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![]() Always the innovator, his ALICE IN CARTOONLAND series broke ground in placing a live figure in a cartoon universe. Back in Kansas City, along with artist Ub Iwerks, Walt developed a primitive animation studio that provided animated commercials and tiny cartoons for the local movie theaters. As a lad in Marceline, Missouri, he sketched farm animals on scraps of paper later, as an ambulance driver in France during the First World War, he drew comic figures on the sides of his vehicle. Walt Disney (1901-1966) was always intrigued by drawings. The opening sequence is very clever, with a tiny cottage and its bucolic setting being transmogrified by Mickey into a jalopy, trailer and stinking city dump. The animators took obvious delight in showing the trailer's various gizmos & gadgets, all compacted into a very small space. The animation is excellent, giving each member of the trio a chance to shine. Here is one of the classic Disney cartoons, full of good humor, keen inventiveness & some genuine hair-raising thrills. With Goofy at the wheel, a vacation spent in MICKEY'S TRAILER soon turns into a road trip to terror for The Mouse & Donald Duck. Most highly recommended.Ī Walt Disney MICKEY MOUSE Cartoon. Some of the best bits ever done were done for these shorts just to see what worked and what didn't. ![]() ![]() You can see the seeds of things Disney did later in features like Dumbo and Bambi in shorts like Mickey's Trailer, which serve as dry-runs while being great works in and of themselves. In this short (a fantastic cartoon in its own right), the visual gags are great, but the timing on everything has to be perfect or it won't work. For Walt Disney, shorts served a couple of primary purposes: one, they kept the Disney name and his principal characters before the public and two, most importantly to Disney, they were a good testing and training ground for new animation techniques, so he could make the feature films as close to perfect as possible. Warner Brothers was after the visual gag and creating continuing characters, while MGM was interested in making visually pretty cartoons and mostly one-shots, with few recurring characters. Disney in the late 1930s did animated shorts like no one else did them. ![]()
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