This would be the second Christmas movie I've seen where the central characters are implied to be Jewish-American. (The first movie would be 'Gremlins', which I've talked about on my blog before.) I'd heard about MouseHunt and its trained mice from this TV show called 'Movie Magic'--in Spanish it was called 'La magia del cine'--[a look behind the curtain, practical and newly developing digital effects of the famous movies at the time]. I loved animals, so I always wanted to see it, but we didn't have the internet at the time, at least not in the way that it exists now. (Note: As of April 2026, MouseHunt was available on the Internet Archive.) When my friend told me that it had been their comfort movie as a kid I thought it would be the perfect time for us to watch it, and I was not disappointed. Even though I had waited for it my whole life.
There are so many good things about this film, in no particular order, so I will just type them out as I think of them. The humour, to begin with, much of it slapstick, some of it mature--by this I do not necessarily mean sexual, though there is that too, in a way that has not aged as well as the rest, ha--rather, in the form that it deals with the problems and ambitions of adults, but might go over a kid's head. Unforeseen professional catastrophe, the parental mandate to continue the family business and not abandon each other, sibling rivalries and resentments, broken promises, relationships that break down because of money, the division of inheritance and debt, etc. All the while trying to beat a mouse to death with a hammer. It would have been sad if the narrative hadn't established early on the immortality of the mouse, which is revealed, near the end, to be magical, or supernatural, and never actually explained. The viewer laughs at the brothers and suffers along with them as they lose their fortune entirely, and through the mouse's intervention, achieve success they could not have dreamed of--not only wealth, but family harmony, personal and professional fulfillment. A humorous interpretation of the Book of Job?
The materiality stood out, to my 21st century eyes--the factory, the twine, the workers, the wardrobe, the acting. I wonder if it would have been an odd thing to say at the time that it came out, but everything felt as though it physically existed, as though it had been made, as though it occupied a space. It's a problem with many commercial films of our age, that even when not all, or not most of the props are digital, they feel as if they were because of editing or because of the absurdly high definition of cameras and screens. It's just so pleasurable to look at. Adding this to my favourites.
