Taking the world's most famous cartoon character and casting him in a piece of entertainment unlike anything he's done before? That's a bold move, especially for a company as traditionally careful as Disney, and a character as pricelessly valuable as Mickey Mouse.

In that sense, Disney Epic Mickey for the Nintendo Wii is a refreshing risk, and Disney should be congratulated for taking it. But -- and you knew there had to be a but -- Epic Mickey is a game that just can't get its execution to match its ambition.

A blend of action, exploration and Super Mario-style platform hopping, Epic Mickey begins with Mickey Mouse being transported to a place called the Wasteland, an alternate cartoon world where Walt Disney's forgotten creations live in peace and obscurity. But Mickey's curiosity and carelessness unleash a disaster on the Wasteland that he must ultimately confront and make right.

To do this, our chirpy rodent must traverse the Wasteland's many environments (loosely based on areas of the real-world Disneyland park) armed with a magic paintbrush that sprays both paint and thinner. Paint is used to fill in missing chunks of the twisted 'toon world's architecture and pacify some foes, while thinner dissolves walls and melts enemies into piles of green goo.

There's often more than one way to overcome obstacles and enemies in Epic Mickey, leaving it up to players to decide whether they'll be destructive or helpful. I have trouble seeing Mickey as anything but the latter, but the game's design problems sometimes proved to be such a nuisance, I'd simply curse and start blasting thinner at everything out of spite.
    

And that's the fundamental problem with Epic Mickey. The ideas behind the game are inspired -- guiding Mickey Mouse through a twisted reflection of Disneyland populated by Walt Disney's forgotten creations is a brilliant basis for a video game, and legendary game designer Warren Spector (Deus Ex, Thief, Ultima Underworld) was a great choice to spearhead the production.

But somewhere between the drawing board and the wee Wii, these exciting ideas ended up trapped in a game that, when it comes right down to it, isn't always a lot of fun to play.

Mickey's dawning realization that he's responsible for the havoc wreaked on the Wasteland and its citizens tugs at the heartstrings, for sure. And his relationship with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the realm's leader (and Walt Disney's onetime star creation, until a contract dispute doomed Oswald and paved the way for Mickey's success) is a great story hook.

But from the consistently infuriating problems with the game's camera controls to paint-by-number level design (no pun intended) to the many tedious hunt-and-fetch missions, Epic Mickey is hampered by a surprising lack of originality and polish. It's as though all of Tinkerbell's magic pixie dust was used to dream up the worlds, and none was left when it came time to actually build them.

Don't get me wrong, there are flashes of freewheeling fun and discovery in Epic Mickey. Like Mickeyjunk Mountain, a twisted version of Disneyland's Matterhorn, built of out castoff Mickey Mouse merchandise. From lunchboxes to Super Nintendo cartridges to that iconic Mickey telephone, seeing this towering mound of old stuff is both a giddy blast of nostalgia and a comment on how relentlessly the mouse has been marketed over the decades. Heady stuff for a game.

But still. While this is a capable action-adventure title that adheres to all the genre cliches that players expect, that's just not enough. With a bona fide game design genius like Spector at the helm, and with Disney allowing unprecedented access to its archives for inspiration, this game could have and should have been an unforgettable love letter to both video gamers and Disney fans.

Instead, it's an uneven and sometimes unsatisfying experience that, despite its loving devotion to the source material, will eventually join the rest of the stuff on Mickeyjunk Mountain.