We haven't done a Blu-ray review in a long time, and there is an upcoming Blu-ray about ready to hit the market (which you got early if you were a Disney Movie Club member)....Mickey and Minnie.
With this year being the 100th anniversary of the Walt Disney Company which was founded on animation with the Alice in Cartoonland Comedies, Disney is going all out celebrating this milestone with many events including home video releases. Most have been re-releases of famous films with limited 100 years packaging and a 4k set for Cinderella is coming out soon as part of this series, but it seems that Disney is looking at releasing a series of Blu-rays featuring the cartoon shorts. The package hints at more volumes as it says vol 1 on the cover, and what better way to start out a series of releases than how it all really got started....with a mouse.......
Disney in the last decade had been very skimpy when it comes to access of their classic cartoon library. Sure all of the feature length films are out (well, almost all of them anyways), but only a handful of cartoon shorts have been out there. I won't bore you with statistics but in general there is usually 65 or so shorts circulating around in some form whether it was Disney Channel's Have a Laugh, TCM, or even streaming. Home video releases after around 2009 have been even more skimpy with only a handful of releases. The first big one would be the Celebrating Mickey back in 2018, which has now morphed into a DMC exclusive Best of Mickey release, but outside of bonus shorts for other featurettes like Mickey's Christmas Carol and Olaf's Frozen Adventure, Blu-ray releases of these shorts were lack luster. We hope this set changes that.
At first glance, it does look like a beautiful set with a very attractive art cover of Mickey and Minnie in classic form. Compared to Celebrating Mickey's cover which I'm sorry, it's awful, and while the packaging to the Disney Treasures was cool, the art cover as a result was not to write home about. One would be disappointed to see that it's not that comprehensible, just 10 or so cartoons, and many of which we've seen over and over again. Disney tends to release Steamboat Willie on home video usually to commemorate an anniversary such as Walt Disney's 100th birthday, Disneyland's 50th, and Mickey's 90th. This release is no exception.
As I've often stated many times that Disney cartoons are very beautifully animated and charming, but with the exception of cartoons like Donald Duck and Goofy, they're really not all that funny. While Disney has tried to correct this in recent years, the shorts presented here were somewhat past the Mickey Mania days. But that doesn't mean that there is anything bad about these shorts. Classics such as On Ice, Brave Little Tailor, and The Little Whirlwind (with the short lived mouse like designs of Mickey and Minnie) are represented here. A welcomed surprise are the two Figaro shorts that Minnie appeared in as they were never restored in HD prior to this release.
Restorations, of course, has been controversial at Disney. While Disney has an excellent track record preserving their films, getting them restored is a different story. They tend to go farther into restoring them by wiping off any cel dust, changing colors, and eliminating film grain. The idea is to make them look like new cartoons as opposed to looking how they originally did. Some films such as The Sword and the Stone and Cinderella suffered the worst. The shorts remastered in HD are somewhat not an exception, but it varies. Some still have their cel dust, some still have grain, and some feel like Technicolor. My guess as to why they didn't go further is that the shorts were never mainstream to begin with unlike the features, so they left more things alone. But still there were some controversies such as photoshopped and fake titles (and before anybody asks, yes On Ice and Thru the Mirror still have the new title cards). For this release, the shorts dissolve in instead of the usual cut to. It's not a major grip, but nit pickers may be upset to know this since this wasn't how they appeared originally (especially Steamboat Willie). The only bonus feature on here is that each short has a new introduction by Mickey and Minnie. There really isn't any historical information on these, just VOs of Mickey and Minnie talking about looking back on their memories in a scrapbook which shows clips of each short you're about to see. Some of our 80's and 90's Disney fans may get a nostalgia trip as these may remind them of interstitials used on the Cartoon Classics VHS releases from the 80's. You will see older transfers of Bath Day and Figaro and Frankie on these bumpers, but have no fear, they are presented in newly restored HD.
It's not a perfect release, it's not too comprehensive, and it actually overlaps at times with Celebrating Mickey, but it is a nice collectible gift set for the Pixie Duster in your family to help celebrate Disney's 100th Anniversary. And hey, hopefully this will lead to more releases; there are still TONS of shorts left to be released on Blu-ray.
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