The DVDs come in a spiffy tin box, like other "Walt Disney Treasures" reissues of recent years: The "Silly Symphonies" and Mickey Mouse collections, the rarities and early shorts. But Disney's two-disc "Oswald the Lucky Rabbit" set is more than a raid on the vaults aimed at 'toon completists. In its cheekily entertaining way, it's an assault on the company's image - a reminder that before there was Disney the corporate behemoth, there was Walt Disney the hardscrabble showman, and that behind Disney the showman was a visionary animator named Ub Iwerks.
Say again? Pronounced "Ubb Eyeworks," the German-descended, American-born Iwerks befriended Disney when both were teenage nobodies, commercial art students in Kansas City during the post-World War I years. Both men drew but where Walt had an entrepreneurial streak, Ub was the gifted artist. The success of their original "Alice comedies," about a live-action girl in a cartoon universe - it was Iwerks who figured out the technology - established Disney, his brother, Roy, and Iwerks in Hollywood, and in 1927 the shoestring Walt Disney Studio came up with a series of silent cartoons about a rascally rabbit named Oswald.
For kids weaned on state-of-the-art digital animation, the 13 Oswald cartoons on disc one may seem impossibly crude at first: silent, shuddering loop-de-loops of primitive pen and ink. Maybe you could do as well making your own flipbook - but probably not, for on a closer look Iwerks and his colleagues were doing astonishing things with perspective, narrative, and the breakaway surrealism native to the animator's art. The shorts are full of cognitive leaps fresh with the delight of their own discovery: Oswald plucking a question mark from his own thought balloon to hoist a plane in the air, popping off his own leg to use as a hammer, letting his shadow joust with a villain while he goes off to smooch with the damsel in distress.
The end of the Oswald story is as intriguing as the beginning. In 1928, Disney's distributor hired away key animators while retaining rights to the rabbit, leaving Walt and Ub up a creek. Forced to come up with a new character, Iwerks drew a mouse. In fact, Ub drew the entire first Mickey Mouse short, "Plane Crazy," on his own, averaging 700 drawings a day. The Mickey of the early days - raffish and defiant - was all Ub.
The character and the company took off, with Roy as the money man, Walt as the commercial visionary, and Ub as the in-house animation genius. As Mickey grew in cultural dominance, though - in part due to Walt's canny cross-marketing skills - Iwerks found his friend acting more like a boss, to the point of fine-tuning the timing sheets that were critical to an animator's personal "voice."
Ub quit in 1930 to start his own studio and launch a new character, Flip the Frog. Flip flopped, not because the cartoons were uninspired but because they and other Iwerks shorts were almost too inspired, bursting with manic and sophisticated creative energy while lacking the universal appeal - the cuteness - of Mickey and company. The Iwerks Studio folded in 1936 and Iwerks went back with Walt, inventing breakthrough designs in camera technology that before his death in 1971 won him two scientific Oscars and a gig doing the effects work for Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds." He outlived his friend and employer by five years.
Much of this story is related on "The Hand Behind the Mouse: The Ub Iwerks Story," a 90-minute documentary made in 1999 by Leslie Iwerks, Ub's granddaughter, that's on the second disc in the "Oswald" box. In the film, animators from Warner Bros.' Chuck Jones to
Disney regained rights to the Oswald cartoons from NBC Universal last year - sportscaster Al Michaels's contract with ABC, which Disney owns, was part of the trade - and the new DVDs do what they can to right the record. (It may be no coincidence that the deal was done after the legacy-minded Lasseter became head of Disney Animation.) They package the surviving 13 of the 26 Oswald shorts with astute commentary while throwing in three of the early "Alice" cartoons and the groundbreaking Mickey Mouse and "Silly Symphony" cartoons on which Iwerks served as prime mover. All that's missing is Ub's solo work - the "Flip the Frog" and "Willie Whopper" cartoons, plus the aggressively strange "ComiColor" fairy tale series - but they're available on
Yet the "Oswald" box stands on its own. Not only does it tell a tale of the difference between artistic brilliance and commercial genius, it provides proof of the brief, marvelous moment when the two were absolutely in synch.
