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Mickey's Trailer

Director: Ben Sharpsteen
Year: 1938
Run-time: 8 min

- Mickey's Trailer is the first Disney film on the list - it came out a year after Snow White.  It's also the first color film on the list, premiering eight days before The Adventures of Robin Hood.  It's a fun trifle, not really holding a candle to the sheer trippiness of the earlier Betty Boop shorts, but it has a number of fun sight gags and Looney Tunes-esque shenanigans.

- After Snow White, Disney films would move away from rotoscoping, and given Disney's dominance of the animation landscape and how we talk about it, rotoscoping would soon come to be associated with "laziness" on the animator's part.  Not to besmirch traditional hand-drawn animation, but rotoscoping can be amazing (Betty Boop is evidence of that).  I'm beginning to wonder if Disney was just eager to separate itself from the work that Max Fleischer was doing (and perhaps even the association with black jazz performers like Cab Calloway).


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