A renowned director, artist, and producer Walt Disney gave this comic book page as a gift when Sergei Eisenstein visited his studio in Los Angeles in September 1930. Following the first success on the screen, Mickey Mouse appeared in a comic book that Disney printed in American newspapers. This page depicts Mickey asking first: ‘I wonder what all the excitement is about? ’, and then exclaiming: ‘My Gosh! A Skunk! ’ On the right side of the page, an inscription reads: ‘To my friend Sergei Eisenstein. Sincerely, Walt Disney.’

Eisenstein first saw Disney’s talking short films in London in 1929 and admired the mastery of their creators, their sense of humor, and the skill of aligning graphics with music. In his first interviews in the United States in June 1930, he said:

Ten years later, Eisenstein wrote a large essay on Disney, explaining the global success of Disney movies by the fact that the selection of animal-type characters that parodied human weaknesses, the funny gags, and the perfection of sound and images held a certain perception of the world, important in any country and in any era: “This man seems to know not only the magic of all technical means but also the most secret strands of human thought, images, feelings, ideas. Such was probably the effect of Saint Francis of Assisi”s sermons. Fra Angelico”s paintings bewitch in this way. He creates somewhere in the realm of the very purest and most primal depths. There, where we all are children of nature. He creates on the conceptual level of man not yet shackled by logic, reason, or experience. (…) Disney is a marvelous lullaby for the suffering and unfortunate, the oppressed and deprived. For those who are shackled by hours of work and regulated moments of rest, by a mathematical precision of time, whose lives are graphed by the cent and dollar. (…) This triumph over all fetters, over everything that binds, resounds throughout, from the plastic trick to the hymn of The Three Little Pigs: “We”re not afraid of the big gray wolf…””

During the First Moscow International Film Festival in 1935, the jury chairman Eisenstein awarded Disney’s Three Little Pigs the Golden Medal for Best Cartoon to the applause of those in attendance. Eisenstein himself successfully applied the reimagined experience of audiovisual montage in the movies Alexander NEvsky and Ivan the Terrible, taught his students at VGIK (the Russian State University of Cinematography Named After Sergei. GerAsimov) how to align motion on the screen and music on a phonogram in a harmonious way.