Great thread,
@_caleb! Thanks for creating it!
As I’ve already made clear, I adore the new Mickey shorts, together with the holiday and seasonal specials associated with them. They are charming, interesting, and very funny, and they’re also packed with affectionate references to Disney’s back catalogue and theme parks. The continual and sincere homage they pay to Disney tradition is, to me at least, very much at odds with the notion that they are somehow disrespectful to Mickey et al.
As to the reasons for this (mis)characterisation, people usually point to the “crude”
Ren & Stimpy-style animation. It’s easy to focus on a few stills that bear out this comparison, but the overall tone of the shorts really is quite unlike the relentlessly icky approach of
Ren & Stimpy (which, full disclosure, I also really enjoy). I’ve used the word already, but “charming” is the first adjective that comes to mind when I think of the shorts, and that to me is a deeply Disney quality.
Needless to say, the classic hand-drawn shorts of the past century remain technically unequalled and charming in a way that’s all their own. But I like the fact that the Rudish reboot is attempting something new that builds on this legacy rather than trying to rehash it. The biggest difference lies in the new shorts’ much more frenetic humour, which picks up on some of the energy and fun of the very earliest Mickey shorts before Mickey settled into a more sedate figure.
I personally see no difficulty in enjoying these different iterations of Mickey and his friends on their own terms and merits. Indeed, such creative reinterpretations are what allow the characters to remain fresh and vital after all this time (nearly a century!). I look forward to more from Rudish and to seeing whatever future generations of artists come up with in Mickey’s evolving story.
ETA: As to which design I like best, there’s something very appealing to me about ’50s Mickey—his bigger nose is cute—though the shorts of that era are probably among the weakest:
