Richard Driscoll, Britain’s most notorious cult filmmaker, has long harboured a dream to make an animated film for children. In the early 2000s, having seen the success of Toy Story and Monsters Inc., one of the titles he bandied about was a proposed animated feature called… Toy Monsters. He’s never subtle about these things.
Twenty years later, Mr D has finally achieved that goal with the online release of a 65-minute feature, surely aimed at the tiniest of tots, clumsily entitled The Adventures of Mickey Sherlock Mouse and Winnie the Pooh. And I say with all deference and humility that it is the Worst Fucking Thing I Have Ever Seen. Driscoll’s other crimes against cinema pale into insignificance beside this utter garbage. I cried with laughter throughout.
So, as we all know, Winnie the Pooh is now in the public domain, as demonstrated by the on-the-ball, surprise success of microbudget British slasher Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. Also in the public realm is the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie. Though not, of course, the character of Mickey Mouse himself.
Driscoll’s character is not Mickey Mouse. It’s Mickey Sherlock Mouse, the grandson of the famous Victorian hero Sherlock Mouse. He wears a yellow raincoat and a woolly hat and, other than being nominally muscine, could not be less like Disney’s iconic character. Pooh wears a blue coat and yellow roll-neck sweater. The other related characters – Tigger, Owl, Rabbit, Eyore [sic], Kanga, Roo and Pixlet [sic] – appear briefly at the start and end. They all live in the 100 Acre Woods, which are a series of forests floating in the air.
When Mickey Mouse (a name that is actually used in the film) is contacted by the King of England, he takes along his friend Winnie the Pooh (never referred to as Pooh Bear). They travel to London in a steampunk airship and touch down in the grounds of Buckingham Palace.
The Crown Jewels have been stolen, and it’s up to Mickey and Pooh to recover them and catch the miscreant. Pooh finds a clue written on the back of a flier advertising a screening of Steamboat Willie: a note to meet at the ‘Circus of Horrors’ at 7pm, signed ‘Ratigan’. Yes, the antagonist is the grandson of Mickey’s grandfather’s nemesis, Ratigan Moriarty. It doesn’t seem to bother Driscoll that, while much of what he plays with here is PD, the idea of a flamboyant, evil rat named Ratigan in a Holmes-ian scenario is lifted straight from Disney’s Basil, the Great Mouse Detective. Also, at one point the pair go to a pub and drink ‘butterbeer’ [(c) JK Rowling.].
At the Circus of Horrors, a spooky abandoned fairground, Pooh and Mickey meet Ratigan who causes them to fall through two holes in the ground. They then spend an inordinate amount of time wandering in separate tunnels before meeting up, then get tied to the front of an underground steam locomotive which will squash them flat, except they escape somehow.
Ratigan, who is an MP(!), plans to sell the Crown Jewels to buy poison gas which he will use to hold London to ransom until the King transfers power to him. Or something. The evil rat, who wears a top hat and cape, has an assistant, a naked blue hairy thing named Gerald. They fly off from the House of Commons in a hot air balloon, but Pooh and Mickey follow in their airship and Pooh brings down the villains with a harpoon.
As a reward, the King arranges a private screening, for the duo and their friends, of … Steamboat Willie. We are then treated to the full seven-minute cartoon, before the story wraps up. There are no credits except ‘A Richard Driscoll film’.
The above synopsis makes the random, meandering ‘plot’ sound a lot more coherent than it is. But the question you’re all asking is: how has Richard Driscoll made this film? Has he hired a team of designers, animators and voice artists? Has he, bollocks. Two words. In fact, just two letters. A. I.
Everything, literally everything in this film appears to have been A.I.-generated. The character designs, the backgrounds, the voices, the narration, the music and a handful of utterly awful songs. Driscoll has just fed his ideas into chatGPT or somesuch, and out has popped this abomination. No one, literally no one, could ever want to watch this. Except people like me who are fascinated by Driscoll’s career. And who want a bloody good laugh at how utterly inept it all is.
Each character is only ever seen directly from the front, their glassy stare interrogating the viewer. The only movement is a crudely animated mouth, and occasional revolving arms and legs. But, because several images of each character have been separately generated, their appearance constantly changes from shot to shot. They grow taller or shorter or fatter or thinner. Buttons, collars, badges and pockets appear and disappear on their clothing. It’s howlingly funny.
Because the characters can’t actually move, the image sometimes zooms in or out. But the resolution of the image is such that any ‘close-up’ is heavily pixelated. That smacks of an actual directorial hand. Or at least, an utter lack of a directorial eye. The backgrounds are, as one might expect, a weird cartoony version of not quite London. There is one scene in a packed House of Commons where the movement of the A.I. ‘camera’ causes all the background faces to distort in a way even more terrifying to the intended audience than the Circus of Horrors. Oh, and there’s a helpful ghost at one point, for reasons entirely unclear.
Almost the entire story is narrated, including the dialogue, except sometimes the dialogue is delivered by the unmoving characters, with Mickey having a slightly American accent and Pooh sounding vaguely Australian. The narration is far too dense and portentous for any tiny tot, who would anyway be bored by the absence of movement on the screen, and much of it sounds like a trailer or advert. Here’s a random example from about halfway through:
“In the hallowed pages of the mystical book, The Legend of Sherlock Mouse, emerges a saga of unparalleled deductive brilliance and crime-solving mastery. This venerable name, whispered through the corridors of time, etched into the very annals of mystery, has now found its way to a new generation. Enter Mickey, the heir to the legacy, the torchbearer of Sherlock Mouse’s storied brilliance.”
There is a long tradition of rip-off cartoons, either adapting the same traditional stories that provided the basis of Disney features, or using recognisable, uncopyrightable concepts. These things were sold on VHS, then on DVD. Inattentive parents and grandparents would buy them, and sometimes there was just about enough entertainment value for an undiscriminating pre-schooler. And they were usually cheap to buy: pound shop staples. But The Adventures of Mickey Sherlock Mouse and Winnie the Pooh, which cost me eight quid to buy on Vimeo, is a whole new level of rip-off. I really do question whether Richard Driscoll has actually sat and watched this all the way through. If he hasn’t, that’s very irresponsible of him. If he has, and thought it was okay to release, that’s even worse.
In summary, by moving into animation, and getting an algorithm to create an entire film for him, Richard Driscoll has outdone himself. Familiarity breeds contempt and we sort of know what to expect from Driscoll now. But this – this is an experience like the first time you saw The Comic or Eldorado. It’s mindblowing in its awfulness. Rustle up a few quid, head to Vimeo and treat yourself to an amazing experience that you will never forget, no matter how hard you try.
M.J. SIMPSON
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