Directed by: Walt Disney
Animation by: Ub Iwerks
Music by: Carl W. Stalling

STORY

Midnight strikes in a lonely graveyard, and while most sensible creatures would probably prefer to be somewhere else, the residents of this cemetery are only getting started.

An owl watches from a tree as bats fly from the church tower, a dog howls beneath the moon and two cats begin a wonderfully ridiculous fight among the tombstones. Then the real stars of the evening arrive. A skeleton climbs out of its grave, discovers that even the dead can be startled by an owl, and before long four skeletons have risen for a moonlit celebration.

And what a celebration it becomes.

The skeletons dance, leap, twist and turn their own bodies into musical instruments. Bones become drumsticks. One skeleton plays another skeleton’s spine like a xylophone. Skulls bounce around the cemetery. Even one of the unfortunate graveyard cats becomes part of the orchestra when its tail is used like the strings of an instrument.

There is no dialogue and there really does not need to be. Music, movement and some gloriously macabre visual comedy tell the entire story.

Then a rooster announces that morning is coming.

The nighttime performers scramble back toward their grave, crashing together in their hurry to disappear before daylight. Even after most of them have made it underground, one pair of skeletal feet has been left behind, requiring one last bony hand to reach from the grave and pull them inside.

The Skeleton Dance turns a cemetery into a stage and death into one enormous visual joke. Nearly a century after it was created, there is still something irresistible about watching four skeletons discover that being dead is apparently no reason to stop dancing.

AIN BACKSTAGE SECRETS & AINTOIDS

THE FIRST SILLY SYMPHONY

The Skeleton Dance was the very first entry in Disney’s famous Silly Symphony series. Rather than building each cartoon around a continuing star such as Mickey Mouse, the Silly Symphonies were conceived around music, mood, movement and changing characters. The series eventually included 75 cartoons and became an important laboratory for techniques Disney artists would later use in feature animation.

CARL STALLING HAD THE IDEA

Composer Carl W. Stalling played a major role in creating the concept that became the Silly Symphonies. Stalling proposed the idea of musical animated shorts to Walt Disney and specifically suggested the possibilities of dancing skeletons. Walt liked the idea enough to pursue it, and The Skeleton Dance became the first experiment in the new series.

UB IWERKS AND A LOT OF BONES

Ub Iwerks was responsible for the overwhelming majority of the animation. Working at remarkable speed, Iwerks animated most of the cartoon during an approximately six-week period in early 1929. Les Clark and Wilfred Jackson contributed to the opening material, but much of the wonderfully elastic skeleton action audiences remember came from Iwerks.

MUSIC AND MOVEMENT BECOME ONE

One of the most important things about The Skeleton Dance is not simply what the skeletons do, but how perfectly they do it to the music.

The music and animation were designed together so that movement could correspond precisely with rhythm. Disney’s artists used timing methods that helped synchronize the animated action with the soundtrack. The result is visible throughout the cartoon: footsteps, rattling bones, dancing bodies and visual gags seem to become part of the orchestra.

THE MUSIC BEHIND THE MADNESS

The idea was associated with the tradition of the Danse Macabre, the centuries-old artistic image of the dead rising to dance. Camille Saint-Saëns’ famous Danse Macabre was an inspiration for the concept, although his composition was not ultimately used in the finished cartoon.

Carl Stalling created the score, incorporating musical material including Edvard Grieg’s March of the Dwarfs along with his own themes.

THE SOUNDTRACK WENT TO NEW YORK

Disney did not yet have the necessary recording facilities at his California studio, so the soundtrack was recorded in New York in February 1929. The cartoon used the Powers Cinephone sound system during a period when synchronized sound was still transforming the motion picture industry.

HOLLYWOOD WASN’T SURE ABOUT THOSE SKELETONS

Some exhibitors were initially reluctant to book the cartoon. Dancing skeletons apparently seemed a little too strange and gruesome compared with the increasingly popular Mickey Mouse.

Disney kept pushing.

The Skeleton Dance eventually received an important engagement at Los Angeles’ prestigious Carthay Circle Theatre. Audiences responded, helping prove that Walt’s strange little cemetery full of dancing bones had commercial possibilities after all.

THE SKELETONS MADE IT TO THE ROXY

The cartoon subsequently reached New York’s enormous Roxy Theatre, one of the country’s most prestigious movie palaces. Its reception was so strong that The Skeleton Dance eventually returned to the Roxy, an extraordinary accomplishment for a cartoon short.

Those early successful engagements helped Disney secure national distribution for the Silly Symphonies through Columbia Pictures.

EVEN THE CRITICS LOVED THE BONES

Contemporary reviewers noticed exactly the same gag audiences still remember today: one skeleton using another skeleton’s spine like a xylophone.

The Film Daily praised the novelty of the cartoon and its graveyard humor, while Variety also singled out the skeleton xylophone sequence and the precision of the musical timing.

TOO MACABRE FOR DENMARK!

Those dancing skeletons were apparently a little TOO effective.

In 1931, reports appeared that The Skeleton Dance had been banned in Denmark because authorities considered the film too macabre.

Apparently four musical skeletons were more than Denmark was prepared to handle.

AINTOID: THE DANSE MACABRE GOES BACK CENTURIES

The central joke has very old roots. The “Dance of Death,” or Danse Macabre, developed in medieval European art as a reminder that death eventually comes for everyone, regardless of wealth or social position.

The Skeleton Dance takes that grim tradition and turns it completely upside down.

These skeletons are not frightening the living.

They are having the time of their afterlives.

AINTOID: THE CAT DIDN’T SIGN UP FOR THIS

Among all the dancing bones and rattling skulls is one of the cartoon’s funniest victims: a graveyard cat.

One skeleton grabs the cat and uses its tail like part of a musical instrument. It is exactly the kind of wildly impossible visual gag that animation could accomplish in ways live action never could.

AINTOID: FROM GRAVEYARD EXPERIMENT TO ANIMATION HISTORY

What began as an experimental musical cartoon became the beginning of one of the most important series in animation history. Disney later described the Silly Symphonies as a place where the studio could experiment with techniques that would eventually contribute to its animated feature films.

Seven Silly Symphonies ultimately won Academy Awards.

AINTOID: STILL DANCING NEARLY A CENTURY LATER

The Skeleton Dance became one of the most enduring cartoons of its era. In 1994, animation professionals voting for the book The 50 Greatest Cartoons ranked The Skeleton Dance number 18.

Those four skeletons had been dancing for more than six decades by then.

They still were not finished.

DATE RELEASED

August 22, 1929

COUNTRY RELEASED