RyothChatty ridiculous rating

ScoobyWell Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

Lightdeossk Captivating movie !

Lela The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

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.

tavm Just watched this classic Walt Disney Silly Symphony (the first) on the Saturday Morning Blog as linked from YouTube. This was a mostly funny and atmospheric cartoon that must have really made an impact on the movie industry since after this there were a lot of cartoons that involved things that bump in the night. Animated by Ub Iwerks with music by Carl Stalling, The Skeleton Dance has four of those creatures having fun scaring fur out of cats and an owl before swaying to and fro, tap dancing simultaneously, and one playing the other like a xylophone. The most shocking part for me was when another played a cat's tail like a violin! Excellent stuff all around so if you're in a Halloween mood, I definitely recommend The Skeleton Dance.

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.

Ron Oliver A Walt Disney SILLY SYMPHONY Cartoon Short.The powers of darkness are abroad one dark & stormy night. In a lonely churchyard, graves are opened and THE SKELETON DANCE is performed by four bony fellows who exhibit terpsichorean skills of the most sepulchral sort. The crowing of a cock signals the approach of daybreak and the ghastly hoofers hie themselves back into their grave.Carl W. Stalling, Disney's music director in the early days, arranged Grieg's 'March Of The Dwarfs' as musical accompaniment to this first entry in the Symphonies series. With Ub Iwerks' masterful drawing, this black & white cartoon still packs a punch today. In 1929 it proved to be completely different from the Studio's Mickey Mouse productions. Indeed, some theater owners found it to be too macabre and refused to show it.The SILLY SYMPHONIES, which Walt Disney produced for a ten year period beginning in 1929, are among the most interesting of series in the field of animation. Unlike the Mickey Mouse cartoons in which action was paramount, with the Symphonies the action was made to fit the music. There was little plot in the early Symphonies, which featured lively inanimate objects and anthropomorphic plants & animals, all moving frantically to the soundtrack. Gradually, however, the Symphonies became the school where Walt's animators learned to work with color and began to experiment with plot, characterization & photographic special effects. The pages of Fable & Fairy Tale, Myth & Mother Goose were all mined to provide story lines and even Hollywood's musicals & celebrities were effectively spoofed. It was from this rich soil that Disney's feature-length animation was to spring. In 1939, with SNOW WHITE successfully behind him and PINOCCHIO & FANTASIA on the near horizon, Walt phased out the SILLY SYMPHONIES; they had run their course & served their purpose.