Mickey, Donald, and Goofy: The Three Musketeers
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Synopsis
Best buddies Mickey, Donald and Goofy are small-time janitors with big dreams of becoming Musketeers. They may not look like heroes, but, powered by teamwork and friendship, they soon discover they can accomplish anything if they work together. Packed with six rousing songs and now fully-restored with new and classic bonus features, this heartwarming family film is better than ever on Disney Blu-ray and High-Def Digital. It's All for Fun and Fun for All!
Picture 9/10
Disney presents their animated straight-to-video version of The Three Musketeers to Blu-ray, presenting the 1080p/24hz high-definition transfer in the aspect ratio of about 1.78:1 on a single-layer disc.
It has a fine looking transfer. The image is sharp and lines are distinctly and crisply rendered, while backgrounds deliver some noticeable textures in the artwork. Colours are sharp and bold and blacks look rich and inky. The animation looks fine and moves smoothly and there aren’t any artifacts or any problems apparent from any digital manipulation. There isn’t any damage present, though I suspect the film comes from a digital source.
I was certainly pleased with the image, though I wasn’t exactly wowed by it. It looks as it should for an animated feature and doesn’t suffer from any of the heavy filtering other Disney releases can.
Audio 8/10
The film comes with a pleasant and nicely mixed 5.1 DTS-HD MA. It’s not showy and remains front heavy, but there is some clever use of the surrounds here and there, with voices and clear sound effects mixed nicely to the rear speakers. Music creeps back as well and moves around nicely. Audio quality is good as is dynamic range. Overall it’s simple but nicely mixed.
Extras 3/10
Shockingly there are a few things on here (this thing is stacked in comparison to Hercules!) though I don’t know if much of it will be worthwhile to anybody, young or old.
Get Up and Dance! opens the supplements and it is a bizarre feature, a dance video featuring three children for the film’s opening number. It’s new to this release and aimed for kids, naturally, but it’s such a bizarre feature and I’m at a loss as to why time and effort and money was put into it. It also runs less than 2-minutes.
Next there are 5-minutes’ worth of deleted scenes. They’re presented as animatics or rough pencil test animations and there’s even one that has been completed. They also come with an optional commentary by one of the executive producers. It was interesting to see that they actually intended to open the film in a nod to the classic Disney pictures with a book opening and presenting the story (the commentary mentions it was actually going to be live action and they even had the book designed and built.) Past that the scenes offer nothing else of value. The commentary just explains why the scenes were cut, usually because the scenes killed the pace.
The cast commentary is a cute idea which might work for kids but will feel a bit tired for adults. Basically the voice actors are in character of Mickey, Donald, Goofy, and Pete and they talk over a scene early on in the film. Basically they complain about working with each other, the difficulties of the director, doing stunts, and so on. It’s cute but thankfully only runs 5-minutes. If it covered the whole film I doubt I could have made it through.
The disc then has an aggravatingly annoying Making-of that runs about 10-minutes. It’s of course an EPK piece with only a few interesting factoids, like the fact this is something that’s been in gestation for a while, possibly being something Walt Disney himself wanted to do early on. It’s an annoying set-up, though, with a “reporter” working as the narrator, interviewing those involved and most of the interviews feel too phony and scripted. Otherwise it goes through the usual motions of development.
The disc then closes with another Disney Song Selection, which presents songs from the film complete with subtitles for the lyrics.
And that closes the supplements off. None of it is really worthwhile and I really have to question who it was all targeted at.
Closing
A bizarre out of left field release for Blu-ray with some odd supplements. But the presentation at least looks lovely.
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