Defining Moment: 'Steamboat Willie' launches Mickey Mouse and the Disney dream, November 18 1928

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On a winter evening in 1928, a group of cinema-goers filed into New York's 79th Street Theater to watch a gangster film. But first they saw - and heard - a cartoon featuring a rotund mouse at the wheel of a steamship. The audience was transfixed. At a time when most movie stars were mute, this cute little rodent could whistle.

Walt Disney was a broke 22-year-old whose studio had already gone bust when he devised the Mickey Mouse character some five years earlier. Disney was on to his third Mickey animation when he saw The Jazz Singer, the world's first film to use synchronised dialogue, and thought to try something similar postproduction with Mickey. The result was Steamboat Willie, the first cartoon with a fully synchronised soundtrack. "The effect on our little audience was nothing less than electric," he recalled after a test screening. "It was terrible, but it was wonderful! And it was something new!"

Despite its use of sound, Steamboat Willie was no talkie: Mickey speaks body language and music drives the plot. Oppressed by Captain Pete, Mickey's emancipation arrives with his muse Minnie, who inspires an improvisatory musical spree involving the ship's menagerie. In Mickey's hands, geese become bagpipes, a cow's mouth a xylophone, and the tails of piglets a porcine piano. The soundtrack - with its jaunty score and bumps, squeals and whistles - was the cherry atop Disney's brand of physical humour.

The tone may have been lighthearted, but its creator was not. Sensing opportunity, Disney raced to complete the sound cartoon before someone beat him to it. "If you ever worked like HELL before in your life, do it now," he wrote to chief animator Ub Iwerks. "DON'T FAIL." Just over a month later, Steamboat Willie was a sensation nationwide.

After the success of Steamboat Willie, Disney made a string of films that gave life to both characters and commodities. By the 1930s, Disney's cast of anthropomorphic animals graced not only screens, but also alarm clocks, candy and Cartier bracelets. Writing in 1938 in praise of "industrialised fantasy", a commentator in The New York Times observed that in the midst of the Great Depression, "figments of Disney's imagination have already sold more than $2,000,000 worth of toys since the first of the year... the exhibitors of 'Snow White' have not had to lay off a single dwarf."

Disney's alchemy of animism and commerce built a cultural empire. Yet when it came to the question of art, he demurred. "Don't ask me about art," he told a reporter.

"I don't know anything about it."

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