LA NOTTE INSONNE DI TOPOLINO

An unreleased film by Goffredo Alessandrini discovered and restored by the National Film Archive. It is a meta-filmic "experiment" with Disney characters. The opening titles read: "In a single show four famous animated cartoons by Ub Iwerks: [Burt Gillett's] The Picnic [Walt Disney's], The Cactus Kid [Burt Gillett's], The Gorilla Mistery [sic], and [Burt Gillett's] The Fire Fighters, gathered together and coordinated with scenic and musical motifs by Goffredo Alessandrini".

"By putting together the four short cartoons, the director seems to have grasped Disney's "poetics", which treated cartoon characters like flesh and blood actors and presented the events of the film like pieces of lower middle-class life. One of the four, The Cactus Kid, was not found
in the rediscovered edition… It is also interesting to note that the producer Pittalunga's credits attribute the four shorts to Ub Iwerks ("mangled" at the time by an obvious misprint into "Irweks"). This is an erroneous attribution, wrong from the moment that Iwerks left Disney in early 1930. Burt Gillett, who, in fact, authored three of the
short cartoons, had joined the Disney team one year before in mid 1929. The fourth cartoon, The Cactus Kid, is actually the first to have been made. Mickey Mouse's first western adventure, the film was directed by Disney himself… The restoration was based on the original inflammable negatives. The sound track was preserved in excellent condition and so was not subjected to any re-mixing treatment. The work was done in the film workshops of Cinecitt`" (National Film Archive).