Steamboat Willie: Sound Animation Begins with Mickey

A cartoon mouse whistled at the wheel of a steamboat, and the audience at the Colony Theatre in New York City heard something no moviegoer had ever heard before: a fully synchronized soundtrack built into an animated film. Steamboat Willie was not the first cartoon with sound, but it was the first to synchronize every whistle, clang, and musical note precisely to the on-screen action, and the effect was electrifying. The seven-minute short made Mickey Mouse an instant star and launched the most powerful entertainment empire of the twentieth century. Walt Disney and his chief animator Ub Iwerks had created Mickey Mouse earlier that year after losing the rights to their previous character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, in a contract dispute with distributor Charles Mintz. Disney vowed never again to create a character he did not own. The first two Mickey cartoons, Plane Crazy and The Gallopin' Gaucho, were silent films that failed to find a distributor. Disney, who had been experimenting with sound synchronization, decided to gamble everything on a third cartoon built from the ground up around a synchronized soundtrack. The technical challenge was enormous. Previous attempts to add sound to animation had simply overlaid music onto existing films. Disney wanted the sound to match the action frame by frame. He hired composer Carl Stalling and used a metronome-like system to keep the animation perfectly in tempo with the pre-recorded music. The recording session itself nearly ended in disaster when the musicians couldn't keep tempo with the visual cues, requiring multiple takes and a last-minute switch to a simpler conducting method. The result was a revelation. Mickey steered a boat, pulled a cat's tail to make it yowl, used a cow's teeth as a xylophone, and cranked a goat's tail like a music box. Every sound matched perfectly. Audiences were delighted by the comic timing that synchronized sound made possible.