The Haunted House

I have always loved the Silly Symphonies and I do have a soft spot for the Mickey Mouse ones. While not my favourite, Haunted House is one of Mickey Mouse's better earlier efforts. There were moments where you can tell there was a Skeleton Dance influence such as a skeleton playing himself like a xylophone, but this didn't put me off at all. The animation very much adds to the atmosphere especially with the effective mix of light and dark shades, the opening is wonderfully eerie and the light-match sequence in the dark hallway is also a masterstroke, showing a depth to Mickey's face and emotions in a way that not many cartoons since have done so well. The music is both energetic and haunting, the story is swift and fun complete with a relevant and interestingly-choreographed dance routine and the gags are imaginative and well-spaced out. And I loved that Mickey is given more to do than usual here, he is a great character but can be bland if with a character like Donald. This is also one of two cartoons where I have seen so much depth to Mickey in terms of animation, the other being The Mad Doctor. The skeletons are wonderfully kooky. All in all, one of Mickey's best. 9/10 Bethany Cox

"The Haunted House" is a very good Walt Disney cartoon, though I wouldn't place it among the best of the era. On the positive side, for a black & white cartoon, the animation is exceptional and the print is very crisp. On the negative, there's a lot of dancing...too much dancing.

The story begins with Mickey Mouse being beckoned into a haunted house. There, he meets a bunch of skeletons that force him to play the organ for them...at which point they all dance about the place. There really isn't much more to the story than this.

The cartoon started great but the sheer amount of dancing really became a bit tiresome...despite some amazingly good animation considering it was 1929.

When I first saw this Mickey Mouse cartoon on a VHS tape a few decades ago, the part I remember the most was when he was in the dark and his face looked like when Al Jolson put on his burnt cork makeup and he says, "Mammy!" I found that amusing then but I can understand why it wouldn't be so now. Moving on, this short is basically about Mickey entering the title place during a storm and encountering Death who makes him play the organ so the skeletons can dance. It's possible some of the animation was meant for the Silly Symphony cartoon The Skeleton Dance. Anyway, in both that and this, the numbers are pretty entertaining though Mickey takes a back seat here during that sequence. Still, The Haunted House is worth the look.

One of the chief features of these early cartoons was dance. Take a piece of music and have an animate or an inanimate object begin to hoof it. In this one, Mickey is caught in a storm and seeks refuge in a spooky old house. It is inhabited by skeletons. They do what they can to frighten him, with great success. But it turns out they are looking for music. Mickey is placed on a stool and forced to play an organ. Then the dancing starts. Using bones as the motif, the undead do quite a good job. There are several surprises along the way. I enjoyed it very much.

On August 29, 1929, Walt Disney publicly screened the first film in his "Silly Symphonies" series, 'The Skeleton Dance (1929).' Needless to say, it was a rousing success, and ensured a further decade of similar musical short films. 'Haunted House (1929)' was released on August 1, 1929, and is similar in many ways, not least because a lot of the footage originally intended for 'The Skeleton Dance' was instead recycled into this Mickey Mouse musical horror short. Though this recycling is rather obvious in the film's second half, in which our mousy hero disappears for a while, I nonetheless enjoyed the film for its vivid imagination, and, especially in its opening minutes, eerie atmosphere. This was one example, at least, where Disney's work benefited from black-and-white animation {the studio's first outing in three-strip Technicolor was 'Flowers and Trees (1932)'}, and the creepy shadows of the haunted mansion bear the sinister atmosphere of a 1930s Universal horror, with the whistling wind providing an ominous air, at least until the music starts up.

Truth be told, 'Haunted House' is the first Mickey Mouse cartoon that I can remember watching, though a reasonable portion of my childhood would no doubt have been occupied in a similar manner. I wish that less of the film had been concerned with dancing skeletons, because Mickey's initial exploration of the dark mansion is stylistically creative and almost genuinely frightening. A lingering trace of the silent era is noticeable when the house's lighting goes out, and Mickey is illuminated only by a circular ring of light that calls to mind the camera iris favoured by so many early filmmakers. A scary Grim Reaper then enters the room, points to an organ against the wall and instructs our hero to "play." Mickey doesn't really know how to, but he nonetheless obliges, and soon the army of skeleton are tapping merrily across the room, using their bones as musical instruments. This Mickey Mouse short could have been better, but it has some good atmosphere, and is well worth watching.