Mickey: The Story of a Mouse (2022) Movie Script
1
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
Mickey!
who we can fill with
all of our hopes and dreams
and all of our love
and all of the innocence
that we experience and then
eventually lose and would like back.
Mickey!
Hi, Mickey. Hi, Mickey! Mickey!
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's everywhere.
- Everywhere!
It's overwhelming. Like, leave me alone.
Uh, 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's 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.
Stop it.
Wore that one the other day.
Haven't worn that one in a while.
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 with him, you know?
Ah. Here 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 origins.
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 a hundred
animators to do Mickey and his pals.
These days, to do
a new hand-drawn Mickey project,
like the one we're starting now,
we have three.
Me, Mark Henn and Randy Haycock.
Randy did characters
like Clayton in Tarzan.
He did a lot of Pocahontas.
And then Mark Henn
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
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 gonna 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.
Forty-eight 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 just laying in the grass.
A thing that Walt called "Belly Botany."
I don't know if you've ever laid
in tall grass on a farm,
but there's a lot that's 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 creative juices
happening underneath his tree.
It was that happy place.
It was where that spark happened.
- I love it. Yeah, that looks cool.
- It's cool. I like that.
So, like, all the possibilities of what
you would want on your arm,
why'd you choose Mickey Mouse?
I feel like blood, sweat and tears
was put into Mickey Mouse by Walt.
You know, he was dirt poor.
Dirt poor with, like, a dream.
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
is so imprinted in everybody's brains.
Like, we all got a weird,
different feeling about him.
Mickey Mouse, to me, is light.
There's, like, a lot of dark in the world.
Especially nowadays, things do
tend to be getting a little bit darker.
And he's just keeping hope in the world.
Yeah!
So, this is the very first,
officially licensed
Disney book ever published.
Imaginatively titled, "Mickey Mouse Book."
Uh, what you've got in here are games.
Probably the most interesting, though,
is the story of how Mickey meets Walt.
Falling from Mouse Fairy Land,
crash-landing on Walt's roof.
Like Santa Claus,
Mickey hops down the chimney,
and who does he meet in the house?
None other than Walt Disney himself.
Walt loved to tell tall tales
of the story about how Mickey came to be.
He told it 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
hopped 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.
Before 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's all about that mythological moment
when he's on the train.
And he's been 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."
Over the years,
with the retelling of that story
on the train,
over and over again,
and the different inflections,
it becomes myth.
This is mythmaking.
Walt realizes the importance
of linking himself to that mouse.
They're 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 it far and wide
that they were gonna 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,
Walt's lead animator.
Walt and Ub complemented 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 on the train
and said, "We need a new character."
And they tried out various animals
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 gotta 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,
I'd planned to go all out on sound.
And those plans came very near
spelling a major disaster for us.
Mickey was not
an overnight success.
Walt had made two cartoons prior
to Steamboat Willie,
Plane Crazy and Gallopin' 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.
Hit that thing right on the button.
And we had--
We had a way of doing it though.
We had a little-- kind of a little beat
that worked up and down.
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...
Or they would go bang!
Or they would go this, or they would pop
one of these popguns, 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.
It had to be this thing
that you would never forget
the experience of having.
It hit. It hit with a bang.
It was a hell of a success.
And nothing
would ever be the same after that.
With Steamboat Willie,
people would probably just be floored
by what they saw, you know?
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. You're all right.
a hero stacked up
against Peg Leg Pete
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 Walt 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?"
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.
That was a brand-new thing.
And there were a couple of 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're imbued with that life force.
Because often it's just the bare essence.
So you can clothe it in anything
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 Mickey.
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
Oh, and he has a dog named Pluto.
Not to be confused with Goofy,
because Goofy is also sort of a dog,
but he's more of a dog-man.
Um, and that's just the world
we're living in.
Ha-ha, everybody.
Mickey Mouse.
Mickey Mouse.
Mickey and I just became inseparable.
We love a mouse. How crazy is that?
That's a little absurd.
Lay down!
Get up!
- Speak!
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
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 would come the
artists that now make up my staff here.
And 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?
Yoo-hoo!
I think Mickey appeals
for a lot of different reasons.
But if I had to pick one,
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 as anything else.
Mickey wasn't perfect,
but he would always find a resourceful way
to get out of situations.
