El Baile de los Esqueletos

What a difference it makes to actually have Disney himself direct his cartoons. The Skeleton Dance is atmospheric, surreal, and visually eccentric to the point where I believe it inspired the Nightmare Before Christmas, to some degree, and even the works of Sally Cruikshank. I imagine that kids might have actually been a bit frightened of this cartoon back in 1929.

Apparently Disney had trouble getting it into theaters based on this notion.

The short features a gloomy churchyard overtaken by skeletons at night who go about dancing to various forms of mischief. A typically thin premise for cartoons from this era, but worth it for the atmosphere.

So much animation; so many skeletons. This is a film about what happens at midnight when all the skeletons of the dead pop up and start to have a good time. They create multi legged creatures. The do hoop rolls. They play the old xylophone thing with the spine of someone. This, of course, has been done a million times. The neat thing here is that this is very cleverly done with all kinds of creativity. There is still something eerie about the fact that what we are seeing is inside each of us. This also has a fun soundtrack that allows the skeletons to do dance routines and participate in the making of the music. A very well done early cartoon that has been copied a number of times.

I was lucky enough to see a 35mm print of this on the "big screen". For Halloween 2000, El Capitan theatre in Hollywood ran "The Skeleton Dance" as the short before 1993's "The Nightmare Before Christmas". It's really nice to see some classic Disney shorts theatrically, rather than video or 16mm. This, being the first Silly Symphony, definitely shows us what was to come from Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks. At the time of its release, sync-sound was only a couple of years old, it's fun to watch (through old films) the progression of sound as the field became more explored and perfected through the years.

A Walt Disney SILLY SYMPHONY Cartoon Short.

The powers of darkness are abroad one dark & stormy night. In a lonely churchyard, graves are opened and THE SKELETON DANCE is performed by four bony fellows who exhibit terpsichorean skills of the most sepulchral sort. The crowing of a cock signals the approach of daybreak and the ghastly hoofers hie themselves back into their grave.

Carl W. Stalling, Disney's music director in the early days, arranged Grieg's 'March Of The Dwarfs' as musical accompaniment to this first entry in the Symphonies series. With Ub Iwerks' masterful drawing, this black & white cartoon still packs a punch today. In 1929 it proved to be completely different from the Studio's Mickey Mouse productions. Indeed, some theater owners found it to be too macabre and refused to show it.

The SILLY SYMPHONIES, which Walt Disney produced for a ten year period beginning in 1929, are among the most interesting of series in the field of animation. Unlike the Mickey Mouse cartoons in which action was paramount, with the Symphonies the action was made to fit the music. There was little plot in the early Symphonies, which featured lively inanimate objects and anthropomorphic plants & animals, all moving frantically to the soundtrack. Gradually, however, the Symphonies became the school where Walt's animators learned to work with color and began to experiment with plot, characterization & photographic special effects. The pages of Fable & Fairy Tale, Myth & Mother Goose were all mined to provide story lines and even Hollywood's musicals & celebrities were effectively spoofed. It was from this rich soil that Disney's feature-length animation was to spring. In 1939, with SNOW WHITE successfully behind him and PINOCCHIO & FANTASIA on the near horizon, Walt phased out the SILLY SYMPHONIES; they had run their course & served their purpose.

The night promises to be a scary one. Lightning flashes. The wind howls. A tree branch in the shape of a hand seems to grab for a frightened owl that spins its head around like a top. The clock on the church tower strikes midnight, sending the bats flying out of the belfry. Two cats on gravestones fight by pulling and stretching each other's noses like taffy. A skeleton rises from behind a gravestone, frightening the fur off the cats. But an owl's hooting scares it, and it retaliates by throwing its skull and knocking the bird's feathers off. It's time for the skeletons to dance; and they perform as no living creatures could.

Less than ten years after this crude black and white cartoon, Walt Disney made "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." Disney may have quickly surpassed this film in technical virtuosity, but no one has surpassed it in artistry. "The Skeleton Dance," with its spooky charm and ineffable strangeness, is one of the great animated cartoons.