#Old flickery micky mouse cartoons full#

What can a ghost or a vampire have to fear in a graveyard? By contrast, this ambling, fleshless corpse is clearly living in a state of disgust at his own grotesqueness. There is a convention in horror, particularly children’s horror, that the denizens of the darkened forest or the haunted manor rule their realms with a cackling confidence. It was here that I remembered one of the most unsettling parts of the cartoon: this skeleton, tiptoeing through the headstones with exaggerated caution, seems scared of himself. A church bell strikes midnight and the owl is soon joined by a pair of yowling black cats, and then by the first in a series of antic dancing skeletons. His hoots sound more like the thin cries of afflicted children than anything explicitly avian.

#Old flickery micky mouse cartoons full#

These eyes resolve themselves into those of an owl, sitting blinking on a bare branch in a dark, wind-swept graveyard, framed against an impossibly large full moon. The five-and-a-half minute long cartoon begins with a crash and a bolt of lightning, followed immediately by a pair of wide eyes that take up the entire screen. It was directed by Walt Disney himself and animated by Ub Iwerks, co-creator of Mickey Mouse. Far from the errant bit of cultural detritus I imagined, it is in fact a well-known and well-regarded piece of early animation, #18 on an industry list of the ∵0 Greatest Cartoons of All Time.

I remembered it so vaguely that I might have made it up, but a quick search revealed it to be the 1929 Silly Symphonies short, “The Skeleton Dance”. Illustration by Brianna Ashby My love of horror movies started with a rickety old cartoon of skeletons cavorting in a graveyard.