LONDON: Seven rare vintage posters of Mickey Mouse are expected to fetch thousands of dollars at an auction that coincides with the 90th anniversary of the cartoon character’s first film appearance.
The seven posters, dating from the 1930s and 1940s, went on display on Friday at a commemorative exhibition in London organised by Disney.
They are going under the Sotheby’s hammer in an online auction that runs until Nov. 26. A price list in a statement from the auctioneer and Walt Disney Co. UK & Ireland suggests they could fetch more than 130,000 pounds in total.
“We’re expecting a lot of interest… There are collectors who collect animation posters from all over the world and Mickey Mouse historically is the most valuable of all the animation characters,” Bruce Marchant, Sotheby’s film poster consultant, told Reuters.
“They’re particularly rare posters from England, France, Belgium and two of them are the only known surviving examples and for three of the others, there are certainly less than five known.”
Such posters were reused several times at cinemas and, being made of paper, most eventually fell apart and were thrown away. “So they were never meant to be looked at 80-90 years later” or viewed as works of art, Marchant added.
The exhibition, “Mickey’s UK Art Collective Exhibition”, is also showcasing new Mickey-inspired works by established and emerging UK artists including Jimmy C, Michael Bosanko and Pal Kumar.