About The Skeleton Dance (1929)
The story behind the film
The Skeleton Dance was the first of Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies, a series of musical cartoons that ran alongside the Mickey Mouse shorts and became Disney's testing ground for new techniques. The idea came from composer Carl Stalling, a theatre organist in Kansas City who had scored Disney's early Mickey cartoons. Stalling proposed a series of "musical novelty" cartoons in which the animation would follow the music rather than a story — and pitched one about skeletons dancing in a graveyard.
Ub Iwerks, Disney's lead animator, animated most of the film himself in about six weeks at the start of 1929, taking inspiration from drawings by the English caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson. The result is a six-minute danse macabre: at midnight in a spooky graveyard, an owl hoots, bats fly, cats fight, and skeletons climb from their graves to dance, play each other's bones like xylophones, and turn a cat's tail into a violin — until the rooster crows at dawn and they scramble back underground.
Cast & crew
- Produced and directed by Walt Disney
- Animation largely by Ub Iwerks
- Music by Carl Stalling
- No dialogue: the cartoon is driven entirely by music and sound effects
Why it's worth watching
The Skeleton Dance is a landmark of animated music and timing. Every movement is matched to the beat, and the skeletons' rubbery, rattling choreography — is still delightfully inventive. It's spooky without being frightening, which makes it a perfect Halloween treat for all ages.
It also shows how quickly animation was advancing in the first year of sound: the Silly Symphonies would go on to pioneer Technicolor and the multiplane camera, leading eventually to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Fun facts
- After premiering in Los Angeles in 1929, The Skeleton Dance was picked up for distribution by Columbia Pictures. At New York's Roxy Theatre it became the first picture in that theatre's history to have a return engagement.
- Its success led to the full Silly Symphonies series, which won multiple Academy Awards in the 1930s.
- In 1994 animators voted it 18th in the book The 50 Greatest Cartoons.
Public-domain status
The Skeleton Dance was published in 1929. Its copyright was renewed, so it remained protected until it entered the US public domain on January 1, 2025. Starlite TV is not affiliated with or endorsed by Disney. See "Rights & source" below.