Mar 29, 2014

Second Season of Mickey Mouse Shorts to Begin in April

The second season of Mickey Mouse shorts will air on the Disney Channel on April 11 at 9 p.m. ET/PT. Each short film will be available the day after its cable premiere on WATCH Disney Channel, Disney.com, iTunes, and YouTube. Some of the shorts are Minnie-centric this year, such as "Eau de Minnie," in which Minnie's new perfume jacks up the town. It is unclear how many shorts will be in the second season, but the first season, which debuted last March, had a total of 18 shorts.

Here's a preview of the second season opener, "Cable Car Chaos":

The same creative team will be in charge of the second season: Paul Rudish will executive produce and direct some shorts, Clay Morrow and Aaron Springer lead director, and Joseph Holt will serve as art director.

These Mickey shorts are quirky projects. Most are four minutes or less, an unusual format for a studio these days, and do not seem to fit into Disney's overall strategy for classic characters. Whatever the intentions behind the film, I for one am glad it exists. Because the best of the bunch ranks among the funniest and most engaging studio shorts produced in the modern era.

The short is packed with personality and perspective, elements that were missing from the more well-known Oscar-nominated theatrical Mickey short "Get A Horse." While lacking the full animation budget of the latter, these shorts exhibit a different kind of fine craftsmanship, with custom-made facial expressions and poses for each animation, sharply timed gags, and gorgeous (if occasionally dissonant) backgrounds.

To their credit, the team behind the shorts is confident in their modern take on Mickey and the gang and not afraid to try something new. In one of the late-first-season episodes, "Flipper Bootooth," the impressively silly gag goes on and on, eventually lasting 50 seconds; in "Bad Ear Day," after Mickey loses his hearing, we, the audience, hear only muffled sounds. One of the most tasteful (and sweetest) shorts of the first season, "O Sole Minnie," is in Italian. These playful gags push the format forward in a way that is all too rare in mainstream animated television today.

There is still room for improvement. Hopefully, the second season will see more comical interactions between characters without relying too heavily on frenetic action scenes with questionable comic payoffs, as in the first season. In many of the shorts, the characters were randomly chasing objects and avoiding each other, neglecting one of the most effective devices for creating comedy: characters bumping into each other, both figuratively and literally.