The Skeleton Dance, Voted the 18th Best Cartoon of All Time, Is Now in the Public Domain (1929)

The July 17, 1929 issue of Vari­ety car­ried a notice about a laugh-filled new short film in which “skele­tons hoof and frol­ic,” the peak of whose hilar­i­ty “is reached when one skele­ton plays the spine of anoth­er in xylo­phone fash­ion, using a pair of thigh bones as ham­mers.” The final lines of this strong rec­om­men­da­tion add that “all takes place in a grave­yard. Don’t bring your chil­dren.” The review amus­ing­ly reflects shifts in pub­lic taste over the past near-cen­tu­ry — unless the sight of skele­tons play­ing each oth­er like xylo­phones is more com­i­cal­ly endur­ing than I imag­ine — but those final words add a note of breath­tak­ing irony, for the short under review is The Skele­ton Dance, pro­duced and direct­ed by Walt Dis­ney.

Despite the pow­er of Dis­ney’s name, this par­tic­u­lar film is bet­ter under­stood as the work of Ub Iwerks, who ani­mat­ed most of it by him­self in about six weeks. He and Dis­ney had been work­ing togeth­er since at least the ear­ly nine­teen-twen­ties, when they launched the short-lived Laugh-O-Gram Stu­dio in Kansas City.

It was Iwerks, in fact, who refined a rough sketch by Dis­ney into the fig­ure we now know as Mick­ey Mouse — but whom audi­ences in the twen­ties first came to know as Steam­boat Willie, whose epony­mous car­toon debut entered the pub­lic domain last year. The Skele­ton Dance, the first of Dis­ney’s “Sil­ly Sym­phonies,” was sim­i­lar­ly lib­er­at­ed from copy­right on this year’s Pub­lic Domain Day, along with a vari­ety of oth­er 1929 Dis­ney shorts (many of them fea­tur­ing Mick­ey Mouse).

The great tech­ni­cal inno­va­tion on dis­play isn’t syn­chro­nized sound itself, which had been used even before Steam­boat Willie, but the rela­tion­ship between the images and the sound. Accord­ing to ani­ma­tion his­to­ri­an Charles Solomon, “hav­ing to under­score the action in the first Mick­ey Mouse pic­ture,” com­pos­er Carl Stalling “sug­gest­ed that the reverse could be done: adding ani­mat­ed action to a musi­cal score,” per­haps fea­tur­ing skele­tons, trees, and such­like mov­ing around in rhythm. There we have the gen­e­sis of this car­toon danse macabre, which was a leap for­ward in the ever-clos­er union of ani­ma­tion and music as well as a rev­e­la­tion to its audi­ences, who would­n’t have expe­ri­enced any­thing quite like it before. Even today, the most nat­ur­al response to a suf­fi­cient­ly mirac­u­lous-seem­ing tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment is, per­haps, laugh­ter.

The Skele­ton Dance was vot­ed the 18th best car­toon of all time by 1,000 ani­ma­tion pro­fes­sion­als in a 1994 book called The 50 Great­est Car­toons. Find 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 in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.