Excerpt from piece on Disney's The Skeleton Dance (1929)

Thursday 9/17/26

This is quite good.

The Skeleton Dance is some five minutes long, but in terms of cultural impact, it might as well have no end. Certain works are always running, after a fashion. Two black cats stand atop headstones, hissing and spitting at each other. From beneath the marker between them emerges our first skeleton, of which there will be four—don’t want to oversaturate the screen with bones. These masterful early Disney cartoons could be as fluid as a Shakespeare sonnet, with a high imagistic quotient, but without becoming too busy in the sensory regard. Disney and his animators like Ub Iwerks, who did the lion’s share of the work on The Skeleton Dance, understood how to let these come-to-life drawings breathe. The eye isn’t ordered where to go; rather, it finds its own way, with the viewer as explorer. One watches The Skeleton Dance and feels a freedom of observation as if having elected to investigate the spooky old New England or New York (for this must be the northeast of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Washington Irving) town cemetery with its longstanding legend about what goes down there. Or up, as it were.

Disney trusted his audience. He wasn’t afraid to “get weird,” and The Skeleton Dance is plenty odd. The skeletons are well-rehearsed, like this is another performance in a string of them. Another season of self-robbed grave dancing outside the house of God, same as another season of The Nutcracker. They perform with or without us—we just happen to be here. The owl and the cats are troubled, knowing unnatural order when they see it. One skeleton rips a couple bones from another, which causes the latter to fall to all fours, with its partner, if that’s the correct word, using the bones as mallets to play the presented spine—it borders on the sexual—xylophone-style. (Later, the skeletons fuse as one, an orgy of bones.) A skull is hurled as a weapon in an airborne nod to Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” but The Skeleton Dance is sui generis. It’s a work for the general populace, but every bit as avant-garde as Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou, also from 1929. Duke Ellington was similarly blending experimental and commercial art in the jazz medium. The true artists of the age progressed, whether they were Louis Armstrong, T.S. Eliot, or the Marx Brothers, all of whom had some Disney in them, and vice versa. Disney wasn’t corporate pablum. The studio was making a leap for the progressive palm, but accessibly.