I'm not sure why the character was altered, to be honest. Maybe they didn't want it to actually be Oswald, or maybe it's actually some other obscure character that happens to look like an ear-less Oswald. He also has yellow pants instead of the blue pants that are associated with Oswald.

The French version is basically the same aspect ratio as the HDTV and Blu-Ray versions but it has more information cropped off the edges and the color is different. The uncensored frames could be extracted, sized down, and used to create an overlay or underlay to remove the censorship but the color would need to be corrected. I seem to recall something about a script that would do color matching. Does anyone have a link to it?