Studio: Walt Disney Studio
Distributor: Celebrity Productions
Short Synopsis
An owl sits on a branch in front of a full moon. Below, a church clock strikes midnight, the bell sends bats out of the belfry, a dog howls, and two cats fight on a gravestone. A skeleton climbs out of a grave and dances. Startled by the owl, it hides; then, annoyed with itself, it throws its own skull at the bird, knocking off its feathers, and the skull bounces back on to its neck. Three more skeletons join it and the dance becomes a full routine. One uses another's ribcage as a xylophone, playing it with a pair of thigh bones; another plays a cat's tail like a fiddle. A rooster crows to announce the dawn, and the skeletons rush for the grave, crashing into each other and tangling into a single heap of bones. They dive in together, leaving a pair of feet behind, and a bony arm reaches out to pull them in.
Why It Matters
- Everything moves to the music, and the bones themselves become instruments. Iwerks animates the skeletons with a jerky, jointed grace that is both comic and genuinely eerie, and the collapse of four dancers into one tangle of bones at the end is a perfect physical punchline.
- It was the first Silly Symphony, the series in which Disney experimented with music, colour and character animation through the 1930s, which led to Flowers and Trees, the first Technicolor cartoon, and to Snow White. It entered the U.S. public domain on 1 January 2025.
Notes and Trivia
- The idea came from Carl Stalling, a Kansas City theatre organist who pitched Disney a series of musical novelty cartoons and the image of skeletons dancing in a graveyard.
- Iwerks animated most of it in about six weeks, drawing inspiration from the English caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson.
- The music borrows from Grieg's "March of the Trolls".
- See also: The Haunted House (1929), which reuses its skeleton animation.