The July 17, 1929 issue of Vari­ety car­ried a notice about a laugh-filled new short film in which “skele­tons hoof and frol­ic,” the peak of whose hilar­i­ty “is reached when one skele­ton plays the spine of anoth­er in xylo­phone fash­ion, using a pair of thigh bones as ham­mers.” The final lines of this strong rec­om­men­da­tion add that “all takes place in a grave­yard. Don’t bring your chil­dren.” The review amus­ing­ly reflects shifts in pub­lic taste over the past near-cen­tu­ry — unless the sight of skele­tons play­ing each oth­er like xylo­phones is more com­i­cal­ly endur­ing than I imag­ine — but those final words add a note of breath­tak­ing irony, for the short under review is The Skele­ton Dance, pro­duced and direct­ed by Walt Dis­ney.

Despite the pow­er of Dis­ney’s name, this par­tic­u­lar film is bet­ter under­stood as the work of Ub Iwerks, who ani­mat­ed most of it by him­self in about six weeks. He and Dis­ney had been work­ing togeth­er since at least the ear­ly nine­teen-twen­ties, when they launched the short-lived Laugh-O-Gram Stu­dio in Kansas City.

It was Iwerks, in fact, who refined a rough sketch by Dis­ney into the fig­ure we now know as Mick­ey Mouse — but whom audi­ences in the twen­ties first came to know as Steam­boat Willie, whose epony­mous car­toon debut entered the pub­lic domain last year. The Skele­ton Dance, the first of Dis­ney’s “Sil­ly Sym­phonies,” was sim­i­lar­ly lib­er­at­ed from copy­right on this year’s Pub­lic Domain Day, along with a vari­ety of oth­er 1929 Dis­ney shorts (many of them fea­tur­ing Mick­ey Mouse).

The great tech­ni­cal inno­va­tion on dis­play isn’t syn­chro­nized sound itself, which had been used even before Steam­boat Willie, but the rela­tion­ship between the images and the sound. Accord­ing to ani­ma­tion his­to­ri­an Charles Solomon, “hav­ing to under­score the action in the first Mick­ey Mouse pic­ture,” com­pos­er Carl Stalling “sug­gest­ed that the reverse could be done: adding ani­mat­ed action to a musi­cal score,” per­haps fea­tur­ing skele­tons, trees, and such­like mov­ing around in rhythm. There we have the gen­e­sis of this car­toon danse macabre, which was a leap for­ward in the ever-clos­er union of ani­ma­tion and music as well as a rev­e­la­tion to its audi­ences, who would­n’t have expe­ri­enced any­thing quite like it before. Even today, the most nat­ur­al response to a suf­fi­cient­ly mirac­u­lous-seem­ing tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment is, per­haps, laugh­ter.

The Skele­ton Dance was vot­ed the 18th best car­toon of all time by 1,000 ani­ma­tion pro­fes­sion­als in a 1994 book called The 50 Great­est Car­toons. Find a copy here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What’s Enter­ing the Pub­lic Domain in 2025: Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Ear­ly Hitch­cock Films, Tintin and Pop­eye Car­toons & More

The Evo­lu­tion of Ani­ma­tion, 1833–2017: From the Phenakistis­cope to Pixar

How Walt Dis­ney Car­toons Are Made: 1939 Doc­u­men­tary Gives an Inside Look

Cel­e­brate The Day of the Dead with The Clas­sic Skele­ton Art of José Guadalupe Posa­da

An Ear­ly Ver­sion of Mick­ey Mouse Enters the Pub­lic Domain on Jan­u­ary 1, 2024

The Dis­ney Artist Who Devel­oped Don­ald Duck & Remained Anony­mous for Years, Despite Being “the Most Pop­u­lar and Wide­ly Read Artist-Writer in the World”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The Sovi­et Union’s repres­sive state cen­sor­ship went to absurd lengths to con­trol what its cit­i­zens read, viewed, and lis­tened to, such as the almost com­i­cal removal of purged for­mer com­rades from pho­tographs dur­ing Stalin’s reign. When it came to aes­thet­ics, Stal­in­ism most­ly purged more avant-garde ten­den­cies from the arts and lit­er­a­ture in favor of didac­tic Social­ist Real­ism. Even dur­ing the rel­a­tive­ly loose peri­od of the Khrushchev/Brezhnev Thaw in the 60s, sev­er­al artists were sub­ject to “severe cen­sor­ship” by the Par­ty, writes Keti Chukhrov at Red Thread, for their “’abuse’ of mod­ernist, abstract and for­mal­ist meth­ods.”

