The Owl is a character from the 1937 Silly Symphony short The Old Mill.
Background[]
Personality[]
Being a nocturnal animal like what most species of owls are, the owl often sleeps during the day. Although it occasionally sleeps inside, the owl would often make a disturbed expression upon staring at the audience, often shown to be sarcastic, especially being disturbed by water dripping from the mill as well the sound of the mill almost toppling.
Physical appearance[]
The owl is a horned owl with a large amount of brown plumage on its body with two tufts on both sides of its head. It is also shown to have a rounded, white-plumaged face with a white beak, a pair of yellow eyes, and light brown plumage on its torso and legs. It also has white stripes located on its wings as well as pale yellow-brown feet with black claws sticking out of each of them.
Appearances[]
The Old Mill[]
The owl is first seen sleeping on a broken cog peacefully just before it wakes up. However, during a stormy night, the cog where the owl is resting on begins to move, waking up the owl while a mother bird tries to defend her eggs in her nest, as the storm continues occurring inside just before flying to one of the rafts inside the mill to avoid falling off the cog. However, above it, rain leaks from the roof as the owl tries to avoid the rain caused by the storm, feeling uncomfortable of the rain and the storm outside. The next day, the owl sleeps on one of the cogs just before waking up.
Video game appearances[]
Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two[]
Owls also appear in Epic Mickey 2 when the player travels through the Old Mill projector screens where they hold platforms to support the player, found only in V1 of The Old Mill. Unlike in the original short, there is more than one owl in the game.
Trivia[]
- An animatronic owl perched in the rafters at the Harpers Mill walkthrough at Tom Sawyer Island at the Magic Kingdom pays an homage to the Old Mill short, alongside a bird nest in a broken cog of the mill wheel. It is unknown if this owl in said area is intended to be the same one.
- There is more than one owl featured in the theatrical poster of The Old Mill, unlike in the actual short itself where only one owl appears throughout it.
- In the Fantasia 2000 segment "Pomp and Circumstance", the owls seen inside the ark have a striking resemblance to the owl that appeared in The Old Mill.
- He looks very similar to Archimedes.
Gallery[]
