Phonearl Good start, but then it gets ruined

Claire Dunne One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Raymond Sierra The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Lee Eisenberg The first Silly Symphony ever might also be called the first music video ever. "The Skeleton Dance" features a group of skeletons who emerge from their graves and make merry. On-screen sound was still in its relative infancy in 1929, and so you can imagine how this stuff must have looked to moviegoers back then! My favorite scene was always the part where one skeleton uses another as a xylophone (although at the end of the scene the first skeleton turns out to be kind of a jerk). It's some pretty cool stuff, and I'm even saying that as someone who doesn't tend to think too highly of Disney's output. It's definitely a fun cartoon.

J. Spurlin The night promises to be a scary one. Lightning flashes. The wind howls. A tree branch in the shape of a hand seems to grab for a frightened owl that spins its head around like a top. The clock on the church tower strikes midnight, sending the bats flying out of the belfry. Two cats on gravestones fight by pulling and stretching each other's noses like taffy. A skeleton rises from behind a gravestone, frightening the fur off the cats. But an owl's hooting scares it, and it retaliates by throwing its skull and knocking the bird's feathers off. It's time for the skeletons to dance; and they perform as no living creatures could.Less than ten years after this crude black and white cartoon, Walt Disney made "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." Disney may have quickly surpassed this film in technical virtuosity, but no one has surpassed it in artistry. "The Skeleton Dance," with its spooky charm and ineffable strangeness, is one of the great animated cartoons.

didi-5 This short film was the first of the Silly Symphony series, which ran under the Disney banner from a decade from 1929 and proved to be an excellent training ground for animation techniques which would become the springboard into Snow White and the later features.Even though the distributor at the time dismissed 'The Skeleton Dance' with the terse telegram 'More Mice' (a reference to the Mickey cartoons which had just started a few months before), this film is inventive, extremely funny, marries action and sound perfectly (and remember, this was when talkies were still very much in their infancy), and is an absolute hoot even after all these years.So what's it about? Well, it is about skeletons dancing. And that's about it. But you can see the influence this film had on later animators (there is a sequence in Monty Python for example which references this film quite closely) and there is no doubt that it is a lot of fun.

FesterW I was lucky enough to see a 35mm print of this on the "big screen". For Halloween 2000, El Capitan theatre in Hollywood ran "The Skeleton Dance" as the short before 1993's "The Nightmare Before Christmas". It's really nice to see some classic Disney shorts theatrically, rather than video or 16mm. This, being the first Silly Symphony, definitely shows us what was to come from Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks. At the time of its release, sync-sound was only a couple of years old, it's fun to watch (through old films) the progression of sound as the field became more explored and perfected through the years.