Merrily Down the Stream: The Mouse is out of the house

As Steamboat Willie, the first iteration of Disney’s Mickey Mouse, enters the public domain, animators, gamers and creators are working to make him their own

The mouse is out of the house, and he’s taking his girlfriend with him. On January 1, the Walt Disney Company lost the copyright for the first iteration of Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse when their 1928 animated short featuring both characters, Steamboat Willie, entered the public domain.

Steamboat Willie(WikiCommons)

For nearly four decades, the multinational media and entertainment conglomerate had attempted to exert control over the film by lobbying to alter copyright laws in the US — first in 1984, when the copyright was initially due to expire, Disney sought an extension based on the “life of the author plus 50 years”, which meant that their copyright would end in 2003.

Later, in 1998, they successfully lobbied again to add another 70 years to the life of the author, allowing them to own the original version of the character till the end of 2023. From January 1, Disney enthusiasts, animation artists, and illustrators can take a stab at using the black-and-white Mickey Mouse version 1.0 but only in a way that does not mislead consumers into thinking that the work has been produced or sponsored by Disney.

The Horror, the Horror

In the past few days, the news has been greeted with enthusiasm and a variety of creative output. While Disney uploaded the short film on YouTube in 2009, the latest search on the platform throws up new work ranging from a dubstep remix of the original tune, to Come Get Your Willie!, an 11-second video of a swearing, trigger-happy version of Steamboat Willie who shoots at people.

There are now tutorials on how to create the character for Roblox, an online multiplayer gaming site; and to nobody’s surprise, a trailer of an upcoming horror film, Mickey’s Mouse Trap, where a killer wearing a Steamboat Willie mask hunts a bunch of young men and women in an amusement arcade — a premise similar to Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, a British slasher film that was released in 2023. Disney also owns the beloved bear and his companions’ character rights from their own set of movies and products, but the original Winnie the Pooh book, written by AA Milne, went into the public domain in the US on January 1, 2022.

One of the most exciting offerings is Mouse, a first-person shooter (FPS) game created by Fumi Games. Shot in a retro rubber hose animation style that is reminiscent of Steamboat Willie and Disney’s earliest works, it clubs the jazzy soundscape of the 1920s with a film noir background of the 1940s and 1950s — the player is a hardened detective out to clean up the city of all riff-raff, with a tendency to shoot first, and ask questions later. The game will be available in 2025. Another gaming company, Nightmare Forge Games, has released the trailer for a horror game, Infestation: Origins, featuring Steamboat Willie as a mutant rodent who must be exterminated by players.

A Dark History

To the uninitiated, these new violent versions may appear to be unnecessary and damaging to a cherished icon’s history. But pop culture and post-colonial scholars will tell you that Steamboat Willie is anything but innocent. At the beginning of the 7-minute and 22 seconds-long short, Mickey Mouse pilots a paddle steamer while whistling “Steamboat Bill”, a popular vaudeville tune. Ub Iwerks, an American cartoonist, created this version of Mickey Mouse with a pointier nose, long tail, no pupils, and wearing gloves — an appearance rooted in Minstrelsy, an oppressive era in American entertainment history.

Beginning in the early 1830s on the East Coast of America, minstrel shows featured White performers in blackface: dark makeup applied to their face and neck, with exaggerated lips, curly-haired wigs and shabby clothing including white gloves to mimic the appearance of the African American people. The characters they played were stereotypes that portrayed Black Americans as dim-witted, gullible, clumsy and yet, happy-go-lucky, not unlike Steamboat Willie. These shows followed a three-act structure and music was an integral part of these performances. In Steamboat Willie, when Minnie Mouse is picked up by the boat’s hook arm and lands on the deck, sheet music tumbles out of her bag. When a cow chews up the pages, Mickey and Minnie force open its mouth, crank its tail and the animal lets out a song, ‘Turkey in the Straw’, made popular by George Washington Dixon, one of the founders of minstrelsy.

A year later, Disney released The Haunted House, in which Mickey Mouse finds himself locked inside a house when the lights go off. In the dark, only his eyes, lips and white-gloved hands are visible, a look made popular by Al Jolson, known as the king of blackface performers. Mickey then sings Mammy, Mammy! briefly, Jolson’s biggest hit from the 1927 film, The Jazz Singer.

Mickey in India

Now that the reinventions are running wild online, we asked some artists from the Indian animation industry how they would like to reimagine Steamboat Willie.

“I would definitely localise the character,” says Suresh Eriyat, director and founder of Studio Eeksaurus in Mumbai. Winner of the National Award for Best Non-feature Animation Film 2017 for his poignant stop-motion short Tokri: The Basket, Eriyat draws on local stories, and urban legends that have a hold on the collective imagination.

Last year, a 12-minute Malayalam short, Kandittund! won the National Award for Best Animation Film; it features Eriyat’s father, PNK Panicker, and is centred around his encounters with the supernatural.

“I would like to place Steamboat Willie in a rural or even an urban set-up in India. I’d like to explore the world in the sewers where rats and mice live and take the audience down to their reality. This kind of setting occupies a space where fiction and reality meet, where horror and mythical events take place. I would like to make it like one of the stories my father told me, where it would seem so real, so plausible that you’d never think it was a figment of anyone’s imagination,” he said.

Animators and twin brothers, Susruta (Bob) and Saswata (Bobby) Mukherjee, who work together as Bob and Bobby, remember the first time they watched Steamboat Willie.

“When we were studying animation at St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, it was one of the first films screened by our mentor, Professor Kaustabh Ray,” they said. “However, what bothered us back then was how Minnie Mouse’s character was introduced, and how the lifting of her skirt by the boat’s hook arm was made to look comical. So, in our version of it, we would reverse the gender roles a bit: Mickey Mouse would be a slave to the big cat who owns the boat. Minnie Mouse boards the boat respectfully, like a hero, and saves him. All this will be done exaggeratedly and humorously.”

And then some wouldn’t change a thing. “Steamboat Willie is iconic, not simply because it introduced us to the ‘House of Mouse’ and his world for the first time, but also because it was a huge technical leap in the documented history of animation cinema,” says Debjoyti Saha, animator and founder of Goppo Animation, based in Mumbai and Kolkata.

“The short might also have been a canon event for many artists who were inspired by it, and the industry that quickly followed suit and went on to make their own masterpieces, contributing to the growth of animated films. So, if you’d ask me what would I like to reinvent or add now that Steamboat Willie is in the public domain, my answer is simple — nothing at all!”