Wild Waves
Wild Waves
G | 14 August 1929 (USA)
Wild Waves Trailers

Mickey Mouse is a singing lifeguard. Minnie Mouse is the damsel he must rescue before she is swept out to sea.

Reviews
Matrixston Wow! Such a good movie.
Supelice Dreadfully Boring
TeenzTen An action-packed slog
Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable
Julia Arsenault (ja_kitty_71) This is one of my favorite Mickey Mouse cartoons from 1929. In this short, Mickey has a job as a beach lifeguard. And while he was singing with seaside friends (the seals, the gulls, etc.), he spotted Minnie Mouse drowning. As it was his duty, Mickey came to the rescue. His seaside friends clapped and cheered, as he placed Minnie on the shore."Where am I?" was the distressed Minnie's words when she came too.; she began to cry. But fortunately, Mickey and the seaside critters put on a song-and-dance show to cheer her up.So my overall opinion is that I really love this cartoon. I also noticed in later cartoons, there was recycled animation from this cartoon.
TheLittleSongbird Wild Waves is not among Disney or Mickey's best. It is rather routine, and I did find it odd that the first half of the short had a story and then for the second half more of a series of song and dance numbers(I do think it would have been better as one or the other). However, the animation is quite nice, a little primitive at times, but at least the backgrounds have crispness and the character designs don't look awkward. The animation of the waves is very good also. The music is very upbeat and catchy, and the dancing aspect is just as energised and animated convincingly. There are some nice gags like with Minnie's clothesline, and I really did get the sense that Mickey and Minnie genuinely cared for one another. Both characters are very likable, and the animals that join in the second half of Wild Waves are colourful characters as well. Overall, really sweet and is easy to like, but at the same time Wild Waves is not one of my favourites. 7/10 Bethany Cox
wmorrow59 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 dangerous, as we find in due course when they overpower our star performers and fling them every which way. The ocean itself has personality in this short, and that's impressive 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 was challenging in the era of black & white cel animation, but nevertheless they chose to give the customers their money's worth with a show of difficult water effects. They make it look easy, and still manage to maintain a light and amusing tone.The credit for the generally high quality of the early Mickeys belongs primarily to one man, legendary animator Ub Iwerks, who drew most of the studio's initial talkie output practically solo. 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 doesn't appear on anyone's list of Disney "classics." It's just another routine Mickey Mouse short, but in a sense that makes it all the more impressive. The Disney cartoons from this period are primitive compared to what would follow in the '30s, but they're highly entertaining, often surprising, and miles ahead of what anyone else was making at the time.
Ron Oliver A Walt Disney MICKEY MOUSE Cartoon.Lifeguard Mickey saves Minnie from the ocean's WILD WAVES. Such bravery surely deserves a musical celebration and a little romance.This enjoyable early black & white film has a plot propelled entirely by its lively soundtrack. Walt Disney supplies Mickey with his squeaky speaking voice.Walt Disney (1901-1966) was always intrigued by drawings. As a lad in Marceline, Missouri, he sketched farm animals on scraps of paper; later, as an ambulance driver in France during the First World War, he drew figures on the sides of his vehicle. Back in Kansas City, along with artist Ub Iwerks, Walt developed a primitive animation studio that provided animated commercials and tiny cartoons for the local movie theaters. Always the innovator, his ALICE IN CARTOONLAND series broke ground in placing a live figure in a cartoon universe. Business reversals sent Disney & Iwerks to Hollywood in 1923, where Walt's older brother Roy became his lifelong business manager & counselor. When a mildly successful series with Oswald The Lucky Rabbit was snatched away by the distributor, the character of Mickey Mouse sprung into Walt's imagination, ensuring Disney's immortality. The happy arrival of sound technology made Mickey's screen debut, STEAMBOAT WILLIE (1928), a tremendous audience success with its use of synchronized music. The SILLY SYMPHONIES soon appeared, and Walt's growing crew of marvelously talented animators were quickly conquering new territory with full color, illusions of depth and radical advancements in personality development, an arena in which Walt's genius was unbeatable. Mickey's feisty, naughty behavior had captured millions of fans, but he was soon to be joined by other animated companions: temperamental Donald Duck, intellectually-challenged Goofy and energetic Pluto. All this was in preparation for Walt's grandest dream - feature length animated films. Against a blizzard of doomsayers, Walt persevered and over the next decades delighted children of all ages with the adventures of Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi & Peter Pan. Walt never forgot that his fortunes were all started by a mouse, or that simplicity of message and lots of hard work always pay off.