Skip to content
Steamboat Willie

File:Steamboat_Willie_1928_Poster.svg · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons

EntityQ816038· pop 52· linked from 365 articles

Steamboat Willie

Sign in to save

1928 American animated short movie by Walt Disney

OverviewAI-generated

Steamboat Willie is a 1928 American animated short film directed by Walt Disney and produced by Walt Disney Studio. The film has a runtime of 8 minutes and was released in the United States of America. Its initial release date is listed as May 15, 1928, with other publication dates recorded as July 29, 1928, and November 18, 1928. The first performance of the film occurred on November 18, 1928.

The production had a budget of 4986. It is described with the tagline "A Mickey Mouse Sound Cartoon." Various sources provide different review scores, including 7.4/10, 8.7/10, and a vote average of 7.299 based on 605 votes. The film entered the public domain on January 1, 1999, and again on January 1, 2024.

Synthesized by Vinony from 23 facts across 4 sources: Wikidata, Internet Archive, TMDb, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

Film · TMDB

7.3

Mickey Mouse, piloting a steamboat, delights his passenger, Minnie Mouse, by making musical instruments out of the menagerie on deck.

Released: 1928-05-158 minDir: Walt DisneyAnimation, ComedyBudget: $4,986

Cast

  • Walt Disney as Mickey Mouse / Minnie Mouse / Pete (voice) (uncredited)

Themes

  • musical
  • steamboat
  • black and white
  • cartoon mouse
  • short film
  • anthropomorphic
  • mickey

This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.

Key facts

Directed by
Walt Disney Ub Iwerks
Story by
Walt Disney Ub Iwerks
Produced by
Walt Disney
Starring
Walt Disney
Music by
Wilfred Jackson Bert Lewis
Animation by
Ub Iwerks Wilfred Jackson Johnny Cannon Les Clark ( inbetweener )
Color process
Black-and-white
Production company
Disney Cartoons
Distributed by
Celebrity Productions
Release date
November 18, 1928 ( 1928-11-18 ) (US)
Running time
7 : 47
Country
United States
Language
English
Budget
$4,986.69

via Wikipedia infobox

Internet Archive

movies

Steamboat Willie is in the public domain! An explainer for public domain Mickey Mouse.

Watch at Internet Archive →

via archive.org

~29 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Steamboat Willie is a 1928 American animated short film directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks. It was produced in black-and-white by Disney Cartoons and was released by Pat Powers' Celebrity Productions. The cartoon is considered the public debut of Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, although both appeared months earlier in a test screening of Plane Crazy and the then unreleased The Gallopin' Gaucho. Steamboat Willie is the third of Mickey's films to have been produced, but it is the first to have been distributed, because Disney had seen The Jazz Singer (1927) and became determined to produce one of the first fully synchronized sound cartoons.

Steamboat Willie is one of the first cartoons with synchronized sound, and one of the first cartoons to feature a fully post-produced soundtrack, which distinguished it from earlier sound cartoons, such as Inkwell Studios's Song Car-Tunes (1924–1926), My Old Kentucky Home (1926), and Van Beuren Studios's Dinner Time (1928). Disney believed that synchronized sound was the future of film.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Steamboat Willie” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

Gallery (13)