Minnie!
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,
the 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.
Yoo-hoo, Mickey!
Yoo-hoo!
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's the cartoon,
and when I saw that cartoon--
First the big head would appear
with radiant lights coming out of it.
I remember my sister 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 the goose bumps 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 mass conscience.
That popularity spins out into things
like the Mickey Mouse clubs,
where kids 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 a hundred 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 you've got Steamboat Willie.
Ah. That's a nice one.
Mickey as he's falling
in the soap bucket.
Yeah, and it's so, so simple.
You look at the hands--
They almost look
like just little pinwheels.
- And just--
- 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've gone five years later.
- Mm-hmm.
Oh, yeah.
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.
Mm-hmm.
The hands, for example.
They 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.
Whoop.
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
that Mickey should be done.
I don't know if I can flip this
'cause the papers are kind of thin.
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
and the Seven Dwarfs coming along?
Oh, it's come along very well.
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 one million dollars 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 shifts 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 is probably
the most difficult character to ink
because of all the curves.
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 cel.
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 inker.
There's only a few of us
in the Ink and Paint department now,
but it 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 developed more
than 1500 different shades of color
for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Color forever transforms
the world of Mickey Mouse.
Pastel is his flesh. His tongue.
Marigold, his shoes. Lobster, his 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 wanna make the paint
look as opaque as possible.
When I'm inking or painting Mickey Mouse,
it just takes me back
to when Walt first created Mickey.
So now that we're done with it,
this is what it looks like from the front.
All ready, Uncle Mickey?
Okay, let's go.
Once Mickey becomes
an international children's star,
there's certain things he cannot do.
Parents of Mickey's
younger viewers
wanted Mickey to clean up his act
and not be 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.
Aw, phooey!
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-tempered Mr. Duck.
Get out of here! Get out of here!
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 great ones
that include the three of them
that work well 'cause their
personalities rub off against each other.
Lend a hand, me hearties!
Aye, aye, Captain!
What's the big idea?
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 the 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.
And then that's when Mickey
comes in to his arm right here.
Then I gotta get all that done
in 297 frames.
So I've only got a hundred frames
to get the rest of it.
I think I was here 25 years
before I actually animated Mickey.
And it seems a shame because,
you know, if you work at Disney,
you should be animating Mickey
all the time, I'd think.
When Eric gave me the sections
that I was gonna do, I got really excited
because that was my favorite Mickey
that made me wanna be an animator.
They came at me from the right.
Then the left. Right, left, left, right!
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 gonna stretch his ears
a little more here
because he just became
a little more pliable from this point on.
We wouldn't have a Fantasia if it weren't
for Walt's concern for Mickey Mouse.
He was worried that Donald and Goofy
were overtaking Mickey's popularity,
and he wanted a vehicle to bring Mickey
back in the limelight again.
And so originally, Fantasia was just going
to be The Sorcerer's Apprentice short,
and it then blossomed
into an entire innovative feature film
that's still never been equaled.
Fantasia 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 13th, 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 kinda crazy
'cause Mickey Mouse, 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
'cause by that time his company had grown,
and thousands and thousands
of people were working at the studio.
So I think Walt became Mickey then.
There's some scenes
in Sorcerer's Apprentice
where he knows he's screwed up
in front of the sorcerer.
The subtlety that they get on his face,
I think that's where the character
hit his absolute peak of perfection.
Artistically, Walt achieved
everything he wanted to with Fantasia.
But when the movie came out,
it was a failure.
Artistic success, financial failure,
you know?
Certainly an artistic
success. It was a magnificent--
Well, there's-- Some people would,
uh, 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.
Well, so long! I'll be seeing ya!
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 life,
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,
or 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 anything.
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.
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.
Four, eight, sequence one. Let her roll.
Walt, being the patriot that he was,
supported whatever the government
and the 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.
If the bolt is pulled back,
the magazine's free
They were designing insignia
for different military and auxiliary units
around the world.
Over twelve hundred 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.
The 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.
Commando Duck, here are your orders.
You'll parachute at position D-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-- this being, Mickey Mouse,
creating pleasure for this community
right on the cusp of the war.
Children in the camps were dressed up
in Mickey Mouse costume,
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.
We 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 has 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 the Mickey we know.
