A 'Lost' Disney Cartoon from 1928 Has Been Discovered in Japan

Before there was Mickey, the cartoon mouse who celebrated his 90th birthday on November 18, there was Oswald. Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Disney's first official recurring cartoon character, starred in 26 shorts between 1927 through 1928. Until recently, seven of those shorts had been lost, but Smithsonian reports that one has been recovered from the collection of an animation historian in Japan.

Yasushi Watanabe, now 84, bought a film reel labeled “Mickey Manga Spide” (Mickey cartoon speedy) from a market in Osaka when he was a teenager. The film was a two-minute version of a 1928 Oswald cartoon called Neck n’ Neck made for 16mm home movie projectors.

Seventy years later, Watanabe realized the short was more than just a neat piece of Disney memorabilia. While reading the 2017 book Oswald the Lucky Rabbit: The Search for the Lost Disney Cartoons by Disney animator David A. Bossert, he learned that a handful of Oswald the Rabbit cartoons were lost, and he had a hunch that his reel might be one of them.

After getting in touch with the Walt Disney Archives, Watanabe confirmed that Neck n’ Neck was indeed one of the cartoons that had been missing for decades, and he donated it to Japan's Kobe Planet Film Archive. Bossert's book also led to the rediscovery of a 50-second clip of the same cartoon at the Toy Film Museum in Kyoto, but the original cartoon, which had been five minutes long, has yet to be unearthed in its entirety.

Oswald's time on the silver screen was short-lived. After Walt Disney and his partner Ub Iwerks lost the rights to the character, the pair came up with Plane Crazy, the short that introduced Mickey Mouse to the world. Oswald's obscurity means that some archivists may be holding on to the lost cartoons without even realizing what they are. In 2008, The National Library of Norway discovered that an illegibly labeled reel in their archive actually contained the lost Oswald short Empty Socks.