"Plane Crazy" was the first Mickey Mouse cartoon ever produced, completed in the spring of 1928. One gets only the smallest taste of how this chirpy little mouse would change cartoon animation and the pop culture forever. As you watch, listen to the music, but tune out the sound effects if you can. "Plane Crazy" was a silent cartoon; the music and sound effects having been added in the early 1930's.
Mickey Mouse's debut cartoon was a top-secret project. The majority of the animators at Walt Disney Studios had betrayed Walt to their long-time distributor Charles Mintz. Not only had Mintz tried to crowd Walt out by turning all his animators against him(only two or three, including Ub Iwerks, remained loyal), he effectively stole the Disney's star character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Mintz saw Walt as a glorified manager at his own studio. While Walt was not doing any of the actual drawing himself anymore, Mintz was flat-out wrong about Walt's importance to the studio. His relentless drive for greater control and perfection were unheard of in any animation studio at that time. In Roy Disney's words, Walt was the "guts of (the) studio."
When Mickey was conceived, along with the scenario for "Plane Crazy," he represented a "hail mary" play on Walt's part to keep his own studio. Walt, Ub Iwerks, and a tiny handful of loyal animators worked on the cartoon late at night, in secret, and on weekends in Walt's garage. Walt's wife Lillian and her sister Hazel labored on the ink and paint work. Iwerks worked at a feverish pace, by one account turning out as many as seven hundred drawings a day. One animator devised a system of covering the Mickey drawings with other drawings so he could easily cover Mickey in the event one of the disloyal animators came in his office. While the studio's relationship with Mintz was officially over, the animators that had sided with him were still contractually obligated to complete a certain number of Oswald shorts. Walt had to tolerate them until they were finished. In this environment, Mickey was born blessed as Walt's savior; his secret weapon.
That said, the Mickey we see in this picture is a little tough to recognize. He LOOKS like Mickey, sure, but his behavior, as in Steamboat Willy, bears little resemblance to that of the pure, indomitably optimistic Mickey we know. He acts like a naughty kid; bending the environment around him to his own will with a casual sadism the Mickey we know would never even hint at.
His smile as a subversive, lascivious quality. In fact, the author/illustrator of "Where the Wild Things Are" deliberately copied that smile for the trouble-making monsters of his book. Yet, far from being a monster, Mickey is tiny and round. His head is a trinity of wafers over yet another circle for a body. His movements are child-like. His shape subconsciously elicits feelings of love. He's more like a bratty, but irritatingly love-able little boy. Every early Mickey cartoon ends, in spite of real terror sometimes, with a laugh or a broad smile.
But it's not only the personality of the infant Mickey that you may find unfamiliar; so is the world he inhabits. These early cartoons are an example of what a style later called "rubber hose." Anatomy and physics are all but completely ignored. Head turn 360 degrees. Arms stretch to impossible lengths. Mickey's ears even jump right off his head in surprise. This style was later abandoned in the mid-thirties by a more realistic style known as "squash and stretch," as whimsical gags began to make way for character-oriented action.
Mickey's defiant happiness, demonstrated here from the very begining, began to shake up a cocktail the nation at large found impossible to resist, especially after the plunge into the Great Depression later that fall. His oblivious confidence in making the world his own not only reflected the ethos of his creators, but tapped the consciousness of the nation in how it saw itself. Mickey filled a need for reassurance: that innocence, pluck, and persistence would always win in the end. Through the animations and theme parks embodied in Mickey Mouse, America eagerly continues to embrace the same message.
