Steamboat Willie

Perhaps Mickey Mouse's most famous cartoon short, Steamboat Willie is also one of the Disney companies oldest fully animated shorts, losing out by just a hair to "Plane Crazy."

Now, the one thing to note about Mickey is that in the older Black and White days, he was.....crazy. Not quite the Mouse we know today, Mickey was much more cheeky and full of energy, constantly using his surroundings to make music in the shorts whether it's an inanimate object or a living animal.

Steamboat Willie follows Mickey Mouse as he works on Pegleg Pete's boat, though the latter character takes a backseat this time around. Noticing Minnie as she rushes to catch up to the boat for a ride, Mickey helps her on board and what follows is a series of gags that starts with a goat eating Minnie's sheet music for "Turkey in the Straw." As Minnie uses the goat to play the music by cranking it's tail, Mickey runs around the boat using everything possible to play the song in time. I do mean everything. A cat is thrown around, pots and pans banged on, a duck, piglets and the mother pig are all used to play along in time to the music. It was sort of disturbing to see Mickey Mouse of all people being so abusive towards animals, yanking on their neck, tails and using the one pig as an accordion, all with a smile on his face.

The short itself holds up pretty good considering just how old it is. While it doesn't have the same charm as later Mickey shorts, it has it's own unique charm in it's zany pace. Of course, the animation is rather crude but from here out things can only look up for Disney as it's animators refined their technique which we will see tonight with the review of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.