It makes him a much more contained
character than he was in the early years.
And America is moving
in that direction too.
We don't want chaos.
We wanna feel safe.
We wanna feel familiar and protected.
Okay, Pluto. Let's get our tree.
- 1953 was his last short,
and I've heard him described
as just being a little-- little man.
He acquired a decent house and a mortgage,
and he just became
your suburban 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 Rambler.
Come on, Pluto, old boy.
We're going to see the 1955 Nash.
When I first saw these,
I did a complete double take
that 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, what 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.
- Hi.
- How are you?
- Nice to meet ya.
- Nice to meet you.
Yeah. I'm excited to work on this.
You know, you could-- 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.
Uh, 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.
- Okay.
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 Macdonald, 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 gotta hurry.
Come on. We gotta hurry.
Ah, gosh.
Gosh! Oh, gosh!
I will never forget that, essentially,
I'm emulating
Walt's performance as Mickey.
Hot dog! Hot dog!
Hot dog!
- Hot dog!
- That last one.
Yeah, nice.
You know, the coal
is floating around him like asteroids,
- so he's trying to grab for them.
- Uh-huh.
Gotcha!
Great.
I'm sitting there and I'm listening
to Bret 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 Bret 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 Lounsbery.
And to be honest,
this is the first time I've drawn
a 1950s Johnny Lounsbery Mickey.
So, you know,
I'm learning as I go.
-Hi, partners!
- Hi, Mickey!
Well, this here's our roundup day,
so, uh, you all pretty nigh ready?
- Sure enough!
-Sure enough.
Then let's get on with it.
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.
Hi, Roy!
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.
Yay, Mickey! Yay, Mickey!
Yay, Mickey Mouse Club!
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
You know, Walt, I think,
very quickly realized
that the power of his creations
had life beyond the walls of the studio.
And he would get fan mail.
People would ask,
"How can I meet Mickey and Minnie?"
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 interests on Disneyland,
Mickey 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 him.
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 safe.
Mickey connects generations.
He connects 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
in a timeless moment.
Mickey is the walking embodiment
of Walt's philosophies.
And you can meet him, still,
in the 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 a sacred space.
It's like he made Disneyland.
It's like he used magic to, like--
At that time,
I'm thinking he's like John Wayne
or he's like a real, true movie 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.
Maybe ten?
When I saw him in Tokyo Disneyland,
I really believe 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--
Pushed her out of the way
so I could 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 used
to talk something like this, you know?
It's kind of a falsetto.
Of course, he's an old mouse now
and the falsetto's getting a little old.
Yeah.
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 him.
After his passing,
they pretty much closed up the office.
They'd go in and dust and--
and things like that,
but it-- 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 hadn't really changed with it.
Even Mickey Mouse has troubles these days.
A band of yippies threatened trouble
in the park all day yesterday.
The yippies said
they have come to liberate Mickey Mouse.
Mickey Mouse was still
very much alive outside the Disney studio.
You know, 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 him,
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.
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 somehow manages to be
the perfect symbol for that change.
Of innocence lost during that 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 founding 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 Minnie.
It's hard to watch
those Mickey shorts with our eyes today.
- But the last thing we wanna do
- Don't do that!
is to ignore, to hide,
to somehow imagine those elements
of our identity don't exist.
That version of Mickey does 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 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 us.
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.
Mickey is truly iconic in the sense
that he cannot be beaten.
So, yes, he's gonna have a disco album
that's horrible
and that comes two or three years
after disco's peak.
But it's still gonna be really popular
and successful.
I loved
the Mickey Mouse Disco when I was younger.
And I would just, like,
dance in my living room.
That's cute.
But then on the other side,
we see the punk appropriation of Mickey.
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.
It was a mixture of,
"I am making fun of something,
and 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 began to incorporate
Mickey as a way of saying,
"If you're gonna flood the culture
with this kind of imagery,
then it becomes ours at some point."
He becomes the super symbol.
Mickey Mouse, we are told,
is one of the top three icons
of the 20th century.
A 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, uh, image
because, uh, Walt Disney is
my favorite artist.
- I'm Mickey Mouse.
- I'm Minnie Mouse.
I'm Donald Duck.
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 day care 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 US Copyright Act.
Do you know
what they're going to do to Mickey Mouse?
