Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers (2004)

Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers arrived in 2004 as a direct-to-video feature, which is the correct destination for it. Donovan Cook directs a loose pass at Dumas, in which three janitors are promoted to royal bodyguard by a scheming Captain Pete who assumes their incompetence will bury his coup along with them. There are songs. There is a carriage chase, a tower, a flooding dungeon, an opera house, and a tortoise narrator who reads the whole business out of a comic book. The animation is serviceable, the slapstick is loud, and the affair runs on the engine of the 1930s short subject.

An inventory of the film's cultural positions returns almost nothing. The voices are the traditional repertory players. The characters are the traditional characters. Minnie and Daisy are cargo to be recovered and then prizes to be claimed. Goofy's clumsiness is a gag, not a condition. Pete's ambition is a throne, not a market. Nothing here engages race, climate, or the body as a subject. The single romance that develops, between Goofy and Clarabelle Cow, arrives as a punchline about a sudden change of heart.

The result is a film with no argument to make. It is brisk, tuneful, and content to be a cartoon. The mixed notices it collected on release appear to have wanted something more, though more of what remains unclear. We get a tortoise with a comic book, three janitors with swords, and a villain who loses. For a certain viewer, that is sufficient. For the purposes of classification, it is tidy work: a film that leaves no cultural residue and seems entirely at peace with the fact. Some pictures arrive carrying a message. This one arrives carrying a talking dog, and asks for nothing else.

{"thematic_tags": ["book_adaptation"]}