On Animation - Oswald the Lucky Rabbit
Guys, can I just tell you all how much I love Oswald the Lucky Rabbit?
But it's a secret, so don't tell anyone.
Some of you probably have heard of the character as he played a fairly big part in 2010's Epic Mickey video game. I actually knew about him before the game came out (haha! What a hipster! I liked Oswald before it was cool, ya'll!) but he existed more as an interesting bit of trivia. Sort of a "hey, did you know - ?" sort of thing. But for those who don't know him, I need to explain some backstory. Why? Well, the backstory is a big part of what makes him so fascinating. Kind of like the story surrounding The Thief and the Cobbler...only maybe a bit better because this one has a happy ending and Thief didn't end well for pretty much anybody.
So back in the 1920's a new cartoon studio headed by Walt Disney was starting out. They'd had some success with a series of shorts featuring a live action little girl interacting with cartoon characters, but new distributor, Universal, wanted a cartoon character to market. Thus was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit born.
In a lot of ways, Oswald was a proto Bugs Bunny - to explain his character really quick - so it's not that surprising that he quickly became a huge hit, with popularity that rivaled that of Felix the Cat! All over the world people fell in love with this little cartoon rabbit!
Marketing y'all
At the height of the character's popularity, Disney went to Universal to renew his contract and to ask them for a bigger budget so he could improve the Oswald cartoons. Universal responded by telling him they were not only not going to increase his budget, they were going to cut it. They also pointed out that they'd already signed most of his staff without his knowledge and that, per his contract, Universal owned the rights to Oswald, not Disney.
And thus did Walt Disney learn the same tough lesson that Alan Moore and Siegel and Shuster did. He walked out of Universal, leaving the character and most of his staff behind. Luckily, the one animator they hadn't yet re-signed was the most important one - Ub Iwerks, regarded not only as one of the highest quality animators of the time, but one of the fastest creators. Iwerks and Disney worked together in secret and in just two weeks had produced a new cartoon, "Plane Crazy" starring a new character, Mickey Mouse. Mickey was pretty obviously a stand-in for Oswald, similar in look and personality, but with a bit stronger character. (I can hear you saying "Mickey Mouse? Stong character?" from here. Mickey's character loss is an interesting and complex topic itself, but we're here to talk about Oswald, not Mickey. Long and short, yes, Mickey had a lot of character in the early cartoons.) It took almost no time for Oswald to be completely overshadowed.
Without Disney and Iwerks, Universal didn't really seem to know what to do with Oswald. He more or less just dissappeared. They made more cartoons, even getting him into cartoons with sound and color, but he was never the hit he had once been and really the only notable thing Universal did with him beyond this point was to hand the character over to an artist to create comics, who promptly turned him into a bland, generic "funny animal" character.
Totally the same character.
Beyond that, I think he only appeared as a background character in some Woody Woodpecker cartoons (and appeared in a Woody Woodpecker video game, I understand, though I think it only released in Brazil).
It's often pointed out that Disney publicly approved of the comic's changes to the character as a defense of it, but I dunno, I can think of a lot of different reasons he might do that which have nothing to do with actually liking it. I wonder sometimes whether Disney ever really got over it.
Genuine statement or extremely passive-aggressive smarm? You decide!
I found it a funny bit of trivia that the original plans for Who Framed Roger Rabbit - originally a Disney project until they turned it over to get more studios on board - called for the Judge to unmask at the end and be revealed to be Woody Woodpecker (hence the high-pitched, manic voice). I don't really think it was intentional, but it's a funny coincidence that Woody was Universal's only real cartoon star at that point. (On a tangent, I'm kind of sad they didn't go this route, just because it would've been a much more interesting mystery if we the audience could guess who the villain actually was instead of him just being a no-name generic toon.)
In 2006, however, Disney finally got the rights to Oswald back, trading sportscaster Al Michaels to NBC for them (I love the description, "they traded a real person for a cartoon rabbit" haha! Though even Michaels admitted that Oswald was the important part of the deal.) One of the things they did with him, you already know. They made Oswald a major character in the 2010 video game Epic Mickey to reintroduce him to the world. The game sends Mickey mouse into a wasteland populated by forgotten Disney characters, and who better to lead them than the very first forgotten character, Oswald, who understandably resents Mickey.
...but Epic Mickey isn't why I made this post. Not really. If you want to know more about it, here's a little 5 minute video the game's makers put together, talking about Oswald and his place in the game: Clicky-poo!
But before the video game, they went around recovering every Disney Oswald cartoon they could find and released them as part of a DVD set. I've been meaning to get my hands on it for a while now, and only just managed to do so, and after watching them, this is what I wanted to talk about.
...you guys, these cartoons are really good!
No, seriously!