- What?
- They're gonna take him away.
Despite their objections,
the day care centers say
they'll have to paint
over the 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 really no 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 signed this contract.
See this signature there? Walt Disney.
Right here it says that we own
Oswald 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.
And 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 and 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
on a Mickey Mouse doll.
Where does something this big
and this important to society
become just owned by 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,
'cause like anybody else would,
Mickey has to act a little bit differently
in different environments.
And how do you not love
Mickey's Christmas Carol?
You know that-- that--
The soul of Mickey in that 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 enchanted operation
hadn't made a movie in 30 years.
When we created the picture,
there was, amongst us, a sense that we--
we were gonna be able to bring him back.
G-g-g-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, uh, you know,
things were pretty well established
as far as what kind of a character,
you know, he is.
There was a sense that
there was a little bit of a fear, I think,
that the studio had with Mickey
'cause they didn't want
to do something that failed.
He was our corporate symbol.
So it would've been really difficult
if Mickey's a flop.
Like Walt always said,
it all started with a mouse.
So they kind of became very careful
about what projects
Mickey was involved with.
Oh! Huh.
Aw, Minnie and I
It's both an honor
and a challenge
to animate Mickey in the present day.
Hey!
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 a hundred 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 evoked
some of the happiest
and most endearing memories
in entertainment, but in recent years,
some of that 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, but
I like Goofy. And Minnie and Goofy.
In attempting to interact
with as many people as possible,
Mickey seems lost.
He's hollow.
There's-- 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-out 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? Uh
Consumerism.
I'm the mascot of an evil corporation.
Take the good with the bad.
Think of all the laughs I've given you.
You're supposed to be funny?
- Yeah.
I think we confused people.
So that, in 2005, when you asked people,
uh, who Mickey Mouse was,
they typically would say
he's a corporate symbol
of The Walt Disney Company.
I'm not sure people really knew
who Mickey was or what Mickey was
because Mickey had been
so many different things
and not necessarily all good.
- What's that? You want some more?
- Hey!
Who's the mouse
that's got the groove?
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've wanted
would've been for Mickey
to remain as he 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,
felt that Mickey was old.
We asked people,
"How old do you think Mickey is?"
And everybody said,
"Well, he's over sixty-five."
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 thought we owed it to ourselves
and to the character
to engage with all sectors of the company.
And that led to what we called a bake-off.
We let each of the entities present to us
a fresh version of Mickey Mouse
that everybody could love again.
At first, I was like,
"Well, gosh. It sure would be cool
to just make Mickey Mouse shorts,
but they're not gonna let me do that."
It was a very interesting time.
For me, it was like,
"He doesn't need to be a shill.
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 came from.
Disney had this bible
of what Mickey is and isn't,
the dos 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 didn't
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.
I'm coming, Minnie!
Fire, fire, fire!
He's, like, coming into his personality.
He's not holding back.
The sky is 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.
Get back here!
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.
Hello.
Oh, my gosh. Red!
There's only really one Mickey
I want to see.
And that's that old-time Mickey.
- Mickey!
- Minnie!
When he came out of the screen,
we didn't want him to feel like,
"Oh, he's the 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
when 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've had us
in hologram animation by now.
In the same way that the parks
and the walk-arounds 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 the way he looks the best.
Well, I just got the short back.
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 gonna be cool.
Everything looks better in this theater.
- Yeah, I think it does.
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! Huh.
Mm-hmm.
Oh. And there's Pluto.
Aw, Minnie and I.
Wow. That one sure gave me a workout.
Hey!
Whoo! Whoo!
Oh! Gosh.
Well what do you know?
Okay, roll it!
Whoa!
Yeah, that's it.
All right.
You guys did a great job.
- Absolutely great.
- Thank you. It was fun. 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 map
of the farm here in Marceline.
And I-- 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 around.
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, um, happiness out of me,
and, like, made me, uh, remember
that I was still a child.
That magical spark
I felt it and never forgot it.
Bye, Mickey!
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 here."
And the cool thing about it is,
it doesn't stop there.
You'll leave, and then in real life,
you'll just notice
Mickey heads everywhere.
It's like, "Oh, my gosh.
Okay, wait a minute. Mickey, are you--
are you speaking to me?
Are you communicating to me?
What is happening here?
