Home E-Learning The Skeleton Dance, Voted the 18th Best Cartoon of All Time, Is Now in the Public Domain (1929)

The Skeleton Dance, Voted the 18th Best Cartoon of All Time, Is Now in the Public Domain (1929)

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The Skeleton Dance, Voted the 18th Best Cartoon of All Time, Is Now in the Public Domain (1929)

The July 17, 1929 issue of Vari­ety car­ried a notice about a laugh-filled new short film in which “skele­tons hoof and frol­ic,” the peak of whose hilar­i­ty “is reached when one skele­ton plays the spine of anoth­er in xylo­phone fash­ion, using a pair of thigh bones as ham­mers.” The final lines of this strong rec­om­men­da­tion add that “all takes place in a grave­yard. Don’t bring your chil­dren.” The review amus­ing­ly reflects shifts in pub­lic taste over the past near-cen­tu­ry — unless the sight of skele­tons play­ing each oth­er like xylo­phones is more com­i­cal­ly endur­ing than I imag­ine — but those final words add a note of breath­tak­ing irony, for the short under review is The Skele­ton Dance, pro­duced and direct­ed by Walt Dis­ney.

Despite the pow­er of Dis­ney’s name, this par­tic­u­lar film is bet­ter under­stood as the work of Ub Iwerks, who ani­mat­ed most of it by him­self in about six weeks. He and Dis­ney had been work­ing togeth­er since at least the ear­ly nine­teen-twen­ties, when they launched the short-lived Laugh-O-Gram Stu­dio in Kansas City.

It was Iwerks, in fact, who refined a rough sketch by Dis­ney into the fig­ure we now know as Mick­ey Mouse — but whom audi­ences in the twen­ties first came to know as Steam­boat Willie, whose epony­mous car­toon debut entered the pub­lic domain last year. The Skele­ton Dance, the first of Dis­ney’s “Sil­ly Sym­phonies,” was sim­i­lar­ly lib­er­at­ed from copy­right on this year’s Pub­lic Domain Day, along with a vari­ety of oth­er 1929 Dis­ney shorts (many of them fea­tur­ing Mick­ey Mouse).

The great tech­ni­cal inno­va­tion on dis­play isn’t syn­chro­nized sound itself, which had been used even before Steam­boat Willie, but the rela­tion­ship between the images and the sound. Accord­ing to ani­ma­tion his­to­ri­an Charles Solomon, “hav­ing to under­score the action in the first Mick­ey Mouse pic­ture,” com­pos­er Carl Stalling “sug­gest­ed that the reverse could be done: adding ani­mat­ed action to a musi­cal score,” per­haps fea­tur­ing skele­tons, trees, and such­like mov­ing around in rhythm. There we have the gen­e­sis of this car­toon danse macabre, which was a leap for­ward in the ever-clos­er union of ani­ma­tion and music as well as a rev­e­la­tion to its audi­ences, who would­n’t have expe­ri­enced any­thing quite like it before. Even today, the most nat­ur­al response to a suf­fi­cient­ly mirac­u­lous-seem­ing tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment is, per­haps, laugh­ter.

The Skele­ton Dance was vot­ed the 18th best car­toon of all time by 1,000 ani­ma­tion pro­fes­sion­als in a 1994 book called The 50 Great­est Car­toons. Find a copy here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What’s Enter­ing the Pub­lic Domain in 2025: Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Ear­ly Hitch­cock Films, Tintin and Pop­eye Car­toons & More

The Evo­lu­tion of Ani­ma­tion, 1833–2017: From the Phenakistis­cope to Pixar

How Walt Dis­ney Car­toons Are Made: 1939 Doc­u­men­tary Gives an Inside Look

Cel­e­brate The Day of the Dead with The Clas­sic Skele­ton Art of José Guadalupe Posa­da

An Ear­ly Ver­sion of Mick­ey Mouse Enters the Pub­lic Domain on Jan­u­ary 1, 2024

The Dis­ney Artist Who Devel­oped Don­ald Duck & Remained Anony­mous for Years, Despite Being “the Most Pop­u­lar and Wide­ly Read Artist-Writer in the World”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.


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