Mickey Mouse and Ub Iwerks. Iwerks again served as the head animator, assisted by Johnny Cannon, Les Clark, Wilfred Jackson and Dick Lundy. This short was intended as a parody of Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill, Jr.", first released on May 12 of the same year. Although it was the third Mickey cartoon produced, it was the first to find a distributor, and thus is considered by The Disney Company as Mickey's debut. "Willie" featured changes to Mickey's appearance (in particular, simplifying his eyes to large dots) that established his look for later cartoons and in numerous Walt Disney films. The cartoon was
Walt Disney Animation Studios November 21, 2018. Since "Alice Comedies" in the 1920s, Walt Disney Animation Studios has produced a series of prominent short films, including the "Mickey Mouse" cartoons and the "Silly Symphonies" series. Many of these shorts provided a medium for the studio to experiment with new technologies that they would use in their filmmaking process, such as the synchronization of sound in "Steamboat Willie" (1928), the integration of the three-strip Technicolor process in "Flowers and Trees" (1932), the multiplane camera in "The Old Mill" (1937), the xerography process in "Goliath II" (1960), and the hand-drawn/CGI hybrid animation in "Off His Rockers"