we were going to

be able to bring him back.

Oh, what a merry Christmas.

Oh, good morning, Mr. Scrooge.

Mickey's Christmas Carol was heralded as Mickey's great comeback.

But it's really a Scrooge McDuck cartoon.

What are you doing?

I was just trying to keep my hands warm, sir.

Some of the top people that used to work here have done Mickey.

And, you know, things were pretty well established as far as what kind of a

character, you know, he is.

a little bit of a fear i think that the studio had with mickey because they

didn't want to do something that failed he was

our corporate symbol so it would have been really difficult if mickey's a flop

right walt always said it all started with a mouse so they kind of became very

careful about what projects mickey was involved with

It's both an honor and a challenge to animate Mickey in the present day.

You've got this big weight on your shoulders.

Like, I'd better not louse it up.

But, you know, I just look at it as a continuum.

I mean, here we are, almost 100 years later.

And we're in the final week of animating this new short.

You know, we're still drawing him. We're still talking about him.

After all the things that Mickey has been through, he's still here.

The Disney name evokes some of the happiest and most endearing memories in

entertainment. But in recent years, some of that Disney luster has dimmed.

Even with that legacy and with those assets, everyone would acknowledge

something was wrong.

What do you think about Mickey Mouse?

He's okay.

I like Mickey.

And Minnie and Mickey.

In attempting to interact with as many people as possible, Mickey seems lost.

He's hollow. There's nothing there.

Look in the dictionary. What a definition.

Unimportant. Trivial.

Irritatingly petty.

Let Fredo take care of some Mickey Mouse nightclub somewhere.

Do I like new Mickey Mouse?

Would I sing the Mouseketeer club song?

No, no, I'm not a fan of Mickey.

This is the Mickey that you see today.

He has nice puffed up cheeks.

In other words, all the kids think he looks cute.

Guess who's moving to Japan?

America's best known mouse, Mickey.

Not only was Mickey mobbed, but so was the store selling his ears.

Fresh supplies had to be flown in after the hats sold out.

Mickey stands for Disneyland, the place where they can go and have all this fun

and spend money.

We don't just sell Disney, we are Disney.

Mickey in one word.

Consumerism.

Take the good with the bad.

Think of all the laughs I've given you.

You're supposed to be funny.

I think...

We confused people so that in 2005, when you asked people who Mickey Mouse was,

they typically would say it's a corporate symbol of the Walt Disney

I'm not sure people really knew who Mickey was or what Mickey was because

had been so many different things and not necessarily all good.

He was looked upon, I think, as commerce.

versus art.

Not quite heartless, but he didn't have enough of the identity that Walt created

for him originally.

The last thing Walt would have wanted would have been for Mickey to remain as

was or to be stuck in some museum case.

So we began a process to bring Mickey forward.

Most people, when they thought of Mickey, besides being a corporate icon,

that Mickey was old.

We asked people, well, how old do you think Mickey is? And everybody said,

he's over 65.

And there had been very little content made with Mickey in it for quite some

time.

We prevented anyone innovating with the character or anyone even trying to

return Mickey to his former self.

We owed it to ourselves and to the character to engage with all sectors of

company. And that led to what we called a bake -off. We let each of the entities

present to us the fresh version of Mickey Mouse that everybody could love

At first, I was like, well, gosh, it sure would be cool to just make Mickey

Mouse shorts, but they're not going to let me do that.

It was a very interesting time.

To me, it was like, he doesn't need to be a show. He can go back to the time

when he was really active and happy.

But I felt like Mickey himself had forgotten his roots, forgotten where he

from.

Disney had this Bible of what Mickey is and isn't, the do's and don'ts, and they

decided not to show me that.

I wanted to remind him that he wasn't just a corporate symbol, that he wasn't

just a greeter in the parks.

That he was a cartoon character, too.

The bake -off ultimately led to a whole new era of storytelling with Mickey.

Hang on, pal. Here we go.

Holy moly! It's Mickey Mouse!

They wanted to restore Mickey to his glory and make sure, because Mickey

take himself too seriously, We weren't taking Mickey so seriously.

The new shorts, actually, that version of Mickey to me is the first time I've

seen that kind of truest version of him in a long time.

He's like coming into his personality. He's not holding back. The sky's the

limit for him.

He's still allowed to be a goober and still allowed to be sad and happy and

angry. All of it.

It's been fun to see kids going, wow, these are actually funny.

How do you balance the heritage that created the character that created the

company with the need to be innovative and modern?

The trick is to respect the past, but not revere it.

There's only really one Mickey I want to see, and that's that old -time Mickey.

When he came out of the screen, we didn't want him to feel like, oh, he's

new Mickey. We wanted him to feel like this is Mickey just outside of his black

-and -white screen.

There was a moment on the film, we were like, wait, so all the characters are

running in and out of the screen from 2D to CG, and they loop like... Six or

seven times. And Lauren's like, yeah.

And we're like, okay.

I think that's something that Walt established early on where you just, you

never say no. You always push boundaries.

You're always innovating.

He would have had it in hologram animation by now.

In the same way that the parks and the walkarounds keep the characters alive,

new animation helps.

keep them alive.

And pencil to paper is the way that Mickey started, and in many cases, it's

way he looks the best.

Now, I just got the short back.

And the thing that I'm really happiest about in this piece is that when you see

it all cut together, you know, all the Mickeys all in one short film.

It really does feel like the Mickey that we all love.

Good to see you guys. Good to see you. Good to see you.

This is going to be cool.

Everything looks better in this theater. You know, if Walt and Ub are watching,

I'd like to think we did our darndest to honor them and honor their creation.

Oh, there's Pluto.

Aw, Minnie and I.

Wow, that one sure gave me a workout.

You guys did a great job.

Absolutely great.

A lot of fun.

Walt would be proud.

I hope so.

Can we run it again?

Yeah.

Everybody used to say, what would Walt think?

I actually think about that a lot.

Walt would say, Never lose sight of the fact that it was all started with a

mouse. But before Mickey Mouse, it all started with Walt Disney.

One thing that Walt kept in his office right until the end was a hand -drawn

of the farm here in Marceline.

And I really like the idea that even at the end of his life, Walt was still

thinking about that tree where he first felt that spark.

Mickey is...

A thing we all share.

There aren't many of those, right?

He's grown into a necessary character for us.

Whenever I did chemo, I had to have my Mickey

Mouse shorts.

And this dark and dreary moment that I was in.

I found a little hope, you know? And I feel like that's who Mickey Mouse is.

When I was 13, I was granted a Make -A -Wish. Then seeing Mickey, he just

brought, like, this happiness out of me and, like, made me remember that I was

still a child.

That magical spark.

I felt it and never forgot it.

At this point, I think Mickey is us.

So wherever we're headed next, he's coming with us.

I love that Disney hides Mickey Mouses everywhere.

All over the park or any sort of property.

It's a little secret way of saying, thank you, Mickey, you still belong

And the cool thing about it is it doesn't stop there. You'll leave, and

real life, you'll just notice Mickey heads everywhere.

It's like, oh, my gosh. Okay, wait a minute. Mickey, are you speaking to me?

you communicating to me? What is happening here? Why am I seeing you