Why am I seeing you everywhere?"
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
Mickey!
who we can fill with
all of our hopes and dreams
and all of our love
and all of the innocence
that we experience and then
eventually lose and would like back.
Mickey!
Hi, Mickey. Hi, Mickey! Mickey!
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's everywhere.
- Everywhere!
It's overwhelming. Like, leave me alone.
Uh, 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's 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.
Stop it.
Wore that one the other day.
Haven't worn that one in a while.
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 with him, you know?
Ah. Here 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 origins.
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 a hundred
animators to do Mickey and his pals.
These days, to do
a new hand-drawn Mickey project,
like the one we're starting now,
we have three.
Me, Mark Henn and Randy Haycock.
Randy did characters
like Clayton in Tarzan.
He did a lot of Pocahontas.
And then Mark Henn
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
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 gonna 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.
Forty-eight 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 just laying in the grass.
A thing that Walt called "Belly Botany."
I don't know if you've ever laid
in tall grass on a farm,
but there's a lot that's 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 creative juices
happening underneath his tree.
It was that happy place.
It was where that spark happened.
- I love it. Yeah, that looks cool.
- It's cool. I like that.
So, like, all the possibilities of what
you would want on your arm,
why'd you choose Mickey Mouse?
I feel like blood, sweat and tears
was put into Mickey Mouse by Walt.
You know, he was dirt poor.
Dirt poor with, like, a dream.
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
is so imprinted in everybody's brains.
Like, we all got a weird,
different feeling about him.
Mickey Mouse, to me, is light.
There's, like, a lot of dark in the world.
Especially nowadays, things do
tend to be getting a little bit darker.
And he's just keeping hope in the world.
Yeah!
So, this is the very first,
officially licensed
Disney book ever published.
Imaginatively titled, "Mickey Mouse Book."
Uh, what you've got in here are games.
Probably the most interesting, though,
is the story of how Mickey meets Walt.
Falling from Mouse Fairy Land,
crash-landing on Walt's roof.
Like Santa Claus,
Mickey hops down the chimney,
and who does he meet in the house?
None other than Walt Disney himself.
Walt loved to tell tall tales
of the story about how Mickey came to be.
He told it 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
hopped 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.
Before 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's all about that mythological moment
when he's on the train.
And he's been 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."
Over the years,
with the retelling of that story
on the train,
over and over again,
and the different inflections,
it becomes myth.
This is mythmaking.
Walt realizes the importance
of linking himself to that mouse.
They're 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 it far and wide
that they were gonna 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,
Walt's lead animator.
Walt and Ub complemented 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 on the train
and said, "We need a new character."
And they tried out various animals
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 gotta 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,
I'd planned to go all out on sound.
And those plans came very near
spelling a major disaster for us.
Mickey was not
an overnight success.
Walt had made two cartoons prior
to Steamboat Willie,
Plane Crazy and Gallopin' 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.
Hit that thing right on the button.
And we had--
We had a way of doing it though.
We had a little-- kind of a little beat
that worked up and down.
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...
Or they would go bang!
Or they would go this, or they would pop
one of these popguns, 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.
It had to be this thing
that you would never forget
the experience of having.
It hit. It hit with a bang.
It was a hell of a success.
And nothing
would ever be the same after that.
With Steamboat Willie,
people would probably just be floored
by what they saw, you know?
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. You're all right.
a hero stacked up
against Peg Leg Pete
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 Walt 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?"
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.
That was a brand-new thing.
And there were a couple of 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're imbued with that life force.
Because often it's just the bare essence.
So you can clothe it in anything
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 Mickey.
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
Oh, and he has a dog named Pluto.
Not to be confused with Goofy,
because Goofy is also sort of a dog,
but he's more of a dog-man.
Um, and that's just the world
we're living in.
Ha-ha, everybody.
Mickey Mouse.
Mickey Mouse.
Mickey and I just became inseparable.
We love a mouse. How crazy is that?
That's a little absurd.
Lay down!
Get up!
- Speak!
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
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 would come the
artists that now make up my staff here.
And 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?
Yoo-hoo!
I think Mickey appeals
for a lot of different reasons.
But if I had to pick one,
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 as anything else.
Mickey wasn't perfect,
but he would always find a resourceful way
to get out of situations.
Minnie!
