Synopsis
The Skeleton Dance (1929) is a Walt Disney animated short you can watch online on iFILM — just five minutes long and the very first entry in the Silly Symphonies series. Midnight strikes, the bats pour out of the belfry, and four skeletons climb out of the graveyard to have a very good time.
They use each other's ribcages as xylophones, terrorise the local cats and generally behave as though death is the least of their concerns. The score was composed by Carl Stalling, and the animation is built around the music beat-for-beat — which was the whole point of the Silly Symphonies experiment.
Released several months before Steamboat Willie, the short showed that synchronised sound in animation didn't have to follow a story — it could just follow a rhythm. Five minutes, no plot, pure movement. That turned out to be enough to make it a landmark. Stream The Skeleton Dance (1929) online on iFILM.
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