Walt Disney
Steamboat Willie

In these very last days, a bizarre pseudo-historical curiosity led me to watch the ancestral Disney filmography on the well-known streaming video channel/site (you know what I'm talking about), namely the very first Mickey Mouse cartoons created by the great master of animation, the same who at the end of the 1920s, precisely on the eve of the Wall Street Crash, didn't yet own that mega-hyper multinational more known on the face of the Earth and who was striving greatly, with enormous effort and great sacrifice, not only to find funding and sponsors for his works but also to achieve a success that struggled to smile upon him. A rodent, which from the 1930s became the undisputed symbol of American animated cinematography, conceived by the person who, legend has it, remembered the mice bustling on his desk on a train ride back to California.

Steamboat Willie, dated 1928, is erroneously considered by the majority of the masses as the first Disney cartoon: in reality, before it, Plane Crazy and The Gallopin' Gaucho appeared chronologically, also featuring Mickey as the protagonist and the eternal girlfriend Minnie as a supporting character. Both predecessors of Steamboat Willie were not successes and almost led to the failure of Walt and his ingenious mouse: the short film in question turned the situation around, particularly due to the introduction of sound, allowing the beginning of a legend that continues to this day.

I must confess something: the analysis I'm about to conduct would concern a great multitude of early Disney cartoons, I cite several titles: The Barn Dance, The Opry House, The Plow Boy, The Karnival Kid, Mickey's Choo Choo. Unable to analyze such a quantity of filmic products, Steamboat Willie is primarily considered the "main" representative of that cinematic period. However, the description intends to cover much of the primitive Disney animated series.

The plot of Steamboat Willie is not canonical or significant: here Mickey takes on the role of a naive helmsman of a small boat, presumably for commercial purposes, continuously harassed by a severe and presumptuous Peg-Leg Pete, quite crude compared to today's portrayal of him. Events suddenly shift to a musician Minnie, who, once the ship docks at a store located on a river pier the Steamboat is navigating, cannot board without the help of her beloved, who lowers an anthropomorphized hook (!!) to first politely and gently lift her skirt to latch onto it. The chaste and unpassionate greetings between the two mice are interrupted by a gluttonous goat swallowing Minnie's guitar and sheet music: due to the bizarre meal, the poor goat turns into a "jukebox," an animal music box: this comic situation evolves into a small but grandiose sound performance accompanied by Mickey himself, who sets about "playing" any tool available on the boat, pots, bins, barrels, even utilizing goose honks, cats, and pigs. Unfortunately, the concert ends and Pete reappears, once again irate and furious, the same who throws Mickey into the hold to peel potatoes. The bitter finale transforms into frivolous comedy as Mickey throws a peeled potato at a parrot that was about to mock him again for his misfortunes.

The short film, despite the absence of Technicolor and any dialogue, represents a distinguished example of essential but hilarious comedy by a cartoon: precisely the little importance attributed to the plot, fragmented, uncertain, and irregular, gives it a greater immediacy and success of the sketches. In its extreme but effective simplicity, the cartoon contains significant comic scenes: not only the "anthropomorphized" hook that, humanly, lifts (and subsequently lowers) Minnie's skirt before latching onto it to bring her aboard, but also the boat deliberately turning its stern towards the pier, the bellows puffing in turn and urging their smaller "companion" to regularly follow the smoke emissions... in short, Disney's genius, besides anthropomorphizing animals, similarly applies this stratagem to objects, a comedic technique still amusing today.

Another important feature is the centralization of music, essential to cover the lack of dialogue and thus enrich the short film: a series of early Disney cartoons base their simple plots on the musical context, from a rather tone-deaf Minnie accompanying with the guitar Mickey, busy milking a primitive Clarabelle, to the same Mickey immersed in a jungle scenario where paradoxically lions and bears are present, singing bizarre and funny melodies alternated with unstable dances. The sound marks the gags (Mickey using a hippo's teeth as a drum, squeezing a goose's neck to derive a special tone), highlights the characters' moods (comedy, sadness, apathy, cheerfulness), introduces the landscape and context (boat on a river, countryside, circus, jungle, Argentine pampas): a technique that today may seem taken for granted but that in 1928 or thereabouts produced a "little revolution" within the newborn animation cinematography.

In the cartoons, the director's intent to identify the real environment with an imaginary context is evident: the economic/agricultural reality of the States, the poverty of the lower classes, industrialization, and technological development (embodied in the automobile - Disney was a great friend of Henry Ford) in contrast with that idyllic rurality expressed in an almost anachronistic and paradoxical agricultural backwardness (animal-drawn plough, horse carriage...). I therefore see, in these animated works, Disney's attempt to illustrate, in a Cervantes-like manner, a reality in full transformation and to lament the lost agrarian simplicity overridden by mass production. I mention in this context a scene from the cartoon The Barn Dance. Mickey and Peg-Leg Pete vie for the beautiful Minnie and both arrive under her house, however in possession of different means, Mickey a carriage, Pete an automobile. Once the lovely mousie comes down to them, she seems aesthetically inclined to prefer Pete's vehicle and ignore the poor mouse. Nonetheless, the car inexplicably collapses at departure and Minnie is happy to now enjoy Mickey's carriage: Is Disney perhaps expressing to his audience his aversion to the emerging consumerist/mass society? Your thoughts on this.

Watching, more than 80 years after its release, this short film and others like it brings a bit of nostalgia and also deep reflection: will the new Disney spearheads post-mortem of Walt himself, the Jonas Brothers and Hannah Montana, be able to stylistically and creatively reach the heights achieved by their predecessors a little before the '30s?

Another difficult and subjective question for you.