The Walt Disney company is creating new Mickey Mouse shorts. Considering how terribly protective Disney is about it’s classic characters, it’s a bit surprising. The shorts have a fresh visual style which I mostly enjoy.
However, I find the new shorts unsatisfying. Here is the latest release on youtube:
The problem I am having with these new shorts is that Mickey is hapless and ineffectual. In the above short, he wants to impress Minnie, so he goes through some spectacular efforts, and fails. His exertions allow him to travel through impressive layout design, but achieve nothing. If it weren’t for Minnie showing up at the end, on her own, it would just be loser comedy.
I have had the same feelings about the other shorts I have seen.
Since it’s almost halloween, here is another one, “Ghoul Friend”. First, I was a little confused with the title. It’s a play on the term “girl friend”. So I was expecting to have a female in the story. But the ghoul, while being a funny zombie version of Goofy, isn’t a girl. It’s a small issue, but it threw me off a little, and you don’t want to do that to your audience. Especially when your short is under 4 minutes long.
While I enjoyed the several funny run cycles they put together for these two characters, that’s pretty much all I enjoyed about it. Mickey can’t fix his car without the zombie Goofy’s help. If Mickey just yanked a bone out of Goofy’s arm, fixed his car, and then escaped, I would have found him more of a comic hero.
This not the kind of character that people come to love. They sort of feel sorry for him.