Get a Horse!

Get a Horse! is a 2013 American 3D animated slapstick comedy short film, produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios. Combining black-and-white hand-drawn animation and color CGI animation, the short features the characters of the late 1920s Mickey Mouse cartoons, and features archival recordings of Walt Disney as the voice of Mickey Mouse. It is the first original Mickey Mouse theatrical animated short since Runaway Brain (1995), and the first appearance of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit in a Disney animated production in 85 years.

Plot
The film begins in 2.35:1 and color when the Walt Disney Animation Studios logo is shown, and then switches to a smaller 1.33:1 aspect ratio for the black and white sequence. Mickey Mouse walks from his house and spots Horace Horsecollar pulling a hay wagon with all his friends playing music. He hops on the wagon and helps up Minnie Mouse and Clarabelle Cow onto the wagon. Just then, Peg-Leg Pete shows up in his jalopy, his horn bellowing "Make way for the future!". Pete spots Minnie and gives her a sexual gaze, so Mickey puts Clarabelle in the gaze in Minnie's place much to Pete's disgust and horror. Angry at being pranked, Pete snatches Minnie and rams his car into the wagon, sending Mickey and Horace flying towards the screen. Seeing Mickey and Horace bounce off the fabric, Pete hurls them even harder into the screen until they burst through into the modern movie theater as the film switches back to 2.35:1 and color. As Pete taunts Mickey from inside the screen and closes the hole in the screen, Mickey tries to get back into his world, pulling back the curtains to reveal a wider screen. Horace then walks onto the stage wearing a Captain America T-shirt, glasses and carrying a cellphone, Hershey's Milk Duds and popcorn. Mickey decides to use Horace as a mock biplane to fly around the theater and fire at Pete with Hershey's Milk Duds. When they crash land onto the stage, Mickey finds the smartphone Horace brought (and apparently stole) onto the stage, so he calls Pete on his candlestick phone and Horace sprays foam from a fire extinguisher into the smartphone and out from Pete's phone.

Pete's car then lands in a frozen lake and the screen fills with water, giving Mickey the idea to poke a hole in the screen with his tail and let the water leak out, causing Pete, Minnie and the other cartoon animals to flood out onto the stage. Minnie is unsure about the new area, asking Mickey if they've landed in Poughkeepsie. Mickey and Minnie's reunion is short-lived, however, as Pete gives chase to the characters in and out of the screen until he snatches Minnie again, punches Mickey onto a support beam and nails the screen shut. Horace and the others decide to swing from the beam and try to break though the screen like a wrecking ball, but the plan only manages to flip the screen upside-down, causing Pete to fall from the ground.

Mickey and the others flips it again and Pete lands on the ground, his car crashing down on him. Getting an idea, Minnie encourages Mickey to flip the screen again, this time having Pete land on a cactus, which sets off a chain of events. First, Pete gets electrocuted on some telephone cables, then he has his face get hit by all the steps on a ladder, lands face first in the mud, and gets his rear end poked on a pitchfork, and falls onto a seesaw, where he gets hit on the head by numerous tools. Then one of the tools, a sledgehammer, rams the pitchfork into his deeper into his rear end. Finally, the sledgehammer falls on the opposite side of the seesaw, where Pete is launched and lands face first in his jalopy.

Horace, Mickey, and Minnie begin to laugh hysterically at Pete's pain. Suddenly, Horace's hand gets stuck behind the screen due to him pounding the screen. Mickey tries to pull him out, but only succeeds by spinning the screen horizontally like a flip-book. To Mickey's realization, it rewinded the scene. Seeing this as an opportunity, Mickey and Horace begin spinning the screen around like a flip-book until Pete is completely knocked out.

Minnie then drives Pete's car with Pete in tow and completely tears the screen down, revealing the black-and-white world in color for the first time. Mickey and his friends enter their world again and dance for a moment while Oswald briefly peeks out from the side of the screen. The horn that was on Pete's car tells an unconscious Pete "Ah, get a horse!" before Mickey and his friends bring down a new screen, then Mickey waves goodbye to Pete and the audience, and he and Minnie give Horace a kiss on the cheeks as Horace blushes. As the iris closes, Pete, who has woken up by now, tries to get back in through the screen, but gets his head (and half his body) stuck. Seconds later, the flap on Pete's pants open up to reveal the words "THE END" and Pete bellows "Hey!!", as the screen cuts to the credits. After the credits, the Walt Disney Pictures logo is in black-and-white, and Clarabelle jumps over the castle, making the arch with her milk.

Cast

 * Walt Disney (via archival recordings) as Mickey Mouse
 * Marcellite Garner and Russi Taylor as Minnie Mouse
 * Billy Bletcher and Will Ryan as Peg Leg Pete
 * Raymond S. Persi as Car Horn

Production
Get a Horse! was conceived and directed by Lauren MacMullan, who became the first woman to solo direct a Disney animated film. She started working on the short after Wreck-It Ralph director, Rich Moore, told her that Disney was looking for some Mickey Mouse ideas for television. Being fond of the earliest Mickey Mouse shorts, mostly because of their simplicity and freshness, she decided for a style resembling the 1920s animation. Produced in a year and 6 months, its hand-drawn animation was supervised by Eric Goldberg, and its computer animation by Adam Green. To achieve the 1928 look, aging and blur filters were added to the image, while for the CG part, they created new models, faithful to the character designs of 1928. Originally temporary, the production team incorporated archival recordings of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse voice from 1928 to 1947, and spliced it into the character's dialogue.

Release
Get a Horse! premiered June 11, 2013 at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in Annecy, France. It made its United States premiere on August 9, 2013, at the D23 Expo in Anaheim, California, and theatrically accompanied Walt Disney Animation Studios' Frozen, which was released on November 27, 2013.

Home media
Get a Horse! made its home debut on the Blu-ray and DVD release of Frozen on March 18, 2014. Get a Horse! will be released on the Walt Disney Animation Studios Short Films Collection Blu-ray on August 18, 2015.

Critical response
Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter lauded the short film as "one of the wittiest and most inventive animated shorts in a long time". He particularly points out that the film "begins as an early black-and-white Mickey Mouse cartoon but then bursts its boundaries into color and 3D in marvelously antic ways that call to mind the stepping-off-the-screen techniques of Buster Keaton's Sherlock and Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo. It's a total winner." Scott Foundas of Variety agreed, labeling the film as "utterly dazzling". Drew McWeeny of HitFix lauded it as "the perfect companion piece" and "enormously entertaining". He continues on that "Filmmaker Lauren MacMullan perfectly nails the look and feel of the early days of the Disney studio, and it is the first time I have ever laughed out loud at Mickey Mouse. It's an inventive and technically precise short, and it also celebrates and deconstructs Disney's animated history in a very fun way."