The Skeleton Dance was a monumental achievement in the history of animated cartoons. It was the first Silly Symphony, a cartoon that was a proposal for a “musical novelty” that combined music and animation. The Silly Symphonies became a testing ground for innovations in animated cartoons. The Skeleton Dance also sparked interest in animation among many. Steamboat Willie may have been the cartoon that made Walt Disney into a leading figure in the animation industry, but The Skeleton Dance equally impressed many.
J.B. Kaufman and Russell Merritt’s book on the Silly Symphonies states that the film’s first premiere was at the Carthay Circle with Murnau’s Four Devils on June 10, 1929. I’m not going to go in depth on the history of the film, the late Jim Korkis already did that here and here. Instead, I am going to focus on the reactions by both audiences and notable individuals to the film.
The following photo below is what The Roxy Theatre had to say about the film (click to enlarge):
The film returned to The Roxy, which Exhibitors World Herald (misremembering Ub Iwerks’s name) reported saying:
“Congratulations are due to the Walt Disney contingent, whose “Skeleton Dance,” the first of a new series of Silly Symphonies, played at the Roxy last week and is the only picture of any variety to have a return engagement at that house. Those who want to see perfection in the gentle art of timing are advised to visit the Roxy during the week of August 3, the time of its next engagement. There is no plot to “The Skeleton Dance.” It is just a marvelous nightmare come to life and presented for your appreciation on the screen. As far as we can remember, it was drawn by a chap called Ubweriks, who might have been suffering from artistic D.T.’s when he made it.
It got as much applause as anything else on the Roxy program.”
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The Exhibitor’s World-Herald also said on September 28:
“If the 13 Disney Silly Symphonies scheduled for release by Columbia, maintain the record established by the first, which is entitled “The Skeleton Dance,” then the series will shatter all achievements in both short and feature length productions. The first played at the Roxy and made such a hit that it was re-booked. During the second engagement, the Roxy featured The Skeleton Dance on the marquee. Never before has the Roxy ever re-booked any production whether short or feature length.”
One person who saw The Skelton Dance at the Roxy was a young Joe Barbera. It would be the film that would make him want to enter the animation industry. Regarding the film Barbera said: “I saw it about seventy miles from the screen, but the impact on me was tremendous, nevertheless. I saw these skeletons dancing in a row and in unison, and I asked myself: How do you do that? How do you make that happen?” (Korkis)
The Skeleton Dance impressed many notable individuals. Ray Bradbury said in the book Bradbury Speaks:
“It was a five-minute lighting bolt that knocked the soul out of my eight-year-old body and vacuumed it back in, bright, clean, refurbished, hyperventilated, new. I loitered all day in the Genesee Theatre just to see that incredible five minutes of drawn terror and delight reinvent itself on the vast screen. Those skeleton acrobats, catapulting their bones about a graveyard and bounding out of tombs and shoving their skulls at a special boy in the front row center, caused him to sit through two performances of some dumb Adolphe Menjou let’s kiss again and cause a run on disgusted boys bolting back and forth to the men’s room and drinking more pop to make more pee. In the middle of this racetrack routine, having seen the skeletons perambulate in syncopation for the third time, my father appeared and dragged me babbling home to a cool reception and a cool dinner.”
Art Babbitt was also impressed and said (in The Comics Journal, 1988):
“My career in animation did not begin at Disney’s. I started animating, very badly, in May of 1924. I did medical films, silent commercials for theaters, and so on. Very simple animation. Then when sound came in I worked with Paul Terry, and I was with him until the spring of 1932. In ’32 1 saw a Disney cartoon, “The Skeleton Dance,” and I knew that was the place where I wanted to work.”
A young Ray Harryhausen was also taken by the film and made puppets of the characters, as seen in this one he made in 1939. He was fascinated by how skeletons could fly apart. Because of this, he made these puppets able to do this on stage.
Kamden Spies is an animation fan, collector, and aficionado. He received his undergraduate degree in an IDM in film history and creative writing from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and is currently getting his Master’s in Library and Information Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington.
That’s a very impressive scene crafted by Ray Harryhausen, all the more so considering he was not yet out of his teens. Harryhausen, of course, would raise the art of animating skeletons to an even higher plane of excellence with “Jason and the Argonauts”.
It appears that the initial reception of this short film was overwhelmingly positive. I have often wondered about that because skeletons in a graveyard seems a morbid way to introduce a new series. Not that I personally have any objection to the film. In fact, my only problem with it is the way in which it gets slashed to pieces when aired on television. This is one cartoon where every frame is crucial. The overall effect of the film, when shown uncut, is stunning.
