By Michaela Gordoni
The A GOOFY MOVIE documentary, NOT JUST A GOOF, just premiered on Disney+, and it’s finally giving credit where it’s due 30 years after the movie’s release.
The animation, which came out April 7, 1995, may not have been the most popular, but it eventually struck a chord with thousands of viewers.
“I was a first-time director. I had a first-time head of story. I had a first-time lead editor,” recalled director Kevin Lima. “I thought we had the opportunity to make a John Hughes movie in animation,”
“Let’s make a movie that’s about contemporary teenagers as opposed to what feature animation was doing, which was all talking animal movies and fairy tales. Even though these are kind of talking animal movies,” he continued.
The team took inspiration from former Walt Disney Studios chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg.
“He thought that might be an interesting subject matter for this story of Goofy and Max,” Lima said. The team mimicked that scenario through a father-son relationship that’s displayed in the movie.
In 1995, the movie was pushed back five months after its original release date. It cost $18 million and grossed $37.6 million.
While it wasn’t a hit at the time of its release, families enjoyed it at home on VHS. Now it is somewhat popular, decades later. Seemingly, ’90s kids may enjoy it more now that they’re adults.
The documentary covers the team’s creative process and plans for the movie, their disappointment at the movie being a low priority for Disney and satisfaction as it became more popular eventually.
Collider writer Ross Bonaime says the documentary displays how hard it was for the team to put their heart into something that Disney hardly supported, despite that it ordered the movie. It shows that even with a small, multicultural team, the creators accomplished a lot. A Disney animation usually takes about four years — but the GOOFY MOVIE team got it done in two and a half.
Movieguide® gave A GOOFY MOVIE a +1 rating. Our review reads: “While billed as a children’s movie, children in the audience appeared not to find it very funny and seemed to laugh simply because their parents did. In this movie, Max and PJ are older than their television series counterparts, so this feature may be over the heads of younger children.”
It seems that the “John Hughes” approach was evident to American families. The more mature themes — not common to Disney animated movies — likely contributed to why the movie wasn’t as popular as it could have been.
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