Mickey's Christmas Carol (1983)

Adapted from a novella published in 1843, Mickey's Christmas Carol arrives with a pedigree that predates the entire apparatus of modern cultural auditing. Burny Mattinson directs a twenty-six minute featurette in which Scrooge McDuck, a duck, plays Ebenezer Scrooge, and the rest of the ensemble is drawn from the studio's back catalogue: Jiminy Cricket as the Ghost of Christmas Past, Goofy as a shackled Marley, Mickey Mouse demoted to a supporting turn as Bob Cratchit. It was the first original Mickey theatrical cartoon in three decades. It was released in 1983, alongside a reissue of The Rescuers. It was, by any measure, an exercise in heritage management.

Within those constraints the film behaves exactly as a Victorian morality tale behaves. Scrooge withholds charity, forecloses on a honeymoon cottage, is dragged toward a gravestone, repents, and buys a turkey. The lesson concerns generosity, and it arrives through Dickens, not through the film's own voice. Siskel and Ebert gave it two thumbs down, complaining that Mickey was underused and that the whole affair felt like a forced march with no ironic spin. They were correct about the march. They were perhaps too charitable in assuming irony was wanted.

A search of the frame for contemporary sensibility returns nothing. The cast is a congress of anthropomorphic legacies, selected for brand continuity. Daisy Duck appears as Isabelle, then leaves. Tiny Tim uses a crutch because Dickens wrote him that way, and the film treats his illness as sorrow, not as discourse. The weasels dig graves. The moral is kindness to the poor at Christmas, an idea roughly as old as charity itself and innocent of any modern polemic. I score this at zero across the board, without hesitation and without pleasure. It is a well-made cartoon about a duck learning to be nice. The sommelier sets down the glass.