The July 17, 1929 concern of Vari­ety automobile­ried a discover a few laugh-filled new quick movie wherein “skele­tons hoof and frol­ic,” the height of whose hilar­i­ty “is reached when one skele­ton performs the backbone of anoth­er in xylo­telephone fash­ion, utilizing a pair of thigh bones as ham­mers.” The ultimate strains of this sturdy rec­om­males­da­tion add that “all takes place in a grave­yard. Don’t carry your chil­dren.” The evaluate amus­ing­ly displays shifts in pub­lic style over the previous near-cen­tu­ry — until the sight of skele­tons play­ing every oth­er like xylo­telephones is extra com­i­cal­ly endur­ing than I imag­ine — however these remaining phrases add a notice of breath­tak­ing irony, for the quick beneath evaluate is The Skele­ton Dance, professional­duced and direct­ed by Walt Dis­ney.

Regardless of the pow­er of Dis­ney’s identify, this par­tic­u­lar movie is guess­ter beneath­stood because the work of Ub Iwerks, who ani­mat­ed most of it by him­self in about six weeks. He and Dis­ney had been work­ing togeth­er since not less than the ear­ly 9­teen-twen­ties, after they launched the short-lived Chuckle-O-Gram Stu­dio in Kansas Metropolis.

It was Iwerks, in reality, who refined a tough sketch by Dis­ney into the fig­ure we now know as Mick­ey Mouse — however whom audi­ences within the twen­ties first got here to know as Steam­boat Willie, whose epony­mous automobile­toon debut entered the pub­lic domain last year. The Skele­ton Dance, the primary of Dis­ney’s “Sil­ly Sym­phonies,” was sim­i­lar­ly lib­er­at­ed from copy­proper on this year’s Pub­lic Domain Day, together with a vari­ety of oth­er 1929 Dis­ney shorts (many of them fea­tur­ing Mick­ey Mouse).

The good tech­ni­cal inno­va­tion on dis­play isn’t syn­chro­nized sound itself, which had been used even earlier than Steam­boat Willie, however the rela­tion­ship between the pictures and the sound. Accord­ing to ani­ma­tion his­to­ri­an Charles Solomon, “hav­ing to beneath­rating the motion within the first Mick­ey Mouse pic­ture,” com­pos­er Carl Stalling “sug­gest­ed that the reverse might be completed: including ani­mat­ed motion to a musi­cal rating,” per­haps fea­tur­ing skele­tons, timber, and such­like mov­ing round in rhythm. There we’ve the gen­e­sis of this automobile­toon danse macabre, which was a leap for­ward within the ever-clos­er union of ani­ma­tion and music in addition to a rev­e­la­tion to its audi­ences, who would­n’t have expe­ri­enced any­factor fairly prefer it earlier than. Even immediately, essentially the most nat­ur­al response to a suf­fi­cient­ly mirac­u­lous-seem­ing tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment is, per­haps, snigger­ter.

The Skele­ton Dance was vot­ed the 18th greatest automobile­toon of all time by 1,000 ani­ma­tion professional­fes­sion­als in a 1994 guide referred to as The 50 Great­est Car­toons. Discover 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 mostly in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His initiatives embody the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the guide The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social web­work for­mer­ly often known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.