Wild Waves (1929)

Release Date:

15 August 1929 (USA)

Genre:

Animation | Comedy | Family | Musical | Short

Plot:

At the beach, Minnie is swept out to sea by a wave (while still wearing her high heels!). Mickey struggles...

Plot Keywords:

Pelican | Beach | Walrus | Mickey Mouse | Anthropomorphism

Cast

Walt Disney	...	Mickey Mouse (voice) (uncredited)
Marcellite Garner	...	Minnie Mouse (voice) (uncredited)
Carl W. Stalling	...	Walrus (voice) (uncredited)

Runtime:

7 min | Argentina:8 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Colour:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Cinephone)

Certification:

Argentina:Atp

Company:

Walt Disney Productions

Soundtrack:

Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep

Mickey rides the wild surf

This early Mickey Mouse cartoon is aptly titled. It's set at the seashore, and in shot after shot the wild surf crashes against the rocks, ebbs, rolls back, then hits the shore again with redoubled force. The waves are beautiful but powerful, as we find in due course when they thwart the characters' intentions and fling them wantonly every which way. The ocean itself has personality in this little short, and that's saying something for a cartoon of this vintage. You've got to give the Disney animators credit for not playing it safe: recreating the violent motion of the sea couldn't have been easy in the black & white era of cel animation, but here they are, giving the customers their money's worth with a lot of difficult water effects while still keeping things amusing.

The credit for the generally high quality of the early Mickeys belongs primarily to one man, legendary animator Ub Iwerks, who animated most of the studio's initial talkie output practically by himself. The opening title card for these seminal works reads "A Walt Disney Comic by Ub Iwerks," a singular credit Disney would never grant any other employee. Iwerks was a key figure in putting the Disney Studio on the map and making the mouse world famous, but he chafed under Walt's dominance and left the studio not long after WILD WAVES was released in the summer of 1929.

But that's real world stuff. Back in Cartoon Land, this particular entry begins with a terrific shot of Lifeguard Mickey sitting atop his tall chair, strumming his guitar and singing for an audience of two seals, a pelican, and other assorted water fowl. The waves crash as Mickey's listeners all sway to the music in perfect synchronized style, while even his chair bobs to the rhythm on alarmingly rubbery legs. Minnie is introduced in the mildly risqué fashion still permissible at this time, with the kind of gag that would soon become verboten: she's changing into her bathing suit in one of those old-fashioned "bathing machines" that looks like an outhouse on wheels. We hear her singing but she's not visible. Then, on a clothesline leading out the window, we watch as her slip, her bra, and her panties appear on the line, one by one, to flap in the breeze. Minnie appears in the doorway in her swimsuit with a "Ta-daaaa!" gesture, skips into the surf, and is promptly swallowed by a wave and carried screaming out to sea. Mickey, of course, tosses his guitar aside and comes to the rescue. He is hindered by more of those diabolical waves, but eventually manages to haul Minnie ashore. When she begins to weep he attempts to amuse her by dancing a hornpipe, and this sets off a general beach musicale, complete with dancing penguins, barking seals, a harp solo played on a fish-net, and a walrus who sings in a basso voice.

WILD WAVES is a sweet little cartoon that isn't usually included on anyone's list of Disney "classics," but in a sense that makes it all the more impressive: in this case, a cartoon that comprises the studio's average product of the period still holds up nicely, provides a few laughs, and looks considerably better than anything anyone else was making at the time.