That's not to say you should rush right out right now and find and watch them. Bear in mind, these are silent cartoons made in the 1920's for a 1920's audience, but with all that said, they still totally hold up! I mean, I not only found them surprisingly entertaining and engaging, they got me to chuckle a few times (and it startled me whenever it happened, I don't tend to laugh at animated shorts no matter how entertaining I find them). You can see a lot of the groundwork laid for later cartoons in these, gags that are still used in animation. This is especially true if you're interested in the art of animation, because without sound, these cartoons were nothing but the art of animation. There was rarely any text used on them, and they never cut to the typical silent movie dialogue card. Instead, everything was handled through pantomime.
As an example, a scene where Oswald is riding on a bike doing the typical "she loves me, she loves me not" with a flower. He could not, of course, say the lines, so it had to be done through expressions and gesture. Simple right? Just a smile or a frown should do it. Instead, the animators went to lengths to make it enjoyable, with Oswald releasing some petals in a joyful flourish over his head before pulling the next ones and getting furious with the flower for leading him so wrongly. It's such a simple scene, but it was animated so wonderfully that it stuck with me. I kind of wanted to take screenshots of the whole scene and make tons of GIFs, the drawings were just so fun!
Oswald, that is not the proper way to ride a bike!
This is not to say that the characters don't talk, we just don't hear it, which works out fine, because most of the time, we don't actually need to. In "Rival Romeos" Oswald and his rival are fighting over Ortensia (Tangent - I'd love to know where the Epic Mickey people came up with that name for her. Is it canon from somewhere or did they make it up? Oh well, it's canon now). Towards the end of the cartoon they have an actual argument. We don't know what words they use, but we're not left in the dark, their expressions and body language convey everything they're saying. And when their argument goes too far and the two of them end up hurting Ortensia she (silently) tells them off before ditching them both, and again, we already know exactly what she's saying. It doesn't need to be spelled out for us, the animation is doing its job perfectly. Also, go Ortensia for not putting up with that bullshit. Starting to see why I liked these cartoons?
And lest I leave you believing that these cartoons were nothing but romance stories, Oswald was more adventureous than anything. In a cartoon taking off (haha) of the flight across the atlantic, Oswald finds his plane destroyed right at the beginning of the race. Desperate to get back into it, he decides to build a flying machine himself...using a dachsund as a base (oh, cartoons XD). If this wasn't surreal enough, he had to explain his plan to his friends but also had to pantomime it so the audience knew what he was doing...and he did...and it's amazing.
And this is not to put down cartoons with dialogue in the least. Pretty much anyone who knows me, knows I like snappy dialogue more than most things. But if you can hold my attention without it? When you can convey the same things without resorting to dialogue, that's damned impressive! This is why I get irritated at people who whine about how limiting an artist stifles creativity. Erm, no. Limitations actually increase creativity, it's why so many artists limit themselves voluntarily. If the character can't say "I'm going to turn this dog into a flying machine! I need you guys to get me a specific item!" then you have to think about how you can show that moment. Telling is MUCH easier than showing, but showing is generally going to be much better than telling in the long run and that's evident in how well these cartoons hold up.
The unfortunate part is how few of these cartoons are left. Universal didn't preserve them well, something I actually don't blame them for - of course Disney took care of the Mickey cartoons, they were personal, they were his, but Universal had no real connection to the cartoons they held and how could any company in the 1920's foresee the rise of home video? It's a shame, but not a crime. Still the fact remains that many of the Oswald cartoons are too damaged or just flat out gone. The DVD set only has 12 shorts on it, and many of those are re-releases that have been edited down from the originals. It was kind of interesting that Disney put little credits on the end of each of the cartoons, listing where they'd gotten them from; some from the Universal archives, some from a Norweigian film museum, others came from private collections. It seems they're still looking, since I read they recently recovered a 13th cartoon, but I've seen several promotional images for cartoons that no longer exist. One, "Sagebrush Sadie" only exists as a little over a minute of pencil drawings by Ub Iwerks that were oddly enough found in the Disney archives - the final inks of it are comepletely gone.
Joking aside, this image was my introduction to Oswald, and it's one of the shorts that's gone.
Honestly, though, I'm excited to see what Disney will do with the character in the future. I think it's safe to say that he's been successfully rescued at this point. I imagine thanks to the game and his interesting history, the character has more fans now than many of the other backup Disney characters. Epic Mickey: the Power of Two, due to release this October, is elevating Oswald to co-op character, he'll be present throughout the entire game whether you play with someone else or not. But perhaps more importantly than that, he'll talk for the first time ever in a Disney property. Disney is always so careful about selecting the voice for their characters, I think it's only appropriate that verteran voice actor Frank Welker get to set what Oswald sounds like.
In a recent interview for the new game, Warren Spector commented on how attached he'd become to Oswald in working through these games, how it made such a good story and it was hard to not connect with the little guy despite the fact that he's just a fictional character. I can honestly say I know what he means, and I'm glad Oswald's story looks like it's going to have a happy ending. Turns out he was lucky after all.