The Wonderful Year of Mickey Mouse: The Wonderful Spring of Mickey Mouse
Hello all you happy people and welcome back to The Wonderful year of Mickey Mouse, a swell look at Paul Ruddish's excellent Mickey Mouse shorts.
It's time for our second seasonal special as spring is here with all the splended sun, gentle winds and crushing anxiety it brings... okay the last part's just me on a given day but it's a pretty neat season and brings us another bountiful anthology on Disney+ to look into.
Spring follows the same formula as Winter: Three shorts, one following the cast in a fantasy setting the other two in everday life tailored to the season, all bound together by a narrator.
The big diffrence is this time the narrator...
Star of Gargoyles, Hazbin Hotel, and Community graces this special with his velvety smooth voice giving the perfect vibes for this special as he always does. Why he hasn't done 80 nature specials instead of morgan freeman I can only assume because he has to fight the minotaur every weekend to keep him from unsealing pazuzu. I don't know his life but i'm sure it's awesome. I've missed talking about him. While his role here is small it's better just by being keith david as most roles are.
Sadly this whole thing can't be about keith david so let's keith david and keith david by talking about keith david.
The first short is once again fantastic: this time the whole gang gets in on it as a bunch of plants and a caterpillar who are wilting away after a long winter and need the mighty rays of the sun who thankfully was replaced after trying to kill Jotaro Kujo and instead is now Dopey from the Seven Dwarves
The Ruddish Shorts have a habit of bringing in characters from classic Disney Films for a quick cameo, Alice from Alice in Wonderland later shows up for croquet, but this is one of the few times i've seen where the character plays a bigger role. There are others, but it's still neat and dopey is geninely endearing as the sun providing needed heat.. and then accidently creating storms when Mickey and Co , forming a delightful little jug band, impress him enough to join on the drums. It's a fun little short where you root for Mickey and co to succeed and finally get their sunshine which they do and donald gets buff for about a minute, goofy becomes a butterfly all that good stuff.
This segment is gorgeously animated and really well designed, I love the little flower designs for everyone and the choices from Daisy as a tulip to keep her pink to donald as literal sour grapes. It's pure adorable.
Speaking of adorable our second segment has everyone enjoying spring: Donalds in a hammock, Goofy's woken from his odinsleep over the winter (Love the full sized bear cave on his lawn) and Mickey and Minnie are gardening but end up being SO dang adorable it overruns into the other two the pollen being a problem for Goofy, can relate, and the vines being an issue for Donald. Mickey and Minnie end up having to clean it up, all works out you get it. This one isn't bad by any means and has a few good gags and I love the little moment where Goofy gives his nose plug to chip n dale because he's just that sweet. We don't get sweet Goofy as much in these so it's always nice when he shows up.
Our final one is my faviorite: it's very close with the first which is very creative and a lot of fun... but it gets into the unhinged nonsense the series is good at and as such made me laugh a LOT. It's time for Spring Cleaning and while Heffer's brother vaccums the cat, Minnie is trying to get Mickey to part with his stuff. And as someone who has more stuff than he probably needs and a slowly filling bookshelf I relate. It also taught me this exists
I REALLY one day need to review all of Mickey's stupid novelty albums.. and talk about how mickey has fucking cakes damn bud. No wonder he wants to hold onto this. I also like the props of picking whatever the hell this is versus his rap album. The latter's the easiest target but more needed to know about Mickey's 80's mixtape that's got an oddly sexual surfing themed cover for some reason. He's soft and wet like prince, got a chain to his board for some reason, mickey is ready to fuck that ocean wave with the intensity and fury of a young Gary Busey and as always i'm totally here for it.
We get better gags than just that: Mickey has built tunnels and when told they need to make an escape tunnel shows one of them is already that, Goofy, Daisy and Donalds Resting Bitch Face show up to help but are turned away for not being at all helpful and Mickey perserves his first churro which later turns into a giant monster.
Not you phil.
It's a perfect use of Mickey's sugary nature in this series: Rather than try and fully get back to his roots as a loveable scamp and cow sex offender or make him a bland corprate mascot, the series instead leans into his clean as mr clean image to make him glurgey and have his over sentiment be a massive issue, while not making him ENTIRELY edgeless. he still gets into scraps or can do stuff, but having him be more the goody good and playign the comedy off that was the right call, letting him not always have to be the straight man like he was in house of mouse. Here Minnie's the straight woman while Mickey, while understandably not wanting to jump everythign int he garbage shoot has a hoarding problem leading to lots of quick effortless gags and a monster climax. I also like the emotinal resolution with Minnie getting Mickey to realize his giving some stuff up gives others memories. It's a nice way to put it and makes me feel better about what i've lost over the years.
Overall wonderful spring is a decent time. None of the series best work, but a fun little spring special to put a spring in your step. Some third spring.
Next Time: We celebrate Asian Pacific Heritage Month baybee with a ton of the excellent foreign language shorts to commemerate the occasion.
