The Mickey Mouse shorts
/ Movies, Music, and TV
If the victor of the cartoon wars of the thirties and forties was Warner Bros. or Disney is entirely subjective. On one hand, Warner’s shorts—Bugs, Daffy, et al.—are still more omnipresent than what Disney produced. On the flip-side, Disney has been a feature-length animation juggernaut since Snow White so it wouldn’t be outlandish to call it a draw.1
Me, I’m into the recent Mickey Mouse shorts. They maintain the sensibilities of the late-twenties/early-thirties cartoons, with similar character designs to the classics, and stories in the vein of Steamboat Willy. To wit…
These new shorts feel more like something seen in today’s alternative animation, and with the atrocities Disney has performed with the characters over the years, it’s nice to see them coming back to their roots.
1 Disney’s standalone shorts, Silly Symphonies, artistically trump any of the others, but that’s neither here nor there.