The last few days I've been busy with various things and Sunday there were computer troubles (which I fully fixed late in the night) so there's been no time for movies. Tomorrow night will finally be a review as I'll finally get back in the swing of things. Last night I did talk about an old cartoon on Letterboxd, and that would be 1929's The Skeleton Dance. I will copy and paste that below:
Ub Iwerks is quite a name; so is his birth name: Ubbe Ert Iwwerks.
What a weekend... and not in a good way. It was not all bad but there were too many bad things so I'd rather forget about it. That includes the computer issues I had earlier today and I think are fixed (after a few hours of work) yet that is uncertain. If I peace out for the next few days-or heck, if it happens at any point in the future-you will know why.
Anyhow, at least I did have time to revisit this classic cartoon, and why not include cartoons in my annual Halloween season list? Sometime in October I'll talk about Skeleton Frolic, which was also directed by Ub Iwerks and was in essence an expanded color remake of this, the first of the Silly Symphonies done by Disney. In only 5 minutes, you can almost feel the chill of an autumn night (such as in Illinois, where I grew up) as various iconography connected to the Halloween season-black cats, spiders, owls, etc.-are seen in a cemetery graveyard, and a quartet of skeletons come out of the ground to dance and engage in creative sight gags as a jaunty tune plays in the background.
The animation and music are nice, so this is a short that is still effective 90 years later. In hindsight, I wish I would have viewed this and Skeleton Frolic around this time of year in autumns past as it sets the proper mood for the spooky season, and how can I not laugh at a skeleton using its own skull as a projectile, or another's backbone being used as a xylophone?
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