As one of the first animated films with fully synchronised sound, 'Steamboat Willie' is widely celebrated as part of a turning-point in cinema that moved from silent film to “talkies”. But when the intertitles of silent movies disappeared so did deaf and hard of hearing audiences’ access. This era also marked the removal of the animator from the frame and enclosed its characters in a contained world in which to play out their drama. As critic Nicholas Sammond argues, the performing animator was part of animation’s inheritance from minstrel and vaudeville performance; his disappearance coincided with increasingly industrialised animation studios and the development of aesthetic standards and conventions that many value as ‘realistic’ today.