>The Sorcerer's Apprentice was in part an attempt to rehabilitate Mickey Mouse, who was becoming increasingly irrelevant as the 1930s drew on. In a sense, Mickey never really survived Disney's transition into color animation beginning in 1932. Animator Ward Kimball recalled "As we brought out new characters and got more personality, Mickey became harder to cope with." Fritz Freleng considered Mickey "a complete nothing" once you got past the initial novelty of animation. "You just see a drawing on screen and don't identify with the character in any way." Disney animators took to calling him a "Boy Scout" in reference to his blandness.
>Donald Duck had clearly become the star by mid-decade, but Walt Disney was still hopeful that Mickey could be rehabilitated, so in 1937 he commissioned Kimball and Fred Moore to redesign the character to look more visually appealing. This resulted in the familiar Mickey Mouse we know today. Yet in the end it was merely a symptom of Mickey's transition from the impish character of Steamboat Willy to little more than a corporate mascot. Writer John Updike, who considered the original Mickey "a representation of the American character--plucky, resilient, good-natured, inventive, put-on, game" to have been completely neutered by this point and "the last remnants of his rude energy were gone."
>In summation, the old Chaplin-like devilry had been pretty well expunged from Mickey by the late '30s (though to be fair Chaplin himself had lost most of his devilry by that time). Despite approving the redesign, Walt would admit he hadn't entirely solved the Mickey problem. "We got tired and had new characters to play with." he would say years later. Only two Mickey shorts were produced during WWII and Walt stopped even voicing the character himself shortly after the war.
>Donald Duck had clearly become the star by mid-decade Donald is still the true star. Mickey is purely corporate mascot known for being a face and selling some merch then his actual projects Donald is still selling comics where he's Disney's face in those countries, stars in shows himself, has to carry Mickey's shows like in House of Mouse or MM 13. It's clear Donald is still the most popular and the mouse will likely never overcome that because corporate is too scared to give him much personality
Xavier Allen
Like 2000 but actually good.
Hunter Stewart
Mickey was fine, it's just that the writers were shit at giving him good stories as time went on. That's why a lot of the Mickey shorts from later on often became ensemble scenarios without much focus. There are in fact good Mickey shorts from the late 30s though.
Blake Butler
Mickey was mostly just an everyman placeholder for generic stories like "Guy gets his car repaired" or "Guy goes to baseball game."
Andrew Adams
I feel like Fantasia 2000 was made at the wrong time, especially with their attempts to incorporate CGI in the shorts.
As much as I love 2D, it would be really cool to see how experimental they could get with current CG technology set to classical music, instead of the awkward CG that we ended up getting with 2000.
>though to be fair Chaplin himself had lost most of his devilry by that time
Oh you know, he got older and lost that youthful edge and started increasingly making self-indulgent movies that were just a vehicle for his political beliefs.
Angel Miller
With a huge, stringless budget and unlimited creative freedom. The thing that's so good about Fantasia was that the studio had free reign to experiment with art and animation, as there are techniques used in Fantasia that are still too laborous or expensive to recreate. Fantasia also didn't rely on rigid narrative structures, which is where Fantasia 2000 failed. Almost all Fantasia segments told stories as a series of interconnected moments tied together by music with no real plot, whereas in 2000 nearly everything had a conventional plot with introductions, conflicts, climaxes, and endings. The outlier from Fantasia is the Sorcerer's Apprentice and the outlier for 2000 is Pines of Rome, but everything else in 2000 tried too hard to be another SA and not attempted to be more like PoR.
Hunter Young
That happened because Walt was no accountant or businessman and just believed in cost-no-object animation. It's impossible to do that today when modern Disney has to pay attention to corporate bean counters and ensure stuff doesn't go over budget.
Of course that's not to say it was a sustainable idea; Disney lost money on every prewar movie and Dumbo was made on a considerably smaller budget after the extravagences of Snow White/Pinocchio/Fantasia.
Mason Howard
mickey works well in the new series of shorts because it rarely ever leaves mickey to carry the whole story on his own the mickey-donald-goofy trinity is divine
Connor Ramirez
Firebird tried to be another Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria and it worked.
Anthony Green
>Walt made one last fix. That January, he met with Bill Cotrell and Jaxon and Ted Sears, Dorothy Blank, and Dick Creedon of the story department to discuss the idea of Jiminy Cricket becoming not just the moral center but the narrator of the film. "I kind of like that where he starts to tell a story in this little prologue affair some way." Walt said, then proceeded to describe Jiminy's new entrance as the camera tracks through the village and into Geppetto's window while Jiminy sings "When You Wish Upon a Star," stopping to tell his story. This tracking scene would, in the final film, be one of the most striking uses of the multiplane camera, and it wound up costing $50k.[87]
Adjusted for inflation that's almost a million bucks today. Imagine spending that much on just one relatively short scene in a movie.
Anthony Bailey
Imagine if the technology of "The Lion King" (2019) were utilized for something other than realism.
Nicholas Howard
first of all, how fucking dare you
Henry Foster
>It's impossible to do that today when modern Disney has to pay attention to corporate bean counters and ensure stuff doesn't go over budget. Also instead of following one man's autistic personal vision, they have to pay attention to focus groups, toy companies, and dye-haired roasties to ensure the movie doesn't scare children or the Chinese government will censor it or so-and-so character's dialog promotes toxic masculinity.
Robert Brown
It's quite simple. You don't and you let these properties fall into the public domain like Fleischer now that their rightful creators are long dead and the general public is far from interested.
I would not trust modern Disney with a Fantasia film
Dominic Price
>the mickey-donald-goofy trinity is divine Mainly the Donald-Goofy combo if we're real, Mickey is kind of the tagalong character in term of appeal while the other two are the real characters that Mickey sets up jokes for There's a reason people worship the Caballeros or Goofy's pairings in Goofy Movie. They bring characters that have more exciting and appealing characteristics then the Mouse
Joshua Torres
Not 3D
Mason Torres
more like mickey works because he's written better
Jace Lopez
Much later on, Sleeping Beauty almost drove the studio into receivership and forced them to sacrifice the theatrical short division, admittedly not a big loss since theatrical shorts were a dying medium by that time.
Dominic Lee
Ironic that nowadays before Corona Disney could buy anything that wasn't a multi-billion dollar corp Honestly it amazes me that Disneyland and the parks didn't outright destroy the company
Easton Turner
you need the straight man tho
Brandon Long
At one time, Droopy from SW was considered here in place of Mickey.
Jack Perry
Not really, Bald Mountain/Ave Maria has a story with a theme but no real plot, while Firebird has a pretty clear plot following a conventional narrative. Firebird is similar thematically to Bald Mountain/Ave Maria, but they're not the same.
Caleb Bennett
Honestly Bob Iger's buying binge wasn't sustainable either and is biting them in the ass hard since most of the properties he bought have been unmitigated money sinks.
Isaac Sullivan
Even if so the straight man is always the one who is seen as just there and the least popular With the Bugs/Daffy/Porky trio, how many times do you see Porky, the designated straight man, brought up compared to the other two?
Kayden Collins
how many cartoons had a bugs/daffy/porky trio? i cant think of a single short
Nathaniel Morris
the closest was bugs teaming up with Porky in the first half of the Fantasia dissparody and Bugs making an end cameo at the end of a Porky and Daffy pairing short
