‘Mickey: The Story of a Mouse’ Film Review: Disney Doc Explores Character, Icon, Ubiquitous Mascot
thewrap.com(“Mickey Mouse in the Gurs Internment Camp”), a 15-page booklet that shows Mickey in the camps alongside other Jewish prisoners under threat of being Jewish himself.
The piece ends with Mickey deciding not to be Jewish, redrawing himself as escaping the camp, and walking back to America. In the documentary, this is framed as “Mickey disappears.” (Horst, on the other hand, was executed.)Though “Mickey” is not interested in the redemption (or renewal) of Walt Disney, neither does it suggest that Mickey himself needs any type of rehabilitation.
He is a character who tries; he is always trying, and when he fails, he does so in the spirit of trying. In 1989, Disney threatened litigation toward three day-care centers in Hallandale, Florida, whose outer walls had been painted with larger-than-life murals of Mickey and friends.
To the disappointment of the children at the centers, the copyrighted cartoons were removed. “[I]t’s totally ludicrous,” Erika Scotti, one of the centers’s directors, said at the time. “I’d rather have everyone’s energy going to […] a new curriculum.”This incident is framed a bit differently by the Disney archivists. “I wouldn’t say that we’ve handled every situation perfectly, but there’s really no precedent for a creation like this when it comes to copyright.
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