“If you were a director or part of the development, if you were between assignments, you were asked to develop Mickey shorts,” says Chris Bailey, the eventual director of “Runaway Brain.” “They just never made one. At the time, Ralph Guggenheim from Pixar referred to Disney’s side projects as the “lunatic fringe.” Executives on the merch side were antsy to get Mickey out there in a “wacky and out-there” way, and it became a priority for Gavin’s team. “They took anything that wasn’t the main feature and threw it into my world,” Gavin tells Polygon. Creative executive Kathleen Gavin, who was coming off Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, was put in charge of these “outside projects,” which included shepherding an unproven northern California studio’s experimental animated feature called Toy Story. Between features, Disney animators were tasked with a number of side projects, from conceptualizing a sequel to Fantasia to providing animation for upcoming theme park attractions and brainstorming ideas for a new Mickey Mouse short. In the wake of Rescuers, the hunt was on for a project that could bring Mickey into the ’90s. The Prince and the Pauper (1990) Image: Walt Disney Animation But when Rescuers bombed, so did Mickey’s reemergence, leaving the mouse hopelessly old fashioned in the collective mind of mass pop culture. In 1990, George Scribner directed “The Prince and the Pauper,” a charming 30-minute film that starred two classically styled Mickeys, and was shown before The Rescuers Down Under. The mouse’s 60th anniversary in 1988 was nearly as synergistic as in 2018, with a new (albeit temporary) land at Walt Disney World, a primetime special that co-starred Roger Rabbit, and a redesign that turned Mickey into a laid back, just-off-the-set-of- Miami Vice type. It stood to reason that Mickey Mouse, the company’s mascot, and a truly enduring global icon, could use a reinvention too. Aladdin, The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast weren’t merely animated features they were cultural phenomena, collecting critical acclaim, box office glory and multiple Oscars. “That is our legacy.”Įisner and the creative teams restored Disney Animation to the creative and commercial heights not seen since Walt’s heyday.
“We have to,” Eisner told Diane Sawyer on 60 Minutes in the summer of 1988, when asked about whether or not the company could continue to afford making animated movies. After two decades of creative stagnation following the death of Walt Disney, Eisner made it a priority to return the company’s animation division to prominence. But months before the film was scheduled to be released, a new management team, led by Michael Eisner, Frank Wells, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, took over the company. The 1984 release of The Black Cauldron, a hugely expensive dud, could have led to the unit’s demise. Welcome to the “lunatic fringe”īy the early 1990s, Walt Disney Feature Animation, as it was known then, had narrowly escaped catastrophe. How “Runaway Brain” came to be, and why it’s been deemed a forbidden object in the years since, is one of the weirder stories in modern Disney history. The short is not locked in the Disney Vault, it’s seemingly buried underneath it in a lead-lined box. Despite being nominated for an Oscar in 1996, playing out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival that May, and being, at the time, the first true Mickey Mouse theatrical short to play for theatrical audiences in more than 40 years has been all but erased from existence. Noticeably absent from the synergistic festivities, however, was the unearthing of the 1995’s “Runaway Brain,” which fans of Disney Animation have longed to see again.
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Mickey’s entire career was celebrated company-wide for a full year, honoring his debut in “Steamboat Willie” in 1928 through his iconic appearance as “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” in Walt Disney’s masterpiece Fantasia and more recent accomplishments like the Oscar-nominated short “Get a Horse” and the wildly popular Paul Rudish TV series. There was a 16,000-foot art exhibition in New York, a primetime TV special on ABC led by Kristen Bell and Dwayne Johnson, and a number of high profile collaborations with brands like Coach, Vans, and Marc Jacobs. In 2018, Disney celebrated Mickey Mouse’s 90th birthday with a cavalcade of cross promotions.
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