Art in Translation

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Mickey Mouse Anniversary Show (La fabuleuse

histoire de Mickey)

Jacques Aumont & Sylvie Pierre Ulmann

To cite this article: Jacques Aumont & Sylvie Pierre Ulmann (2016) Mickey Mouse
Anniversary Show (La fabuleuse histoire de Mickey), Art in Translation, 8:1, 92-94, DOI:
10.1080/17561310.2016.1143713

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17561310.2016.1143713

Published online: 13 May 2016.

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 Art in Translation, 2016
Volume 8, Issue 1, pp. 92–94, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17561310.2016.1143713
© 2016 Taylor and Francis
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Mickey Mouse
Anniversary Show
(La fabuleuse
histoire de
Jacques Aumont and
Sylvie Pierre Ulmann Mickey)
Translated by Abstract
Vivien Groves
This is a 1970 review of the Mickey Mouse Anniversary Show (1968),
First published in French as released in France as La fabuleuse histoire de Mickey. The assessment
“Mickey Mouse Anniversary
Show (La fabuleuse histoire is critical, but not dismissive of the film. It raises issues surrounding
de Mickey)”, Cahiers du Mickey Mouse and Disney within the context of Hollywood, as well
cinéma 224 (October 1970): as the structure and function of the pseudo-historical, hagiographic
64. “compendium film.”
 Mickey Mouse Anniversary Show 93

KEYWORDS:  Jacques Aumont, Sylvie Pierre Ulmann, Walt Disney,

Mickey Mouse Anniversary Show / La fabuleuse histoire de Mickey,
Hollywood “mythology”, compendium films

Introduction by Barnaby Dicker (Royal College of Art)

The Mickey Mouse Anniversary Show was originally produced and

aired in 1968 as an episode of the television series Walt Disney’s Won-
derful World of Color. Marking the 40th anniversary of Mickey Mouse,
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the episode was given a cinema release outside America. This short,
dense, spikey review presents the response of Cahiers du cinéma by two
of its editors. With post-1968 political energy still very much in evi-
dence, the assessment is tough, but not dismissive, permitting Mickey
substantial agency and a certain dignity in his character and life-story.
Indeed, beneath the criticisms, Jacques Aumont and Sylvie Pierre Ul-
mann point to highly valuable issues around ideological discourse. On
the one hand, this relates specifically to Mickey Mouse and Disney with-
in the context of Hollywood; on the other, to the structure and function
of the pseudo-historical, hagiographic “compendium film.”

Mickey Mouse Anniversary Show (La fabuleuse histoire

de Mickey) by Jacques Aumont and Sylvie Pierre Ulmann

The relative failure (including the question of the number of ticket sales
in Paris cinemas) of this Disney compilation of film clips, dating from
Mickey’s début up to 1948, of course stems from the ambiguity of its
objective: it is consecutively, or simultaneously, a children’s film (albe-
it one that cannot decide whether it is didactic or distractive); a film
for adults (nostalgic for the 1930s and the books they read in their
childhood); and additionally, a film for perverse intellectuals ([drawn
to] the somewhat faded glamour of the strip cartoon genre). Therefore,
nobody fully benefits from it, with the most serious failure occurring at
the didactic level, which could have offered something other than the
semblance of an unveiling of certain “tricks of the trade” associated
with animation production. At the very least, the selected films and ex-
tracts could have been put more precisely into historical context; but, of
course, from the moment when this hagiographical project (and the role
played by nostalgic compassion) became too cumbersome, it could not
have been handled any other way, so that this film, in which Hollywood
focuses on the rise of one of its own myths with fascinated astonish-
ment (obviously without interrogating said myth, or even indicating
the consequences), could emerge (as if having been appropriated by an
external source) as something other than a discourse on ­complacency
and self-reassurance (despite the final sequence shot at Disneyland
 94 Jacques Aumont and Sylvie Pierre Ulmann

­ ffering nothing particularly reassuring, nor especially cheerful). There

o
is ­compensation for this shortcoming: because the process of combining
the clips frequently allows for the inclusion of complete quotations, the
importance of Mickey can be determined, in his capacity as (1) a totally
mastered creation: particularly memorable in this regard is the sequence
where Disney illustrates his principle of “plausible impossibility”—that
is, the task of making the implausible seem natural, which is the exact
automated counterpart of the task of making the ideological seem plau-
sible in fiction films; (2) an industrial creation, incorporating the actual
“hard graft of the invention”, as already sufficiently evidenced by the
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film anthology in question; (3) an anonymous creation, a pure “dose

of ideology”, sustaining itself in the early days of talking pictures by
means of liberated, speedy and unconventional behaviour [de la ­liberté
d’allures ambiante] (at a time when anything was permissible in cin-
ema), and descending into inane mawkishness in the post-war years
through the progressive intrusion of an animal-protector sentimentality
(see the cartoon short, Mickey and the Seal); this was to the detriment
of rigorous naturalism (Mickey’s Service Station), exuberance (Mickey’s
Fire Brigade), and even plastic beauty (Lonesome Ghosts). Above all, by
means of his specific, anthropomorphic coding, Mickey becomes estab-
lished here as the most realistic representation of the average American,
the like of which has never been seen in the cinema: always placed
in highly concrete situations (the inverse of the abstractions found in
cartoons of the “Tom and Jerry” kind, which are based on a pure logic
of binary conflict), this comic hero is the most sedately super-adapted
there is (a genuine one-man-band, he can do everything). Hence, he
is incompatible with the realms of the “fantastic”, “dream”, and “po-
etry”, as if, with Mickey, animation had everything to gain in strictly
confining itself to mining its realistic dimension.