The short, that predates Mickey Mouse and stars a impression Oswald a Lucky Rabbit, is one of a beginning Disney cartoons.

Staff during a Huntley Film Archives, a batch footage association in England, found a 16-mm imitation of a film in a safe there in 2011, startling many in a animation village who insincere it had been damaged like so many silent-era films.

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“It’s like somebody anticipating a Van Gogh in their attic,” pronounced Dave Bossert, producer, artistic executive and control of special projects during Walt Disney Animation Studios. “This animation as distant as we know hasn’t been seen in over half a century.”

In a five-minute, 21-second film, Oswald and his crony and nemesis Peg-Leg Pete are hobos roving on a steer and personification checkers when hilarity ensues — steer gags engage a careless chicken, an indignant policeman and a gorilla with an organ grinder.

The cartoon, that will have what Bossert is job a “re-premiere” Saturday before a screening of Buster Keaton’s 1923 wordless comedy “Our Hospitality,” binds a poignant place in Walt Disney lore.

Disney destined 26 Oswald cartoons for Universal Studios before quitting that association — and withdrawal behind a popular, floppy-eared impression — over a agreement brawl in 1928. It was on a prolonged steer float behind to Los Angeles after resigning from Universal in New York that a animator combined his signature character, Mickey Mouse.

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Oswald belonged to Universal for 78 years until a Walt Disney Co. reacquired a rights in 2006 in an radical trade for sportscaster Al Michaels. (Michaels went from “Monday Night Football” on Disney’s ABC to NBC, that is owned by Universal’s parent.)

But a 26 Oswald shorts that Disney had destined himself were constructed on a rarely incendiary nitrate film used in a wordless era, and many had been deliberate mislaid or destroyed.

At a time Bossert review about a find of “Hungry Hobos” in England, a Walt Disney Co. owned 14 of those Oswald shorts. Walt Disney Animation Studios President Ed Catmull and General Manager Andrew Millstein had told Bossert that they wanted to lane down more.

(The liberation and replacement of a brief is partial of a studio-wide importance on a possess history, and an bid to reignite seductiveness in classical Disney characters — Oswald appears in Disney’s 2010 video diversion “Epic Mickey.” A new though vintage-looking Mickey Mouse brief called “Get a Horse,” featuring a voice of Walt Disney, is premiering subsequent week during a Annecy International Animated Film Festival in France.)

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The studio bought “Hungry Hobos” anonymously in a Hollywood memorabilia auction for $31,250 and digitally easy a 16-mm print, a routine that concerned repair damaged cog holes and warping, and stealing mud and scratches.

“You don’t wish to make it rock-solid ideal means afterwards it’s not of a era,” pronounced Bossert, who has overseen a digital restorations of Disney facilities such as “Bambi,” “Cinderella” and “Snow White.” “We left in some design wobble and light flutter that’s demonstrative of that time period. We mitigated it, though didn’t mislay it.”

Disney also consecrated a new measure for a brief film by Emmy-winning composer Mark Watters, who served as low-pitched executive for a Disney Channel array “Have a Laugh,” a three-year plan to revive and record 60 Disney shorts from a 1930s and ’40s.

Watters will control a L.A. Chamber Orchestra’s opening of his measure Saturday night.

According to Bossert there is during slightest one other “lost” Oswald brief that Disney is wakeful of, though a owners is perfectionist what Disney considers too most income to squeeze it.

rebecca.keegan@latimes.com

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