In 1984, Jeffrey Katzenberg was appointed chairman of The Walt Disney Studios during the final production stages of The Black Cauldron, meaning at a time when Disney was far from its heyday and its theatrical animated releases were performing poorly at the box office. Fortunately, through Katzenberg’s new managerial approaches and upcoming blockbuster projects that would achieve commercial and critical success — for instance, dropping The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin between 1989 and 1992 alone — the prestigious company was able to establish a new glory that is now usually referred to as the Disney Renaissance or its Second Golden Age. But as the Mouse House and Katzenberg were at this time primarily focused on and occupied with their next extravagant project, The Lion King, Kevin Lima — one of the studio’s young, diligent animators — was working on his directorial debut: A Goofy Movie, an obvious underdog project with a relatively low budget and little hope of meaningful success. The film was primarily greenlit as something of an experiment, a theatrical extension of the Disney Channel’s Goof Troop and a dream gig for Lima. Unlike other Disney animated productions to arrive during this so-called renaissance, then, A Goofy Movie wasn’t rooted in fairytale reimaginings or sagas of heroes and villains, but was more simply a family story and a modern-day, somewhat hipper perspective on Goofy’s accustomed slapstick and his teenage son Max — half coming-of-age tale and half road-trip narrative about a father-son relationship.
Fast forward to the movie’s 30th anniversary, and viewers have now been given Eric Kimelton (Lima’s nephew) and Christopher Ninness’ documentary Not Just a Goof, which features unprecedented all-access to Lima’s private archive and collection of multiple old interviews, behind-the-scenes video tape footage, early cuts, clean-up animations, and unused music from the film. This is all delivered in combination with plenty of contemporary talking head interviews with Lima and the original creative team — such as Steve Moore (storyboard artist), Bruce Smith (character designer), Gregory Perler (editor), Dan Rounds (producer), Bill Farmer (Goofy voice-actor), Jason Marsden (Max voice-actor), etc. — as well as a series of lighthearted and humorous new animation sequences. Kimelton and Ninness’ goals with Not a Goof are modest and straightforward: deliver a making-of accounting — both of A Goofy Movie specifically and a generation’s Disney nostalgia more broadly — and explore everything from the painstaking process of storyboarding and animating to time-intensive processes of voice-acting, music composition, and rendered dance sequences to unpredictable obstacles and the fundamental repetition of endless decision-making and revision. Given these ambitions, then, it’s somewhat surprising that Not Just a Goof offers viewers not only an insightfully on-point and colorfully detailed documentary, but more importantly, a genuinely emotional one that remains true to the original spirit of Goofy and Max’s bumpy road trip/relationship.
In this way, Not Just a Goof seems to take inspiration from the work it’s surveying, following a similar narrative trajectory that rides waves of love, doubt, failure, and success, before gradually moving from the very notion of misunderstanding: whether between the artists’ authentic visions and their contrasting ideas with Katzenberg, or from the fact that A Goofy Movie initially faced negative critical reception upon its theatrical release (Roger Ebert being one of its few defenders), before its later re-appraisal, being revered in innumerable YouTube fan videos or praised en masse by thousands of diehard enthusiasts at D23 Expo. This reflects what many of a certain age already knew: that A Goofy Movie is an object of Millennial affection and a gem of a Disney film in its own right, one that shouldn’t have had to wait decades to receive proper assessment. Indeed, both A Goofy Movie and Not Just a Goof are, well, more than goof, as the former has at this point essentially become something of a cult classic of Disney animation, while Kimelton and Ninness’ film succeeds as a sincere tribute to a little miracle that once seemed a mere blip amongst the ‘90s monolith of high-profile Disney projects.
DIRECTOR: Eric Kimelton & Christopher Ninness; CAST: ddd; DISTRIBUTOR: Disney+; STREAMING: April 7; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 28 min.
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