Disney Epic Mickey Rebrushed Is A Full-Circle Moment For The Game’s Original Narrative
14 years ago, Disney’s Epic Mickey was released exclusive to the Nintendo Wii, which is the only place it’s been playable since. It is, at the moment, shackled to the Wii–480p resolution, motion controls, and all. If you want to legally play the game today, you’d have to get your hands on a Wii (or a WiiU, for you select few), get a hard copy of the game, and pop it in. That would have remained the case, however, if it weren’t for its upcoming remake Epic Mickey Rebrushed which aims to bring the original game’s experience to modern consoles, with updated visuals and controls. And thank goodness, because otherwise, the game could have risked becoming a part of its own meta-commentary.
Epic Mickey follows Mickey Mouse on his discovery of a bizarro Disneyland, dour and gray in tone, where forgotten characters of Disney’s past like Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (and many more) all live. Haphazardly, Mickey procures a magic brush that holds the power to erase the world with paint thinner, or bring it to life with painted color. With this responsibility, Mickey is not only burdened with the knowledge of a past completely forgotten, but the power to restore or even change it.
At its core, the game is about what happens when the present is faced with having to amend its past. A past that hasn’t only been forgotten, but casted in a shadow so opaque, that it practically vanished altogether. Its narrative is a direct commentary on Mickey’s own success, which started all the way back in 1928, where he became the undisputed mascot of the Disney brand, despite many characters like Oswald having existed prior. In tackling this story, the original game, in turn, manifested its own narrative into reality, by repopularizing once forgotten Disney characters like Oswald, Horace Horsecollar, and Clarabelle Cow (just to name a few), and brought them back into the mainstream Disney ethos.