Live-action animated film match with a live kitten. In a variation from this and inspired to do so Walt Disney's first directorial efforts, years before Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was born in 1927 and Mickey Mouse in 1928, were the live-action animated "Alice Comedies" cartoons, in which a young live-action girl named Alice interacted with animated cartoon characters. Many previous films combining live action with stop-motion animation using back projection, such as Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen films in the United States, and Aleksandr Ptushko, Karel Zeman and more recently Jan Švankmajer in Eastern Europe. The first feature film to do this was
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit with both sound and color (two-strip Technicolor), a 2½-minute animated sequence of the live action movie "The King of Jazz" (1930), produced by Laemmle for Universal. However, it was not until 1934 that Oswald got his own color sound cartoons in two-strip Technicolor, "Toyland Premiere" and "Springtime Serenade". The Oswald cartoons then returned to black-and-white, except for the last one, "The Egg Cracker Suite" (1943), released as a part of the Swing Symphonies series. "Egg Cracker" was also the only Oswald cartoon to use three-strip Technicolor. But before he was permanently retired, Oswald made a cameo appearance in "The Woody