It’s the ultimate Christmas gift for animation junkies around the world: a long-lost Disney film from 1927, found in a library near the Arctic Circle.

That film – Empty Socks, Walt Disney’s first Christmas animation – was found during a review of films at Norway’s National Library in Mo i Rana.

It features Oswald the Rabbit, a character created by Disney and Ub Iwerks, who dresses up as Santa Claus and shares Christmas with a group of orphans.

“A lot of these films, they’re pretty fragile,” says Jim Zubkavich, coordinator of the animation program at Seneca College. “Even films made in the ’80s, when they’ve gone back to digitize them, they’ve found there can be damage on the prints. So something from the 1920s, to find an intact print. . . that’s pretty amazing stuff.”

Zubkavich, who teaches animation history, says Oswald was a character commissioned by Universal to compete with Felix the Cat and other popular cartoons of the day. But after some frustrating business dealings with the company, Disney swore he’d never create a character for anyone else, says Zubkavich.

His next creation? The iconic, enduring Mickey Mouse.

“If the Oswald cartoons had continued, we may never have seen Mickey,” says Zubkavich.

Local animation experts are excited about the find.

“I’m always happy when someone discovers a lost film, whether it’s animated or live action,” says Mark Mayerson, coordinator of the Sheridan College animation program. “In Disney’s case, it’s nice to fill in any blanks in Disney history.”

“It’s amazing to me, because even when we think that we’ve got everything, (there are) still these sort of gaps,” says Zubkavich.

Though the Empty Socks film was discovered in 2008, no one realized what it was until this year, when American animation historian David Gerstein approached Norway’s National Library during his search for films about Oswald.

That’s when everything clicked.

“There were no titles on the cans or the film itself,” says Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, head of the film section in the National Library of Norway’s research department. But Gerstein’s involvement helped identify the 5 ½-minute film, which is only lacking about one minute in the middle.

Before this discovery, the only preserved copy of the film was a 25-second sequence housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

“In Norway and many countries, Disney is associated with Christmas. . . this is kind of the first part of that story,” Hanssen says. “A kind of embryo for everything that happened. It feels like an important part of film history itself.”

The National Library is now giving the Walt Disney Company an early Christmas gift: a digitized copy of the film. They’re keeping the actual nitrate film in their archives in Mo i Rana.

So how did a Disney film wind up in Norway in the first place?

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Hanssen says the Christmas flick was screened there in 1929 – 85 years ago.

Says Zubkavich, “It just proves that in a dusty drawer somewhere, in a box or attic, there are still amazing treasures to be found.”