The Disney animation that was only discovered 87 years after its release

Over the last 100 years, the Disney built a wide collection of animations that, with their diverse characters, narratives, formats and styles, impacted the growth of the different generations that grew up following the stories produced by Casa do Mickey.

But, did you know that one of the studio’s animated productions was missing for 87 years? RECREIO explains the full story below!

VERY WELL KEPT

We are talking about the short film of around 6 minutes entitled “Sleigh Bells”, which was shown for the first time in 1928, and soon after, disappeared from the archives of the company created by Walt Disneystaying away from the small screen for almost nine decades.

Therefore, many people only became aware of the existence of the animation in 2015, when the production was rediscovered by a researcher working in the online collection of the British Film Institute (BFI), where the only surviving copy was preserved, as reported by the ADORCinema portal at the time.

According to the British newspaper “The Guardian” (via Gazeta do Povo), “Sleigh Bells” became part of the BFI collection 34 years ago, when a lot purchased from Soho was compared, where the animation had only one piece of information attached, i.e. , there was the date “1931” as the only description.

After the rarity was found, the short that follows the character Oswald, the Lucky Rabbit in an ice hockey game, was restored by Walt Disney Animation Studios, as well as gaining new physical and digital copies.

Furthermore, on December 12 of the same year, the studio re-exhibited the animation that had been seen since its release. The event took place in London as part of a special BFI Christmas program, called “It’s a Disney Christmas: Seasonal Shorts”, according toADORCinema.

Check out the animation preview below:

Who is Oswald the Lucky Rabbit?

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was created by Walt Disney and your collaborator Ub Iwerks as a character for a series of 26 Universal Studios animated shorts that would be named after the big-eared figure himself.

The character became a huge success. However, the contract signed on March 4, 1927 with Universal ended up being dissolved about a year later, causing Walt would also lose the rights to Oswald.

Thus, the rabbit remained away from Disney stories until 2006, when the studio managed to regain the rights to the character from Universal, marking Oswald’s first official appearance after his return home in the game “Epic Mickey” released in 2010.