But one oft-exper­i­men­tal art form thrived through­out the exis­tence of the Sovi­et Union and its vary­ing degrees of state con­trol: ani­ma­tion. “Despite cen­sor­ship and pres­sure from the Com­mu­nist gov­ern­ment to adhere to cer­tain Social­ist ideals,” writes Pol­ly Dela Rosa in a short his­to­ry, “Russ­ian ani­ma­tion is incred­i­bly diverse and elo­quent.”

Many ani­mat­ed Sovi­et films were express­ly made for pro­pa­gan­da purposes—such as the very first Sovi­et ani­ma­tion, Dzi­ga Vertov’s Sovi­et Toys, below, from 1924. But even these dis­play a range of tech­ni­cal vir­tu­os­i­ty com­bined with dar­ing styl­is­tic exper­i­ments, as you can see in this io9 com­pi­la­tion. Ani­mat­ed films also served “as a pow­er­ful tool for enter­tain­ment,” notes film schol­ar Bir­git Beumers, with ani­ma­tors, “large­ly trained as design­ers and illus­tra­tors… drawn upon to com­pete with the Dis­ney out­put.”

Through­out the 20th cen­tu­ry, a wide range of films made it past the cen­sors and reached large audi­ences on cin­e­ma and tele­vi­sion screens, includ­ing many based on West­ern lit­er­a­ture. All of them did so, in fact, but one, the only ani­mat­ed film in Sovi­et his­to­ry to face a ban: Andrei Khrzhanovsky’s The Glass Har­mon­i­ca, at the top, a 1968 “satire on bureau­cra­cy.” At the time of its release, the Thaw had encour­aged “a cre­ative renais­sance” in Russ­ian ani­ma­tion, writes Dan­ger­ous Minds, and the film’s sur­re­al­ist aesthetic—drawn from the paint­ings of De Chiri­co, Magritte, Grosz, Bruegel, and Bosch (and reach­ing “pro­to-Python-esque heights towards the end”)—testifies to that.

At first glance, one would think The Glass Har­mon­i­ca would fit right into the long tra­di­tion of Sovi­et pro­pa­gan­da films begun by Ver­tov. As the open­ing titles state, it aims to show the “bound­less greed, police ter­ror, [and] the iso­la­tion and bru­tal­iza­tion of humans in mod­ern bour­geois soci­ety.” And yet, the film offend­ed cen­sors due to what the Euro­pean Film Phil­har­mon­ic Insti­tute calls “its con­tro­ver­sial por­tray­al of the rela­tion­ship between gov­ern­men­tal author­i­ty and the artist.” There’s more than a lit­tle irony in the fact that the only ful­ly cen­sored Sovi­et ani­ma­tion is a film itself about cen­sor­ship.

The cen­tral char­ac­ter is a musi­cian who incurs the dis­plea­sure of an expres­sion­less man in black, ruler of the cold, gray world of the film. In addi­tion to its “col­lage of var­i­ous styles and a trib­ute to Euro­pean painting”—which itself may have irked censors—the score by Alfred Schnit­tke “push­es sound to dis­turb­ing lim­its, demand­ing extreme range and tech­nique from the instru­ments.” (Fans of sur­re­al­ist ani­ma­tion may be remind­ed of 1973’s French sci-fi film, Fan­tas­tic Plan­et.) Although Khrzhanovsky’s film rep­re­sents the effec­tive begin­ning and end of sur­re­al­ist ani­ma­tion in the Sovi­et Union, only released after per­e­stroi­ka, it stands, as you’ll see above, as a bril­liant­ly real­ized exam­ple of the form.

The Glass Har­mon­i­ca will be added to our list of Ani­ma­tions, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Long Before Pho­to­shop, the Sovi­ets Mas­tered the Art of Eras­ing Peo­ple from Pho­tographs — and His­to­ry Too

Sovi­et Ani­ma­tions of Ray Brad­bury Sto­ries: ‘Here There Be Tygers’ & ‘There Will Come Soft Rain’

Watch Dzi­ga Vertov’s Unset­tling Sovi­et Toys: The First Sovi­et Ani­mat­ed Movie Ever (1924)

Watch Inter­plan­e­tary Rev­o­lu­tion (1924): The Most Bizarre Sovi­et Ani­mat­ed Pro­pa­gan­da Film You’ll Ever See

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness