Sleigh Bells is an animated Oswald the Lucky Rabbit short released on July 23, 1928. The short was missing until late 2015, when a surviving print was rediscovered and restored by researchers, the British Film Institute (BFI), and the Walt Disney Animation Studios, respectively. In celebration, the short was screened for the first time since its release on December 12, 2015.[2]
Synopsis[]
Oswald plays the hockey champ, but gets distracted and flirts with Ortensia.
Plot[]
The short opens on a winter scene with a number of characters skating, skiing, and ice sailing on a frozen pond with hills in the background. In the foreground is Oswald, wearing a knit cap, skating around in a figure eight pattern. He stops in the center of the frame and twists his body up, then untwists and continues the figure sight skating, Oswald does a split and actually splits his body down the middle. Looking concerned, Oswald picks himself up by the head as his body becomes one again and continues to skate.
Groups of assorted animal characters are gathered to watch as a gang of identical orphan kittens, last seen in Empty Socks, take turns skating down a hill, onto the ice, in and out of a wooden barrel, and then up onto the belly of a elephant, who swats them with his trunk back in the direction of the hilltop from which they came.
The next shot shows us that as each kitten lands at the top of the hill, a dachshund is standing on his hind legs nearby, using a slingshot with snowballs to propel the kittens back down the hill. An enormous cycle of the kittens traveling from the hill to the elephant and back, again and again.
The dachshund then skates down the hill himself. He coils up like a spring upon touching the bottom, then hops in and out of the barrel like a snake. Next he forms into a ball shape so the elephant can easily swat him back upward again.
Alas, the graceful cycle movements of the kittens and the dachshund are interrupted when a large female hippo skates down the hill. When she lands on the barrel, it gets stuck to her bottom when she bounces onto the elephant, he is flattened, and when she bounces off onto the ground, the barrel is shattered. The elephant gets up and his torso is as thin as cardboard.
Characters[]
Gallery[]