“I hope that we don’t lose sight of one thing. That it all started with a mouse.”
Walt Disney
And given that Mickey is basically the well-spring from which all good things flow at The Walt Disney Company … well, it’s kind of appropriate that — on Disney’s Glendale Campus — there’s this very cool Mickey-inspired fountain.
“And what exactly were you & Noe doing on Disney’s Glendale Campus?,” you ask. This past Friday was Mickey Mouse Day, a media preview where we — along with a bunch of other reporters — got a chance to look at two of the nineteen new Mickey Mouse shorts that will soon begin playing on the Disney Channel. We were also given an in-depth look at the new Disney Mobile game which will based on these shorts as well as the wildly popular game “Where’s My Water”.
Mickey Mouse Day – Media Preview at Disney’s Glendale Campus
Bart Decrem served as MC for the first part of the day’s events. He expressed what it was that made working for the Mouse special for him:
“The thing that never ceases to sort of amaze me and impress me is just the depth of the characters and the worlds that Disney stands for and the emotional connection that our guests have with those characters. The other thing that blows me away is sort of at Disney every couple of months is just the amazing talent, the talented crew of people we have here,” Decrem decried.
Eric Coleman, Senior Vice President in charge of Original Series for Disney Television Animation, echoed this sentiment. When introducing Where’s My Water creator Tim Fitzrandolph, he said: “I dare you to find a more talented game-maker on the app store.”
Coleman explained the responsibilities that came with re-creating what is arguably the world’s most iconic character: “We’re very excited about what we’ve been doing with Mickey. When we at the TV Animation Studio were given the opportunity to do new Mickey Mouse shorts, we were thrilled. We set out with three specific goals in mind.
1. To introduce Mickey to a new generation, Entertain families that have their own memories of Mickey Mouse and highlight the personality of this character; show what a star he is.
2. We wanted to make sure that they feel contemporary. So to us this doesn’t mean that we just give him an iPhone and call it a day. It was in the tone, the sensibility, and the execution in the shorts. Where they’re edited, if music plays, the feel of it.
3. We wanted to make shorts that really bring him to an international audience. We have Disney Channels in 167 countries now, a huge global audience. While the appeal of Mickey Mouse is universal, we wanted to make some shorts that felt very customized to some of our specific audiences.”
The next thing Disney Television Animation had to do was assemble a team that could actually pull this project off:
“We were really, really fortunate to bring aboard Paul Rudish, who in the animation industry is highly regarded. He’s beloved, he’s talented, he’s extremely handsome .. .he’s legendary, he’s Emmy-winning, he worked on The PowerPuff Girls, Dexter’s Laboratory, Samurai Jack; he also designed the original 2D Clone Wars designs, he’s worked on so many groundbreaking shows, and we were working with him in-house on some things. And when this opportunity came up, Paul was the perfect sensibility-wise to tap for it,” Coleman explained.
“So the next thing was for Paul to pull together a team. And under Paul we have some incredible storyboard artists, character designers, background designers, just a hugely talented crew. We said to Paul, we want to do this, these are the things we want to accomplish, and you have a wide berth here to tell us if you take that challenge on, what you want to do with it,”Eric continued.
Paul Rudish shared his feelings on the project: “When the offer came to get on this project, it was kind of overwhelming. It was exciting to me as a fan of Walt Disney’s classics to tackle the original cartoon character (almost). But not in the scary way, being that he’s so iconic and such a strong character and his world and cast of characters is very iconic and actually very easy to navigate. So the weight of what Mickey Mouse could be went away pretty quickly, and we are really comfortable to just get in there and play with this guy,” Rudish stated.
“(This version of Mickey Mouse was a character) that I felt like I knew. (As a kid, one of my favorite things to do was) was going to Disneyland and going to that little theater on Main Street and watching all the old black-and-white cartoons like Plane Crazy, the original Mickey Mouse cartoon and one of my all-time favorites,” Paul said “(So I) started drawing and instantly found the want to do that rubber-hose, old black-and-white kind of thing. Honestly not doing old time, black-and-white cartoon, but the sensibilities of those original cartoons, that were just a little more surreal and very graphic and very playful.”
“(The challenge with creating these sorts of Mickey Mouse shorts in the modern age where he’s once again) that whimsical mischievous little rascal, finding his character, that little guy that’s kind of naïve, and then finds himself in trouble, then finds a clever way to get himself out of it,” Rudish continued. “So we started exploring the graphic tone of them, the music cues, the original sketches that I was playing with, I just find black-and-white so appealing to me personally that white face and black head and just a powerful graphic, and those three circles that’s instantly recognized all over the world, it’s just really iconic.
“It doesn’t matter what you do with (Mickey). You can put him in different costumes, in different places, and kind of cast him with different roles around the world, and he’s still always Mickey Mouse. Some different international things are happening, we are exploring different things that are happening, different locations, the cast of characters are there; we were looking for the rubber hose is fun, Goofy is more like his original origins, Dippy Dog, and it’s still really like him, the 1950s incarnation of Donald and Daisy. Donald was super-cute then,” Paul enthused.
“So it’s kind of an amalgamation, things kind of percolated naturally as I was drawing, things kind of came up in my head, I imagined the characters, and then to complement that, again provenance of being at Disney and the history of all the amazing artists that were always inspiring me was right at hand, fantastic pieces of art by artist like Walt Peregoy, Mary Blair, Eyvind Earle, had me super excited,” Rudish said. “so we drew inspiration from all around Disney, eras and different productions …”
Paul then showed the members of the press who had come out for Disney’s Mickey Mouse Day some fantastic inspirational artwork he’d done for the shorts, and pointed out to us where the inspiration came from. Some, like the Mary Blair-style art Paul did for the Alpine short, were very obvious. Some, like the Chinese zoo, were subtler.
We got to see two shorts, one which took place on an American boardwalk, the other in Tokyo. What was interesting was that they did, indeed, play to an international audience – some of the shorts were in another language but needed no translation. Some had no talking at all! But like the original Mickey Mouse short, Plane Crazy, no words were needed.
FYI: The Disney Channel is going to begin airing these new Mickey Mouse shorts starting on June 28th. The first batch includes “No Service” (in which Mickey and Donald try to buy lunch from a beachside snack shack but are unceremoniously turned down because of the classic “No shirt, no shoes, no service” admonition) and “Yodelberg” (where Mickey longs to visit Minnie atop her mountaintop chalet but quickly realizes that the threat of avalanche has made the trek up the mountain more challenging than usual).
NEXT TIME: I’ll discuss what happened during the second half of our visit to Disney’s Glendale Campus on Mickey Mouse Day. Where we then got to scope out what the Company hopes will be its next big app, “Where’s My Mickey?”
But what do you folks think of what you’ve seen so far of these new Mickey Mouse shorts? Does this artwork and/or the comments from the filmmakers make these shorts seem like something that you’ll seek when they air on the Disney Channel?