It’s a Wednesday morning in March, 1929. Ticket in hand, you’ve just walked into the United Artists Theater in Los Angeles for the first movie showing of the day. A few others wander in, and take seats scattered throughout the theater.You – and the other movie lovers around you – don’t know it, but you’re about to witness a preview of not just the future of animation, but also a link to a European tradition hundreds of years in the making.
And it all started with a mouse… and a rat. Maybe some fleas.
Since the Black Plague began ravaging European communities in the Late Middle Ages, villages dealt with grief partly through an art form known as the danse macabre. Traditionally, these reminders of the inevitability of death took form as performances of costumed dancers dressed as the dead, or as paintings of skeletons joining together to dance by their graves. This “dance of death” also has a long musical and literary tradition, with musical compositions written as early as the 15th century, and a variety of books and poems printed throughout Europe, evoking the dead-come-to-life theme. The twentieth century would see a new entry into the genre – in cartoon form.
A few hundred years after the Black Plague outbreak, in Kansas City, Missouri, animation producer Walt Disney met with friend and silent-movie organist and composer Carl Stalling to write some music for a couple of cartoon shorts he had produced, starring a soon-to-be-world famous mouse – Mickey.
From this meeting sprung the idea of creating a series of cartoons drawn to fit the music, instead of fitting music to a finished animation. And, Stalling suggested, maybe it could be skeletons dancing by their graves. And so, Disney’s Silly Symphonies series was born, beginning with the danse macabre-esque “The Skeleton Dance.”
Surprisingly, though, without a seemingly made-to-order classical piece: Camille Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre.
While the cartoon shares some features of Saint-Saëns’s music – the tolling of bells in the opening, the use of xylophone – Disney said no. According to Stalling, they considered using Danse Macabre, but Disney couldn’t get copyright clearance. Instead, Disney told Stalling to write something similar. Stalling’s answer was a foxtrot, and a bit of another classical piece – Edvard Grieg’s “March of the Dwarfs.”
From Grieg’s Lyric Pieces, “March of the Dwarfs” depicts a lively meeting of mystical nocturnal creatures inspired by Norway’s Jotunheimen Mountains. In the cartoon, though, it makes for a fun, memorable skeleton-as-xylophone sequence, and adds a bit of weight to the lighter, Stalling-composed pieces surrounding it.
There’s another nod to Grieg, tucked in at the end of the short, too. As a pair of skeleton feet wait to be let back into the grave, the tension builds, helped along by the final moments of Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King.”
Stalling would spend about 2 years adding music to Disney’s shorts. Later, after a short stint freelancing, Stalling was hired by Leon Schlesinger to handle music for a couple of new animation projects at Warner Brothers – Merrie Melodies, and Looney Tunes. It’s here that Stalling would help make incredible cartoons memorable with the power of music.
But, for now, that’s all folks…
