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Suicide Mouse (sometimes referred to as Suicide Mouse.avi) is a Creepypasta about a supposed lost Mickey Mouse cartoon. The cartoon, while seemingly just a loop of Mickey walking past some buildings for a few minutes, is found by a Disney executive to be much darker than it originally seemed.
The story can be read here.
There have also been four recreations that can be seen here, here, here, and here. Watch them at your own risk. (Actually, there is something of a small cottage industry in making these videos. Here is a three part compilation of eighteen versions from 2016. Note that these are only complete versions, not condensations, that the compiler may have missed a few, and that there have probably been several new ones since:Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).
This creepypasta provides examples of:
- Alien Geometries: At first the scenery was just a standard Wraparound Background, but during the part where there is murmuring in place of the music, the sidewalk starts going in different directions, defying Mickey's walking physics.
- Artistic License – History:
- The Creepypasta depends on the notion that Disney has a dark cartoon of Mickey Mouse hidden in the vaults that causes the viewers to either become disturbed or commit suicide. Except... Disney has a lot of dark animated shorts that have been released to the public, with Mickey sometimes as a star. Examples include The Mad Doctor, Pluto's Judgement Day, and Runaway Brain. These shorts also have animation that's a lot more disturbing than Mickey walking with a Nightmare Face, like Pluto getting kidnapped by a stranger during a storm, or Mickey's brain being switched with that of a monster. Plus, given that Disney is only about eighty years old, it would be very difficult to cover up such a cartoon short when the animation cels are valuable and fans seek out the vintage shorts.
- Given the amount of effort it would take to make one cartoon short, especially since the animator would have to storyboard their sequence and pitch it to their crew, acting out each sequence, it seems unlikely that an animator would be able to pitch such a short as a comedy, where Mickey does nothing but walk as everything else becomes Deranged Animation, and have it make it to the final stage without even a television release.
- Art-Style Dissonance: The first recreation, which looked like it was made in MS Paint, and the third recreation, which looks like it was made in Flash. Note that the original story suggests that the original cartoon was made in the 30s.
- "Blind Idiot" Translation: The Russian text in some recreations.
- Death by Adaptation: While Mickey Mouse's fate in the original story and in most of the recreations is unclear, he kills himself in the third recreation.
- Deranged Animation: It starts off normal, but soon floating ruins of buildings and sidewalks that defy perception appear, with Mickey continuing his walk cycle, but with a gradually more distorted Nightmare Face.
- Driven to Suicide: The employee who watched the final portion of the cartoon, and in the third recreation, Mickey himself.
- Hell Is That Noise: The screaming that is heard towards the end of the video.
- Madness Mantra: According to the story, the poor employee who had to watch the last minute or so of the cartoon, after Leonard Maltin couldn't handle any more of it, stumbled out of the room, pale and saying "real suffering is not known" seven times, before grabbing a security guard's pistol to kill himself.
- Nightmare Face: Various websites discussing the creepypasta have shown a disturbing image of Mickey Mouse's face logo from the classic cartoons edited so that his face is against a bloody red background and has photorealistic eyes, despite having nothing to do with the story. The actual story gives us this description:Mickey's face began to fall apart. his eyes rolled on the bottom of his chin like two marbles in a fishbowl, and his curled smile was pointing upward on the left side of his face.
- Nothing Is Scarier:
- The majority of the episode is just Mickey walking past buildings while odd noises play.
- The minutes where the cartoon briefly cuts to black with no sound also counts.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: One of the details that the narrator in the original pasta notes is how Mickey doesn't feel happy when walking.It wasn't the jolly old Mickey we've come to love either, Mickey wasn't dancing, not even smiling, just kind of walking as if you or I were walking, with a normal facial expression, but for some reason his head tilted side to side as he kept this dismal look.
- Pragmatic Adaptation: The third recreation, where Mickey kills himself. Even more so recreation 4.5, which has images that seem to belong on a Shock Site in the second half of the short, and shows no distortion of the background or the ending Mickey Mouse face.
- Recursive Translation: Justified for the adaptions. The original story mentions a Russian sentence in the ending, but the Russian text was never spelled out; we only got to see the English translation "the sights of hell bring its viewers back in". Thus the adaptations have had to translate it back to Russian on their own.
- Take Our Word for It: Whatever was in the final 30 seconds of the film. Apparently, it's so bad that an employee watching it fell into a Madness Mantra before being Driven to Suicide, but Leonard Maltin isn't able to get any more information beyond the use of a Russian phrase.
- World of Chaos: The scenery eventually turns into this, with the buildings reduced to floating rubble and the sidewalk adopting Alien Geometries.
- Wrap Around Background: At first, the background consists of just the same six buildings. But then everything gradually falls apart...
