Guardstone wrote:Erm... I'm sure lots of folks here will call me nuts, but I don't really like Mickey, he's so boring. Films like this certainly won't help that image. Disney should spice up the little fella and give him a real adventure if they want to keep him as an asset other that the daft ambassador he currently is for the company.
I think you're mistaking likeability with wasted potential and misdirection.
Look, I agree the Disney Company has wasted Mickey for years but this goes back to decisions made regarding the character the mid- to late-1930s.
When Mickey started in 1928, he was a wild and crude little guy who tortured animals, sexually harassed Minnie, and was not a completely stand-up citizen. Very politically incorrect.
However, because of his pluckiness and his underdog status, audiences grew to like him a lot, and through the mid-1930s, there were actually a lot of good Mickey cartoons made like "The Brave Little Tailor," "Through the Looking Glass," and "The Band Concert."
The thing you notice about a lot of these cartoons is that it's not really Mickey's OVERALL personality that's the great thing, it's the situations he's placed in and how he reacts to them. He doesn't give up, he's eternally optimistic, and ultimately finds his way out of things. That appealed a lot to people during the Great Depression, and it really should still have appeal even today.
If all you've ever seen of Mickey is the majority of cartoons made with him since the 1980s -- especially the made-for-TV and direct-to-video junk with the exception of The Three Musketeers --, then your conclusion that he's boring and useless is basically correct but not completely informed. When you look at his earlier cartoons, and especially the color shorts up to about 1938, it's a different story. This is a character with possibilities, but they've been squandered by managers too afraid to break out of a stereotype that's developed around Mickey since the 1950s. Of course, unless you buy the Disney Treasures DVDs or watch a friend's set, you'd never realize that because Disney doesn't let these classic shorts be shown on American TV much anymore!
The problem is at some point in the mid-/late-1930s, the Disney Company basically turned Mickey into a father-figure and upstanding citizen to an alarming degree. He became duller, and over time his adventures became less imaginative. It was a lot easier to do cartoons with Donald Duck and Goofy because they had off-kilter, imperfect (and in Donald's case cocky and JERKY) personalities that leant themselves to comedy. It's harder to do comedy and invent new situations for a character that's a bit TOO perfect. That's why less Mickey shorts were made in the 1940s and why from about 1953 to 1983 there were no new Mickey Mouse theatrical shorts made.
I think another mistake Disney made with the character was that they overdesigned Mickey. As much as I like Freddie Moore's character design work and animation, I think it was the biggest mistake to HUMANIZE Mickey's design (Moore's redesign) and take him from the "Brave Little Tailor" iconic look to his appearance in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." I think the older, simpler black-and-white design with the plain black eyes works better than the human eyes and flesh-toned face Mickey we all see today.
I think Mickey Mouse is a perfect example the age-old argument of human-design/locomotion versus caricature designs in animation. They went a bit too far in the human direction as far as I'm concerned with Mickey and he paid a price there in design along with the dull plots they gave his later post-1930s shorts.
"Runaway Brain" (1995?) was a step in the right direction but somebody at Disney got scared and this short was never promoted that well in the mainstream world outside of Hollywood animation. It's more in the spirit of "The Brave Little Tailor" and classic 1930s Mickey than anything else I've seen in the past 20-some years.