The Skeleton Dance (1929)
Skeletons rise from a graveyard at midnight and dance to music made from their own bones — a spine played like a xylophone, a rib cage strummed like a harp, a cat's yowl standing in for a violin — before diving back into their graves at the crow of a rooster.
The Skeleton Dance was the first entry in Walt Disney’s Silly Symphony series, animated almost single-handedly by Ub Iwerks over roughly six weeks; its pairing of horror imagery with slapstick timing set a template Disney would follow throughout the series, and decades later its dancing skeletons resurfaced as an internet meme set to modern novelty songs.
Background
The Skeleton Dance was the first of Disney’s Silly Symphonies, a series built around music rather than a recurring character. Ub Iwerks animated almost all of it, and Carl Stalling composed an original score after Disney considered and dropped Camille Saint-Saëns’s “Danse Macabre” as the cartoon’s musical basis. The film reached theatres in 1929, and its copyright expired at the end of 2024.
What to watch for
Watch how tightly the movement follows the music. The skeletons play each other’s bones as instruments, and the timing of every gag is worked out to the beat. Its success helped Disney build the Silly Symphonies into a major series. The film remains a good example of how the early sound cartoon could use rhythm as its main comic engine, and it is short enough to watch alongside the other silent-to-sound films on the site.