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,
the 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.
Yoo-hoo, Mickey!
Yoo-hoo!
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's the cartoon,
and when I saw that cartoon--
First the big head would appear
with radiant lights coming out of it.
I remember my sister 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 the goose bumps 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 mass conscience.
That popularity spins out into things
like the Mickey Mouse clubs,
where kids 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 a hundred 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 you've got Steamboat Willie.
Ah. That's a nice one.
Mickey as he's falling
in the soap bucket.
Yeah, and it's so, so simple.
You look at the hands--
They almost look
like just little pinwheels.
- And just--
- 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've gone five years later.
- Mm-hmm.
Oh, yeah.
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.
Mm-hmm.
The hands, for example.
They 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.
Whoop.
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
that Mickey should be done.
I don't know if I can flip this
'cause the papers are kind of thin.
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
and the Seven Dwarfs coming along?
Oh, it's come along very well.
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 one million dollars 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 shifts 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 is probably
the most difficult character to ink
because of all the curves.
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 cel.
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 inker.
There's only a few of us
in the Ink and Paint department now,
but it 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 developed more
than 1500 different shades of color
for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Color forever transforms
the world of Mickey Mouse.
Pastel is his flesh. His tongue.
Marigold, his shoes. Lobster, his 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 wanna make the paint
look as opaque as possible.
When I'm inking or painting Mickey Mouse,
it just takes me back
to when Walt first created Mickey.
So now that we're done with it,
this is what it looks like from the front.
All ready, Uncle Mickey?
Okay, let's go.
Once Mickey becomes
an international children's star,
there's certain things he cannot do.
Parents of Mickey's
younger viewers
wanted Mickey to clean up his act
and not be 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.
Aw, phooey!
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-tempered Mr. Duck.
Get out of here! Get out of here!
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 great ones
that include the three of them
that work well 'cause their
personalities rub off against each other.
Lend a hand, me hearties!
Aye, aye, Captain!
What's the big idea?
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 the 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.
And then that's when Mickey
comes in to his arm right here.
Then I gotta get all that done
in 297 frames.
So I've only got a hundred frames
to get the rest of it.
I think I was here 25 years
before I actually animated Mickey.
And it seems a shame because,
you know, if you work at Disney,
you should be animating Mickey
all the time, I'd think.
When Eric gave me the sections
that I was gonna do, I got really excited
because that was my favorite Mickey
that made me wanna be an animator.
They came at me from the right.
Then the left. Right, left, left, right!
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 gonna stretch his ears
a little more here
because he just became
a little more pliable from this point on.
We wouldn't have a Fantasia if it weren't
for Walt's concern for Mickey Mouse.
He was worried that Donald and Goofy
were overtaking Mickey's popularity,
and he wanted a vehicle to bring Mickey
back in the limelight again.
And so originally, Fantasia was just going
to be The Sorcerer's Apprentice short,
and it then blossomed
into an entire innovative feature film
that's still never been equaled.
Fantasia 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 13th, 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 kinda crazy
'cause Mickey Mouse, 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
'cause by that time his company had grown,
and thousands and thousands
of people were working at the studio.
So I think Walt became Mickey then.
There's some scenes
in Sorcerer's Apprentice
where he knows he's screwed up
in front of the sorcerer.
The subtlety that they get on his face,
I think that's where the character
hit his absolute peak of perfection.
Artistically, Walt achieved
everything he wanted to with Fantasia.
But when the movie came out,
it was a failure.
Artistic success, financial failure,
you know?
Certainly an artistic
success. It was a magnificent--
Well, there's-- Some people would,
uh, 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.
Well, so long! I'll be seeing ya!
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 life,
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,
or 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 anything.
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.
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.
Four, eight, sequence one. Let her roll.
Walt, being the patriot that he was,
supported whatever the government
and the 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.
If the bolt is pulled back,
the magazine's free
They were designing insignia
for different military and auxiliary units
around the world.
Over twelve hundred 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.
The 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.
Commando Duck, here are your orders.
You'll parachute at position D-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-- this being, Mickey Mouse,
creating pleasure for this community
right on the cusp of the war.
Children in the camps were dressed up
in Mickey Mouse costume,
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.
We 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 has 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 the Mickey we know.
It makes him a much more contained
character than he was in the early years.
