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 official 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 film in the Mickey Mouse series to have been produced, but it is the first to have been officially 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.
The soundtrack was arranged by Wilfred Jackson and Bert Lewis, and it included the songs "Steamboat Bill", a composition popularized by baritone Arthur Collins during the 1910s, and the popular 19th-century folk song "Turkey in the Straw". The film's title may be a parody of the Buster Keaton film Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), which is a reference to the song by Collins. Disney performed all of the voices in the film's little intelligible dialogue.
Steamboat Willie became the most popular cartoon of its time. It has received wide critical acclaim, for introducing one of the world's most popular cartoon characters and for its technical innovation. It is often considered one of the most influential and greatest cartoons ever made. Animators voted it the 13th-greatest cartoon of all time in the 1994 book The 50 Greatest Cartoons, and in 1998, the film was selected by the United States Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry. After having its copyright previously extended multiple times by the United States Congress following extensive lobbying by The Walt Disney Company, Steamboat Willie entered the U.S. public domain on January 1, 2024.
Mickey Mouse was created as a replacement for Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, an earlier character created by Disney for Winkler Pictures but owned at the time by Universal Pictures. The first two Mickey Mouse films produced, silent versions of Plane Crazy and The Gallopin' Gaucho, had failed to gain a distributor. According to Roy O. Disney, Walt Disney was inspired to create a sound cartoon to greatly increase its appeal, after watching The Jazz Singer (1927). The character of Pete predates Steamboat Willie by three years, having appeared as the villain to both Oswald and Disney's first ever cartoon hero, Julius the Cat (a character similar to Felix the Cat) starting with Alice Solves the Puzzle (1925), though he was originally depicted as a bear.
Steamboat Willie became erroneously and widely recognized as the first cartoon with fully synchronized sound. From May 1924 to September 1926, Dave and Max Fleischer's Inkwell Studios produced 19 sound cartoons, part of the Song Car-Tunes series, using the Phonofilm sound-on-film process. However, the Song Car-Tunes failed to keep the sound fully synchronized, whereas Steamboat Willie was produced using a click track to keep his musicians on the beat. Only one month before Steamboat Willie was released, Paul Terry's Fables Pictures released Dinner Time, which has a soundtrack but was not a financial success.
In June 1927, producer Pat Powers made an unsuccessful takeover bid for Lee de Forest's Phonofilm Corporation. In the aftermath, Powers hired a former DeForest technician, William Garrity, to produce a cloned version of the Phonofilm system, which Powers dubbed "Powers Cinephone". By then, de Forest was in too weak a financial position to mount a legal challenge against Powers for patent infringement. Powers convinced Disney to use Cinephone for Steamboat Willie.
Mickey Mouse is piloting a side-wheeler paddle steamer, cheerfully whistling "Steamboat Bill" and sounding the boat's three whistles. Soon, captain Pete appears and orders Mickey off of the bridge. Annoyed, Mickey blows a raspberry at Pete who attempts to kick him, but Mickey rushes away in time and Pete accidentally kicks himself in the rear. Mickey falls down the stairs, slips on a bar of soap on the boat's deck, and lands in a bucket of water. A parrot laughs at him, and Mickey throws the bucket on its head in retaliation.
Pete has been watching the occurrence, and pilots the steamboat himself. He bites off some chewing tobacco and spits into the wind. The spit flies backward and rings the boat's bell. Amused, Pete spits again, but this time the spit hits him in the face, to his dismay.
The steamboat makes a stop at "Podunk Landing" to pick up a cargo of various livestock. Mickey has trouble getting one of the slimmer cows with a FOB tag onto the boat attached to a harness. To solve this, Mickey fills the cow's stomach up with hay to fatten the slim cow into the harness. Just as they set off again, Minnie Mouse appears, running to catch the boat before it leaves. Mickey does not see her in time, but she runs after the boat along the shore calling out Mickey's name. Mickey hears Minnie's calls and he takes her on board by hooking the cargo crane to her bloomers.
Landing on the deck, Minnie accidentally drops a ukulele and sheet music for the song "Turkey in the Straw", which are eaten by a goat. After a brief tug of war with the goat over the partially eaten ukulele, Mickey loses his grip and it lands inside the goat. The force from the ukulele makes the goat begin to play musical notes. Mickey is interested, and orders Minnie to begin using the goat's body as a phonograph by turning its tail like a crank. Music begins to play which delights the two mice. Mickey uses various objects on the boat as percussion accompaniment, and later on begins to "play" the animals like musical instruments via pulling the tail of a cat, stretching a goose's throat, tugging on the tails of a nursing sow's piglets and using the sow as an accordion, and using a cow's teeth and tongue as a xylophone to play the song.
Captain Pete is unamused by the musical act and puts Mickey to work peeling potatoes. Out of spite, Mickey uses a knife to peel the potatoes wastefully, discarding most of the potato along with the skin. In the potato bin, the same parrot that laughed at him earlier appears in the porthole and laughs at him again. Fed up with the bird's heckling, Mickey throws a half-peeled potato at it, knocking it back into the river below. Mickey then laughs as he sits next to the potatoes and hears the parrot squawking.
Mickey, Minnie, and Pete perform in near-pantomime, with growls and squeaks but no intelligible dialogue. The only true dialogue in the film is spoken by the ship's parrot. When Mickey falls into a bucket of soapy water, the bird says, "Hope you don't feel hurt, big boy! Ha ha ha ha ha!". After Mickey throws the bucket onto the parrot's head, it cries "Help! Help! Man overboard!". It repeats the phase at the end of the short, after which Mickey throws a potato at the parrot and it falls into the water.
Steamboat Willie was produced between July and September 1928, which according to Roy O. Disney's personal notes had a budget of US$4,986.69 (equivalent to about $94,000 in 2025), including the prints for movie theaters. There was initially some doubt among the animators that a sound cartoon would appear believable enough, so before a soundtrack was produced, Disney arranged for a screening of the film to a test audience with live sound to accompany it. This screening took place on July 29, with Steamboat Willie only partly finished. The audience sat in a room adjoining Walt Disney's office. Roy projected the film from outdoors and through a window, to hide the projector's mechanical sound. Ub Iwerks hung a bedsheet for a movie screen, behind which he placed a microphone connected to speakers where the audience would sit. The live sound was produced from behind the bedsheet. Wilfred Jackson played the music on a mouth organ, Ub Iwerks banged on pots and pans for the percussion segment, and Johnny Cannon provided sound effects with various devices, including slide whistles and spittoons for bells. Walt Disney provided the short's little dialogue, mostly grunts, laughs, and squawks. After several practices, they were ready for the performance for Disney employees and their wives.