A Goofy Movie (1995)

A Goofy Movie arrived in 1995 as something close to a contractual obligation, a spin-off of the Disney Afternoon series Goof Troop, granted a smaller budget than the studio's real ambitions that year and released into a marketplace that still had Bad Boys in it. Kevin Lima's directorial debut concerns a fourteen-year-old boy, a widowed father, a fishing trip to Idaho, and a lie about a pop concert. The critics of the day found it rambling. The public, eventually, found it charming. Such is the way of these things.

The film's preoccupations are entirely domestic. Max wants to be popular, to impress Roxanne, and to escape the gravitational pull of his father's laugh. Goofy wants to connect with a son who no longer fits in his lap. The women in the cast exist to be admired from a distance or to offer encouragement from the bleachers. The narrative engine is embarrassment, not ideology. Nobody here has a theory about power. The closest the film comes to a thesis is that fathers and sons should listen to each other, a proposition unlikely to unsettle any political order currently in operation.

We are left, then, with a clean sheet. There is no representation project, no queerness, no feminist argument, no racial reckoning, no environmental sermon, no critique of wealth, no body-positive messaging, no neurodivergent coding, no rewriting of the historical record, and no lecture. A direct-to-video sequel followed in 2000, and a documentary about its making appeared three decades on, and neither development has retroactively installed any of the above. It is a cartoon about a man in a hat who cannot stop embarrassing his child, and it commits to that premise with a sincerity the current classification apparatus has no use for. The sheet stays clean.