And America is moving
in that direction too.
We don't want chaos.
We wanna feel safe.
We wanna feel familiar and protected.
Okay, Pluto. Let's get our tree.
- 1953 was his last short,
and I've heard him described
as just being a little-- little man.
He acquired a decent house and a mortgage,
and he just became
your suburban 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 Rambler.
Come on, Pluto, old boy.
We're going to see the 1955 Nash.
When I first saw these,
I did a complete double take
that 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, what 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.
- Hi.
- How are you?
- Nice to meet ya.
- Nice to meet you.
Yeah. I'm excited to work on this.
You know, you could-- 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.
Uh, 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.
- Okay.
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 Macdonald, 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 gotta hurry.
Come on. We gotta hurry.
Ah, gosh.
Gosh! Oh, gosh!
I will never forget that, essentially,
I'm emulating
Walt's performance as Mickey.
Hot dog! Hot dog!
Hot dog!
- Hot dog!
- That last one.
Yeah, nice.
You know, the coal
is floating around him like asteroids,
- so he's trying to grab for them.
- Uh-huh.
Gotcha!
Great.
I'm sitting there and I'm listening
to Bret 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 Bret 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 Lounsbery.
And to be honest,
this is the first time I've drawn
a 1950s Johnny Lounsbery Mickey.
So, you know,
I'm learning as I go.
-Hi, partners!
- Hi, Mickey!
Well, this here's our roundup day,
so, uh, you all pretty nigh ready?
- Sure enough!
-Sure enough.
Then let's get on with it.
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.
Hi, Roy!
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.
Yay, Mickey! Yay, Mickey!
Yay, Mickey Mouse Club!
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
You know, Walt, I think,
very quickly realized
that the power of his creations
had life beyond the walls of the studio.
And he would get fan mail.
People would ask,
"How can I meet Mickey and Minnie?"
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 interests on Disneyland,
Mickey 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 him.
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 safe.
Mickey connects generations.
He connects 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
in a timeless moment.
Mickey is the walking embodiment
of Walt's philosophies.
And you can meet him, still,
in the 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 a sacred space.
It's like he made Disneyland.
It's like he used magic to, like--
At that time,
I'm thinking he's like John Wayne
or he's like a real, true movie 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.
Maybe ten?
When I saw him in Tokyo Disneyland,
I really believe 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--
Pushed her out of the way
so I could 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 used
to talk something like this, you know?
It's kind of a falsetto.
Of course, he's an old mouse now
and the falsetto's getting a little old.
Yeah.
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 him.
After his passing,
they pretty much closed up the office.
They'd go in and dust and--
and things like that,
but it-- 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 hadn't really changed with it.
Even Mickey Mouse has troubles these days.
A band of yippies threatened trouble
in the park all day yesterday.
The yippies said
they have come to liberate Mickey Mouse.
Mickey Mouse was still
very much alive outside the Disney studio.
You know, 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 him,
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.
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 somehow manages to be
the perfect symbol for that change.
Of innocence lost during that 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 founding 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 Minnie.
It's hard to watch
those Mickey shorts with our eyes today.
- But the last thing we wanna do
- Don't do that!
is to ignore, to hide,
to somehow imagine those elements
of our identity don't exist.
That version of Mickey does 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 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 us.
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.
Mickey is truly iconic in the sense
that he cannot be beaten.
So, yes, he's gonna have a disco album
that's horrible
and that comes two or three years
after disco's peak.
But it's still gonna be really popular
and successful.
I loved
the Mickey Mouse Disco when I was younger.
And I would just, like,
dance in my living room.
That's cute.
But then on the other side,
we see the punk appropriation of Mickey.
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.
It was a mixture of,
"I am making fun of something,
and 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 began to incorporate
Mickey as a way of saying,
"If you're gonna flood the culture
with this kind of imagery,
then it becomes ours at some point."
He becomes the super symbol.
Mickey Mouse, we are told,
is one of the top three icons
of the 20th century.
A 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, uh, image
because, uh, Walt Disney is
my favorite artist.
- I'm Mickey Mouse.
- I'm Minnie Mouse.
I'm Donald Duck.
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 day care 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 US Copyright Act.
Do you know
what they're going to do to Mickey Mouse?
- What?
- They're gonna take him away.
