Mickey: The Story of a Mouse: A Surface Level Look At An Icon

Since Disney+’s launch in 2019, there have been multiple documentaries that Disney has released about what they do within the many varied subsets of the company. The Imagineering Story and Behind the Attraction focus on the various parks, Marvel’s Assembled series focuses on how the various shows and movies from Marvel Studios are made, and specials or series like Disney Gallery and Embrace the Panda focus on their other projects. Mickey: The Story of a Mouse similarly covers the history of shorts character turned company mascot Mickey Mouse and, while there are some interesting parts of the story that are addressed, the documentary does not dive deep enough into the vast history of the character.

The documentary pitches itself to the viewer in its thesis that it will tell the story of Mickey Mouse from his inception to the present and not shy away from some of the darker aspects of the character. To the documentary’s credit, it does not shy away from the copyright controversies and the various other issues that have plagued the character, however the way the documentary is broken up no topic gets explored as deeply as they should have. For example, the documentary does address that the symbol of Mickey Mouse was co-opted by counterculture movements, however it does not take the appropriate time to further address the topic in any way which requires the viewer to go and do further research.

The other major point that the documentary brings up that should have been explored further was the evolution of Mickey as a character between his arrival in 1928 and 1953 when Disney benched the character until Mickey’s Christmas Carol. They do briefly address that the character needed to change personalities based on audience response and how his auxiliary cast gained the traits that were taken away to make him more palatable. It would be interesting to have seen a film historian like Leonard Maltin explore the difference between a character like Mickey and characters like Bugs Bunny at Warner Brothers or Tom & Jerry at MGM from the same era. This would have further highlighted the difference between Disney’s handling of Mickey and the other studios.

In total transparency, it was unlikely that something like that was ever going to happen considering it would have possibly not reflected well on Walt Disney himself and, in the same way an authorized documentary about Apple is unlikely to disparage Steve Jobs, the producers would not have been given the same access they got within the Walt Disney Company if they did not portray the founder of the company well. The documentary would have been better served as a series, however the issue becomes if any aspect of the documentary is expanded, it becomes unflattering to Disney. For example, there are laughable moments where they try to explain why they were/are so harsh with copyright and when Universal retained the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, it is portrayed as a massive sin for Walt to not be given the rights to the character while as we speak Disney is fielding allegations and is locked into litigation about how they treat their work for hire partners at Marvel Entertainment.

Much like Light and Magic and The Imagineering Story, things taken in documentaries like this should be taken with a Space Mountain-sized grain of salt. These documentaries are designed to raise awareness for the various brands while acknowledging some of the problems they’ve encountered in the past. It would have been interesting to see a lot of these topics explored in greater detail, however there is plenty of additional reading or podcasts that do explore these topics. If the history of early Disney is of interest, The Queens of Animation by Nathalia Holt is worth a read while the briefly touched on “Yippie Invasion” of Disneyland is greater explored in a series currently running on the Disney History Institute Podcast. If a viewer is looking for a cursory and surface level introduction to the history of Disney, this is worth a watch.

Final Rating: 7.5/10

Mickey: The Story of a Mouse debuts on Disney+ on November 18th.