Le squelette joyeux

While this film is fascinating and delightful, it is absolutely not stop motion animation. It is a film of a "break apart" skeleton marionette, nothing more. I have a skeleton marionette made by the Pelham Puppets company that does all these tricks. Clearly the design for the marionette was around at the turn of the century, and Pelham mass-marketed it. I'm astonished that this film is widely regarded as "one of the first stop motion films", when it is nothing of the kind. That's all I have to say, but unfortunately the IMDb is insisting that my review isn't long enough, so I'm writing more words. The film itself is only 45 seconds long! How many words can one write about a 45 second film?

Among the simplest yet best movies ever, comedy and horror join in this flawless short. watch it now it won't cost you a minute nor a penny,since it's in the public domain. thank you ,lumiere brothers, thank you

Le Squelette Joyeux (1898)

Long before Disney had THE SKELETON DANCE, there was this forty-second film from the Lumiere Brothers. Basically we see a skeleton (attached to wires) dancing around. As it dances faster and faster parts of it begin to fall off and then attach itself back to the body. This certainly isn't the work of Georges Melies but it's still pretty darn good and it's certainly very entertaining. It's obvious to see how the dance is being done but this really doesn't take away from the entertainment factor and especially when you consider when this was made. The goal was to make viewers laugh and I'm sure many did back in the day, although the sight of the skeleton might have scared some as well.

I found this film on YouTube when I was watching some Georges Méliès films. I can only assume someone looked at the style and assumed it was one of his pictures...which isn't at all surprising. What IS surprising is that it was made by one of the Lumière brothers...who were known for much more mundane sorts of pictures than "The Merry Skeleton".

In "The Merry Skeleton" an obviously fake skeleton dances about on a string. However, by stopping and restarting the camera, you see parts of the skeleton fall off and magically reattach themselves. A cute trick for its day...and mildly enjoyable today.

Honestly, this short subject was indeed made by the Lumiere Bros! Go ahead and laugh but it's true. Auguste and Louis Lumiere's films were often slices of everyday activities that will today be mostly of interest to film historians. Sometimes the Bros DID, however, create shorts that were staged just a bit, such as the primitive comedy "Tables Turned on the Gardener". But "The Joyeus Skeleton" is the closest I've ever seen the Bros get to the kind of filmmaking Georges Melies was turning out at the exact same time, not a trick film but certainly far from a documentary. It features a skeleton marionette (never mind that crud about it being stop-motion animation) dancing and flinging his bones around so that he falls apart. It is quite a clever idea and is interesting for the development of the Bros' films, and amazingly enough it's actually one of the few Lumiere films that can still entertain today. (If you wanna see it, many YouTube uploads have a fun music track that sounds like clacking bones which makes the watch more fun).