Watch: Brand New Clip from Disney's Get a Horse!

Disney animation legend Eric Goldberg, who served as hand-drawn animation supervisor for Get a
 Horse!

85 years ago today, Mickey Mouse first appeared on our screens in the now classic Steamboat Willie (watch the short in our recap for Disney 90th anniversary here). To commemorate this milestone, Disney have released a brand new clip from Get a Horse!, the vintage-styled Mickey short that precedes Frozen in cinemas.

90 Years, An Infinite Legacy: Disney Turns 90 Today

90 years ago today, on 16th October, 1923, Walt and Roy Disney founded the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio. From that day onwards, the landscape of animation changed forever. Alice Comedies, Mickey Mouse, Snow White, all the way through to Toy Story, Tangled and modern greats like that; join us in a look back at the unparalleled legacy of The Walt Disney Company.

Two Animation Cels from Disney's Get a Horse! Short

"Here Comes Trouble: Peg-Leg Pete interrupts Mickey Mouse and his favorite gal pal Minnie in this
 animation cel as they delight in a musical haywagon ride."

Disney have released two "vintage animation cels" from their beguiling new/old Mickey Mouse short, Get a Horse!, which is tipped to play before Frozen in November.

Disney Reveals Poster for Get a Horse; Release Date and Plot Synopsis Announced

As we've heard previously, Disney are set to release a new Mickey Mouse short, Get a Horse!. Today, the House of the Mouse revealed a nice new poster for the film (above). More details below.

William Talking Toy Story 2 With The Rotoscopers

Continuing my recent podcast tour (you can check out my guest appearances on The Scotty Jo Podcast here and here), I was very happy to be welcomed onto The Rotoscopers' Animation Addicts Podcast last week, talking about my favourite animated film, Toy Story 2. The episode is available now, and you can download it from iTunes, or listen to it here.

Mickey Mouse News: New Series of Shorts Coming Later This Year, Watch the First Now/New Poster for The Stooge

Disney announced yesterday that they're working on a series of nineteen new 2D Mickey Mouse cartoon shorts, to premiere on 28th June on Disney Channel, Disney.com and their WATCH Disney Channel app.

The new series will feature Mickey and other classic Disney friends, including Minnie Mouse, Donald and Daisy Duck, Goofy and Pluto, in a "broad range of humorous situations that showcase [Mickey's] pluck and rascality, along with his long-beloved charm and good heartedness". The shorts will take Mickey to locales including Paris, New York and Beijing.

Munir's Disney Retrospective -- Animated Classic #9: Fun and Fancy Free (1947)

By Munir Abedrabbo.

Last Week's: Munir's Disney Retrospective -- Animated Classic #8: Make Mine Music (1946)

Here, finally, we have the first fully satisfying anthology film, and one that deserves a better reputation and more exposure than it gets nowadays. Part of its success is that it only has two very strong segments instead of many weak ones, and also because it features many beloved Disney characters (Mickey, Donald, Goofy and Jiminy Cricket!) in various roles. Both segments ‘Bongo’ about a bear in love and ‘Mickey and the Beanstalk’, a variation of the famous Jack and the Beanstalk story, feature plenty of laughs and good character development. Also helping matters is Jiminy Cricket’s intervention as the host, as well as famous ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, as himself, and his marionettes providing some comic relief and serving as narrator for the Mickey short. All these ingredients blend perfectly to produce a movie that, while still composed of short films, manages to deliver high quality feature entertainment and one of the best segments featuring Mickey & Co. in the studio’s history. Rating: 4/5.

Next Week: Animated Classic #10 Review: Melody Time (1948)

Mickey Mouse and Roger Rabbit Could Co-Star in Animated Remake of The Stooge

Who Framed Roger Rabbit saw the biggest names in animation come together for a fun-filled cameo-a-thon, and it, ironically, made the titular rabbit rather a big name in animation too. A film recently proposed to Disney looks to take advantage of that, pairing Roger with a certain Mickey Mouse.

Happy Halloween from A113Animation!

Boo! Happy Halloween! Yes, All Hallows' Eve is upon us again, and we here at A113Animation hope you have a spooktacular day. Fortunately for us animation fans, there's plenty of animated Halloween stimulus, so enjoy two quintessential pieces of Halloween animation, from Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, and from the charming and endearing Peanuts special, It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

Classic Cartoons #5 - Steamboat Willie

I'm sure using this short film now will come back to bite me when I do my Bitesized Biography of Walt Disney and am in need of a short film to pair with it, but today's Classic Cartoon is the third Mickey Mouse cartoon, but the one that is often regarded as the mainstream debut of the famed mouse, the cartoon that put Walt Disney on the map - Steamboat Willie.

I'm currently amidst reading the biography of Walt Disney by Neal Gabler and what it stresses heavily, and what comes through when watching this short film, is how important this short film was to the early years of Walt Disney Animation Studios. Released in 1928, Steamboat Willie was the first Mickey cartoon to be distributed, and became a phenomenal success - much needed after a string of knock-backs and failures from the Disney studio; Willie provided them their big break. Steamboat Willie was the first Mickey to be synchronised with sound, and whilst that was surely a contributing factor in its success, another surely is the fantastic characters and timeless storytelling. Though quite the little sadist here, using animals as musical instruments, Mickey was and is a sign of the eternal optimism and childlike joy that Disney himself represented. The story, simple in premise, remains brilliant today, at 7 minutes, the short flies by and remains possibly the truest definition of a Classic Cartoon.

Inducted into the National Film Registry, to be preserved forever, in 1998, the starting sequence of the short is now widely recognisable for its prefacing of Disney animated releases. Steamboat Willie is the epitome of classic Disney storytelling.