Debuting in 2013, Mickey Mouse delivered a modern take on the iconic character for a new generation. Following the show's success, Disney+ released a season's worth of short Mickey Mouse films titled The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse. In celebration of Mickey Mouse's 93rd birthday on Nov. 18, Disney announced the Disney+ series is returning for a Season 2.

The upcoming season of The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse will feature four extended-length episodes themed around four seasons. Starting with "Winter," The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse will embrace an increasingly experimental story-telling style while continuing the current iteration of the classic cartoon character. Ahead of the announcement, CBR sat down for an exclusive interview with The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse's Executive Producer/Supervising Director Paul Rudish about Season 2. Rudish described what it's like to highlight Mickey Mouse for modern audiences and which short story idea they couldn't crack.

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CBR: Mickey Mouse is one of the more iconic characters of animation on a global level. There have been so many different incarnations of the character over the years -- what do you think makes the character so enduring?

Paul Rudish: I think right off the top, his personality and good-hearted nature. He's a resourceful little fellow with a lot of pluck and gumption. But he's still kind of naive, and he gets himself into trouble just because he thinks everything's going to be sunshine and rainbows and can't even imagine that something terrible might be lurking around that corner. And then he just naively walks into trouble, and then finds himself going, "Oh, golly, this isn't very nice."

Then he finally reaches that tipping point where he is like, "All right, I got to turn this around." He figures out some way to muster his courage or to come up with some resourceful way of turning the tides in his favor. Sometimes, he still takes it on the chin. I think that youthful energy that he has, yet with the facility of an adult, makes that character right on the line of childhood and adulthood, so both age ranges can appreciate where he's coming from.

When I was developing the shorts in the early days, I was trying to do a little forensics. What makes Mickey popular? Dissecting it. I think it [originated from] silent cartoons and that style of trying to put all the storytelling in visually rather than verbally: that was always baked into Mickey Mouse. All the pantomime type of acting, all the weird rubber hose animation, and whatnot were fun. They weren't relying on the dialogue to deliver the jokes -- that translated better in other markets, in other countries -- so you weren't relying on the language. You were doing humor that everyone could relate to. I compare that to Bugs Bunny. The Looney Tunes stuff is great, but Bugs Bunny, he's sharp with his dialogue. He's witty. That's not really Mickey's game. Mickey's pretty simple. Finding that kernel set the tone for us. And again, that tone was set by Walt Disney and Ube Iwerks, so it was just going back in Mickey's history and going, 'Why are these cartoons great? Okay, what can we learn from that? How can we help perpetuate those ideas that actually Walt and Ube had set in motion?"

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disney mickey mouse driving with minnie donald daisy and goofy

This new season of Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse is going to be framed as a four-part exploration of the four seasons. Where did that concept for the new season come from?

Well, we had done our first season of The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse for Disney+, which is available now. When they wanted to do a second season, [Disney] wondered if there was a way that they could put a spin on it. They felt like we've got a huge library of shorts now and [wondered] if there was a way we could do something that they could billboard, or point to and say, "This is something different?" They talked about the holiday specials that we had done previously, the Halloween and the Christmas specials. They were talking a little bit about programming ideas and stuff. They told me, "We usually air things in the four quarters. We like to have these four quadrants throughout the year. We'd like to do something that we could wave a flag around."

Rather than just dumping a collection of shorts and going, "Hey, everybody, go look in the shorts bucket," they wanted to have something they could specifically advertise. Something they could say, "Hey, get ready for the airing of this new thing." I quite literally thought, well, they've got their four quadrants, their four seasons. What about the four seasons? It doesn't sound that clever, but I thought about the holiday specials, and in lieu of doing holidays specifically, we thought the four seasons give us a nice thematic framework we could build stories around.

To look into what's the magic of winter, what's the fun of spring, and so on... I literally leaned into that. It was cool that this time they didn't really have the set format that they wanted us to follow. It was up to us to pitch what we thought we wanted to do. And so each of the four seasonal specials is all slightly different constructions and different kinds of storytelling... It was really fun to be able to explore different formats of storytelling and try some different things that we haven't really done with the seven-minute shorts.

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Once you've got the idea for a story, what's the process to determine which characters to focus on?

Really, it's pretty organic. It's more being in the story room, while we're having brainstorming meetings, and really talking about different scenarios, and what would it be like if we throw our characters into these scenarios. It's really just finding one that actually feels like it has traction. There might be some good ideas, and we'll try to explore them. Sometimes we're not really sure we're finding the payoff in this, so we look at another idea. The stories reveal themselves, rather than us trying to really hammer out something very direct. We have approached some things with a direct objective. But really, it's more organic.

We don't just set out to go, "Okay, let's do a Mickey and Minnie cute one, and let's make it a musical." It's more like, "Hey, what if Mickey and Minnie were just playing music, and they get heard by a record producer, and then he gets really excited, and then he drags them on through a music career that maybe they didn't even want." And then we start riffing about that. Then it all falls together... there have been lots of ideas that sounded fun, but they've had to get thrown out because we just couldn't quite find the through-line in it.

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Were there any ideas you weren't able to crack that really broke your heart to let go of?

I thought there could be a funny scenario where Mickey and Donald go to a Halloween party in the two-man horse costume, and then a horse actually falls in love with them. And then they can't get the zipper unstuck, and they're trapped while the horse is to get sweet on them. But that one didn't pan out for whatever reason.

What's it like as a creator to approach a character as ubiquitous as Mickey Mouse and make it stand out?

It's very satisfying. It warms my heart to see it received so well, and by such a broad audience. The age range is always fascinating for me... I'll hear a grandfather say, "Oh, me and my four-year-old granddaughter love these. Oh, she thinks they're hilarious, and they remind me of the cartoons that I remember as a kid." That feels really good, that it can have that breadth and appeal to such a wide audience, and then to the international audience as well.

[These shorts have been] received so well all over the world. I'm very proud of what we made and proud of all my team members. We've got so many talented people, all of our directors and designers. It's quite a delight, honestly, to make these. It's fun to work with such great people and to collaborate, and bounce ideas off of each other, and then see it all come together into something that the audience is really responding to.

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This iteration of Mickey Mouse -- extending from those first shorts you did in 2013 to Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse now almost a decade later -- has clearly had so much work and love put into them. If you could, what lessons would you share with your younger self?

A lesson I learned after about Season 2, maybe, is that I've been super fortunate to be able to give all my directors and designers and storyboard artists ownership in what they do. I think early on... Getting the whole thing started, I was very precious, and on top of everything, and thought that I had to have my fingers in everything.

As the crew grew, and we all got comfortable with our style of working together, I found that I could delegate much more, and still feel confident that things were going to be great, because I've found a good group of friends and colleagues that all shared the same kind of mindset. We all had a similar vision of what Mickey was. I built the sandbox and the parameters of what we wanted to do with these cartoons. I found that most people agreed, and shared a similar opinion on what Mickey can be, or should be. I didn't invent Mickey Mouse, so I don't have all the answers. I just found that I have this community of contemporaries that feel very much the same and we're all talking the same language. Now, we can all parse it out... I don't have to be pulling out my hair thinking that I have to be on top of everything. So I guess I would've told myself at the very beginning, "Don't worry. Take a deep breath. You're going to be working with great people, and they're going to make your life a lot easier. So you don't have to stay up till 10:00 p.m. every night at the office," which I did during the first season.

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