A rare Walt Disney animation that was thought to be lost was found in the possession of Japanese man who bought the film when he was in high school. A two-minute clip of black and white film was found that features Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a character created by Walt Disney that laid the foundation for the animator’s Mickey Mouse.
Oswald was created in 1927, and the 1928 clip was thought to be extremely rare. But after reading a book about Disney and his Oswald films, an 84-year-old man in Japan realized he owned one of the clips.
According to The Telegraph, the man stumbled into ownership of the extremely rare footage and didn’t realize what he had until after the fact.
Titled “Neck ‘n’ Neck” when the film was released in the US, a handful of copies reached Japan, where one was purchased by a high school student named Yasushi Watanabe from a toy wholesalers’ market in the city of Osaka.
Mr Watanabe failed to realise the significance of his purchase, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported, until he read a book titled “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit: The Search for the Lost Disney Cartoons”, published in 2017 by David Bossert, who had worked for many years on animated movies at the Walt Disney Studios in the US.
That book told Watanabe — now 84 — just how rare those movies are — 26 were Oswald the Lucky Rabbit films were made, but only 19 were thought to have survived until this one was discovered. Here’s a description of the clip, which uses some narrative devices Disney would often replicate with his later works, including Mickey Mouse.
In the movie, a dog policeman uses a motorcycle to pursue Oswald and his girlfriend, who are in a car. The chase takes the vehicles up a steep mountain road, with the vehicles stretching and contracting as they round steep bends, a frequent Walt Disney device used in many of his later works.
The clip has apparently been verified as the real deal, so Watanabe now has a nice piece of history. And a video completionists will be very excited to get their eyes on.
(via The Telegraph)
