La danse macabre

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.

It was in 1928 when sound entered the realm of motion pictures and with it a new age arrived to the young medium and the conventions of an art form were changed forever. This new technology, that allowed movies to be able to have their own musical score independent of the theater's orchestra, entered the mind of a young film director and animator named Walt Disney, who had been producing short animated films with the help of the brilliant cartoonist Ub Iwerks. Disney decided to take advantage of the novelty of sound and create a series of short musical animations to distribute along their Mickey Mouse cartoons (which also began to be produced with sound), in which they would be able to experiment with new techniques, characters and ideas. He named the series, "Silly Symphonies", and the very first one of them, 1929's "The Skeleton Dance", would revolutionize animation forever.

In "The Skeleton Dance", the action is set on an abandoned graveyard during a windy night under the full moon. It is the perfect night for the creatures of the night, and so the bats fly from the belfry, the spiders go out for a walk, and an owl watches scared the action that's about to begin: the dead rise from their graves, and they are ready to dance. A skeleton comes out first, scaring a couple of cats who were fighting, and then he calls his friends, other skeletons who are willing to play some music and celebrate. Using their bones as musical instruments, the Skeletons play a haunting tune, dance to the music, and even dance Ring Around the Rosie, having fun until the moon hides and the new day begins, because as soon as the rooster appears to announce that it's morning, the Skeletons must return to their graves, and prepare themselves for the next time.

Created by Ub Iwerks and Walt Disney, "The Skeleton Dance" is, as its tag-line says, a talking picture novelty in which audiences where able to witness a good song accompanied by an animated film, pretty much similar to what we now know as a musical video. What makes the movie amazing is the way it perfectly mixes the horror atmosphere of its setting with the whimsical comedy that made Walt Disney Productions' short films so popular with the audiences. Skulls, bats, cats and spiders make an apparition in the movie, in what could be the perfect scenario for a horror film, but this time the skeletons only want to have fun. Carl W. Stalling, composer of the film's song (and another influential figure in the history of animation), creates in "The Skeleton Dance" one of the best Disney tunes ever, perfectly putting in his music that mix of horror and humor that the short film embodies.

Ub Iwerks' art shines through the film, and Disney makes sure to take the most advantage of his friend's talent. As written above, they saw the "Silly Symphonies" as a way to experiment, and "The Skeleton Dance" showcases Iwerks and his team making a highly dynamic film, as well as creating pretty impressive sequences where perspective is put to great use. It's also very imaginative the many things they do with their skeletons, specially when they made them use the things found in the cemetery as musical instruments (including cats, and later, their own bones). The choreography of the Skeleton dance is very funny, and one gets the feeling that this group of young animators were truly having fun when making this little film. In many ways, "The Skeleton Dance" was way ahead of its time, and includes elements that years later would be part of the horror genre.

Among Disney's early films, "The Skeleton Dance" is one of enormous importance, as thanks to its big success Disney was able to produce more cartoons of his established characters. It also produced many imitators (WB's "Merry Melodies" and MGM's "Happy Harmonies" being the best of them) and a completely new style of short animations. Sadly, the friendship between Disney and Iwerks would be broken and Iwerks abandoned Disney in 1930 to open his own studio and later to work at Columbia Pictures (where in 1937 he remade "The Skeleton Dance" in color, under the name of "Skeleton Frolics"). While he never found the same success he had with Disney, Ub Iwerks' work proved to be among the most influential in the history of animation, becoming the teacher of other masters like Chuck Jones, and even now, animators today study the magic of Ub Iwerks and his dancing skeletons.

10/10

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.

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.