I have read that some reviewers were not so pleased with “The Skeleton Dance” feeling that the cartoon was a bit macabre for children–but then, in those days, cartoon shorts were aimed at adult audiences. Perhaps Walt wanted to startle his audiences–similarly to the ways in which he later incorporated moments of sheer horror into “Snow White”. Not to mention a few terrifying moments in “Pinocchio,” “Fantasia,” and elsewhere. People who think of Disney cartoons as all sweetness and light with no real substance need to be reminded that the Disney output was very edgy in its early days. It was a bold and daring move on Walt’s part to introduce his Silly Symphony series with this entry.
Do you recall any specifics about what gets cut when it’s shown on TV? I’ve never seen it on television and I’m curious to guess what gets cut and why. Do TV stations think it actually is too macabre for today’s children? Or are there culturally insensitive moments I’m not remembering?
I believe the cuts were more for time than due to content. Sequences that take a bit of build-up, such as the gradual metamorphosis from one skeleton to four, the dance sequences, and some of the atmospheric bits. My sense was that it was done to speed the film along faster. I always notice when one of my favorite cartoon shorts gets a trimming–it’s worse when I actually know what’s missing. Some gags lose their payoff when the full reel isn’t played. But apparently it was done to save time.
I think it is easy today to forget just how influential, important, and innovative the Disney studio was to the animation and artistic community in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s.
From technical stuff like sound and color, to cultural perceptions and benchmarks of the art form, they were simply the clear top dog for at least over a decade. Reviews from luminaries like this are good indications why!
Tex Avery once said that “Walt Disney spent a lot of money training people who went on to do their best work for someone else.” Including Tex, needless to say.
He was of course referring to animators, designers, and screenwriters, but what about Carl Stalling? He’s defintely one of the genuine genius-level talents who left Walt early on, either for more pay or because they’d come to dislike him, or both.
Carl was doing “mashups” of popular and classical music long before that term was invented. Also in the early 20th century, the insurance company executive and “amateur” composer Charles Ives (educated in music at Yale) was doing something similar, but he worked in obscurity and his music wasn’t championed by anyone in the American classical music world until very late in his life.
It took a very long time, but in his last years, the late 1940’s, Ives was finally awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music. His public comment on this honor was that of the pithy New Englander that he was: “Prizes are for boys. I’m grown up.”
But there were no prizes of any kind for Maestro Stalling.
Even so, who could argue that he “went on to do [his] best work for someone else” other than Walt? What would the WB cartoons, after their faltering first few years with varioua composers coming and going like in a revolving door, have been like without him? I can’t even imagine that! Can you? If he’d written ONLY the scores of the otherwise silent Road Runner cartoons, he would still belong in the pantheon of true giants— in any art form.
Perhaps Carl was the greatest talent (non-drawing division) who ever walked away from the nascent Mouse Factory. He was at least ONE of them!
Maybe he’s at least an official “Disney Legend.” and I’d be very surprised if he isn’t.
Sorry to inform you that, as of right now, Carl Stalling is NOT an official Disney Legend. I find this deficit as scandalous as you do.
I never expected to see Carl Stalling compared with Charles Ives on Cartoon Research. I see your point, and the two men had other things in common as well (e.g., they were both organists). The significant difference is that Stalling always worked for someone else and had to deal with very precise increments of time, whereas Ives enjoyed the luxury of total self-indulgence and could compose works that lasted however long he pleased. I respect Ives for having anticipated every single trend of twentieth-century musical composition, but I’ve never sat through a performance of his music that I did not find exasperatingly dull — while I can listen to Stalling’s cartoon scores for hours on end. Stalling, like all cartoon composers, had much more in common with the “specialist” composers of nineteenth-century ballet (Delibes, Adam, etc.), who had to write music to match pre-determined choreography.
Note that the first Columbia ad references Krazy Kat, so they were distributing two animations studios’ cartoons at the same time. On reflection realized that in the 40s Paramount was distributing studio-owned Famous cartoons (formerly the independent Fleischers) simultaneously with George Pal’s Puppetoons. Previously I hadn’t given it much thought, assuming a studio would either own an animation studio OR contract one independent for all its cartoon shorts. Now I’m wondering which was the norm.
In live action it was and is fairly common for a studio to handle outside productions. MGM, with a large short subject department on the lot, also distributed all Hal Roach’s comedies.