The Haunted House

One of the chief features of these early cartoons was dance. Take a piece of music and have an animate or an inanimate object begin to hoof it. In this one, Mickey is caught in a storm and seeks refuge in a spooky old house. It is inhabited by skeletons. They do what they can to frighten him, with great success. But it turns out they are looking for music. Mickey is placed on a stool and forced to play an organ. Then the dancing starts. Using bones as the motif, the undead do quite a good job. There are several surprises along the way. I enjoyed it very much.

This animated short is cute but lacks the fun of The Skeleton Dance (1929). In fact, The Haunted House borrows quite a bit from The Skeleton Dance.

In this short we have Mickey who enters a house during a storm only to find out the house is haunted. A ghoul commands Mickey to play the organ while the skeletons dance. It's a fun watch for Halloween.

8/10.

When I first saw this Mickey Mouse cartoon on a VHS tape a few decades ago, the part I remember the most was when he was in the dark and his face looked like when Al Jolson put on his burnt cork makeup and he says, "Mammy!" I found that amusing then but I can understand why it wouldn't be so now. Moving on, this short is basically about Mickey entering the title place during a storm and encountering Death who makes him play the organ so the skeletons can dance. It's possible some of the animation was meant for the Silly Symphony cartoon The Skeleton Dance. Anyway, in both that and this, the numbers are pretty entertaining though Mickey takes a back seat here during that sequence. Still, The Haunted House is worth the look.

This is a nicely done black and white Mickey Mouse cartoon, where he stumbles upon a haunted house after finding shelter from the pouring rain. Mickey runs into a few live skeletons who demand that he plays the piano to entertain them while they dance. What results are some delightful and characteristic moves with music matching sound effects.

There's some harmless creepy moments when skeletons appear in the dark and scare Mickey as he lets out a loud screech; this reminds me of a Disney screensaver I had that used clips of this cartoon's images and sounds.

The short has plenty of Halloween related things as well, from skeletons to bats, and from spiders to clawry trees. Even the haunted house itself sports a fierce-looking face image. Fun stuff here!

Grade A

On August 29, 1929, Walt Disney publicly screened the first film in his "Silly Symphonies" series, 'The Skeleton Dance (1929).' Needless to say, it was a rousing success, and ensured a further decade of similar musical short films. 'Haunted House (1929)' was released on August 1, 1929, and is similar in many ways, not least because a lot of the footage originally intended for 'The Skeleton Dance' was instead recycled into this Mickey Mouse musical horror short. Though this recycling is rather obvious in the film's second half, in which our mousy hero disappears for a while, I nonetheless enjoyed the film for its vivid imagination, and, especially in its opening minutes, eerie atmosphere. This was one example, at least, where Disney's work benefited from black-and-white animation {the studio's first outing in three-strip Technicolor was 'Flowers and Trees (1932)'}, and the creepy shadows of the haunted mansion bear the sinister atmosphere of a 1930s Universal horror, with the whistling wind providing an ominous air, at least until the music starts up.

Truth be told, 'Haunted House' is the first Mickey Mouse cartoon that I can remember watching, though a reasonable portion of my childhood would no doubt have been occupied in a similar manner. I wish that less of the film had been concerned with dancing skeletons, because Mickey's initial exploration of the dark mansion is stylistically creative and almost genuinely frightening. A lingering trace of the silent era is noticeable when the house's lighting goes out, and Mickey is illuminated only by a circular ring of light that calls to mind the camera iris favoured by so many early filmmakers. A scary Grim Reaper then enters the room, points to an organ against the wall and instructs our hero to "play." Mickey doesn't really know how to, but he nonetheless obliges, and soon the army of skeleton are tapping merrily across the room, using their bones as musical instruments. This Mickey Mouse short could have been better, but it has some good atmosphere, and is well worth watching.