Mickey: The Story Of A Mouse

Although much fanfare was made about the involvement of Oscar-winning documentary director Morgan Neville, “Mickey: The Story of a Mouse” is directed not by Neville, who worked on it as a producer. Instead, it’s helmed by Jeff Malmberg.

A veteran producer and editor of film and TV, Malmberg cut his teeth in the documentary world by editing films like “Red White Black & Blue” and “Women in White,” before turning to directing documentaries himself with 2010’s “Marwencol.” Telling the story of artist and photographer Mark Hogancamp, who coped with a severely debilitating violent assault by constructing a 1/6-scale World War II-era miniature town in his backyard, the film was met with universal critical acclaim and several awards, even inspiring Robert Zemeckis to lift its story for the controversial 2018 fact-based drama “Welcome to Marwen.”

After the success of “Marwencol,” Malmberg continued to work on documentaries, with the relationship between fictional constructions and personal and cultural histories remaining his favored subject. In the well-received yet underseen 2017 film “Spettacolo,” he told the story of Monticchiello, a small hill town in Tuscany, Italy, which holds an annual tradition in which townspeople join forces to dramatize their lives and major community events into a stage play. Given his experience with stories of metafictional interest, it’s no wonder that Malmberg was tapped to tell the story of Disney by way of its greatest cultural symbol.