Despite their objections,
the day care centers say
they'll have to paint
over the 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 really no 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 signed this contract.
See this signature there? Walt Disney.
Right here it says that we own
Oswald 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.
And 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 and 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
on a Mickey Mouse doll.
Where does something this big
and this important to society
become just owned by 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,
'cause like anybody else would,
Mickey has to act a little bit differently
in different environments.
And how do you not love
Mickey's Christmas Carol?
You know that-- that--
The soul of Mickey in that 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 enchanted operation
hadn't made a movie in 30 years.
When we created the picture,
there was, amongst us, a sense that we--
we were gonna be able to bring him back.
G-g-g-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, uh, you know,
things were pretty well established
as far as what kind of a character,
you know, he is.
There was a sense that
there was a little bit of a fear, I think,
that the studio had with Mickey
'cause they didn't want
to do something that failed.
He was our corporate symbol.
So it would've been really difficult
if Mickey's a flop.
Like Walt always said,
it all started with a mouse.
So they kind of became very careful
about what projects
Mickey was involved with.
Oh! Huh.
Aw, Minnie and I
It's both an honor
and a challenge
to animate Mickey in the present day.
Hey!
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 a hundred 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 evoked
some of the happiest
and most endearing memories
in entertainment, but in recent years,
some of that 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, but
I like Goofy. And Minnie and Goofy.
In attempting to interact
with as many people as possible,
Mickey seems lost.
He's hollow.
There's-- 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-out 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? Uh
Consumerism.
I'm the mascot of an evil corporation.
Take the good with the bad.
Think of all the laughs I've given you.
You're supposed to be funny?
- Yeah.
I think we confused people.
So that, in 2005, when you asked people,
uh, who Mickey Mouse was,
they typically would say
he's a corporate symbol
of The Walt Disney Company.
I'm not sure people really knew
who Mickey was or what Mickey was
because Mickey had been
so many different things
and not necessarily all good.
- What's that? You want some more?
- Hey!
Who's the mouse
that's got the groove?
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've wanted
would've been for Mickey
to remain as he 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,
felt that Mickey was old.
We asked people,
"How old do you think Mickey is?"
And everybody said,
"Well, he's over sixty-five."
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 thought we owed it to ourselves
and to the character
to engage with all sectors of the company.
And that led to what we called a bake-off.
We let each of the entities present to us
a fresh version of Mickey Mouse
that everybody could love again.
At first, I was like,
"Well, gosh. It sure would be cool
to just make Mickey Mouse shorts,
but they're not gonna let me do that."
It was a very interesting time.
For me, it was like,
"He doesn't need to be a shill.
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 came from.
Disney had this bible
of what Mickey is and isn't,
the dos 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 didn't
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.
I'm coming, Minnie!
Fire, fire, fire!
He's, like, coming into his personality.
He's not holding back.
The sky is 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.
Get back here!
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.
Hello.
Oh, my gosh. Red!
There's only really one Mickey
I want to see.
And that's that old-time Mickey.
- Mickey!
- Minnie!
When he came out of the screen,
we didn't want him to feel like,
"Oh, he's the 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
when 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've had us
in hologram animation by now.
In the same way that the parks
and the walk-arounds 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 the way he looks the best.
Well, I just got the short back.
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 gonna be cool.
Everything looks better in this theater.
- Yeah, I think it does.
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! Huh.
Mm-hmm.
Oh. And there's Pluto.
Aw, Minnie and I.
Wow. That one sure gave me a workout.
Hey!
Whoo! Whoo!
Oh! Gosh.
Well what do you know?
Okay, roll it!
Whoa!
Yeah, that's it.
All right.
You guys did a great job.
- Absolutely great.
- Thank you. It was fun. 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 map
of the farm here in Marceline.
And I-- 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 around.
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, um, happiness out of me,
and, like, made me, uh, remember
that I was still a child.
That magical spark
I felt it and never forgot it.
Bye, Mickey!
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 here."
And the cool thing about it is,
it doesn't stop there.
You'll leave, and then in real life,
you'll just notice
Mickey heads everywhere.
It's like, "Oh, my gosh.
Okay, wait a minute. Mickey, are you--
are you speaking to me?
Are you communicating to me?
What is happening here?
Why am I seeing you everywhere?"