The Haunted House

This animated short is cute but lacks the fun of The Skeleton Dance (1929). In fact, The Haunted House borrows quite a bit from The Skeleton Dance.

In this short we have Mickey who enters a house during a storm only to find out the house is haunted. A ghoul commands Mickey to play the organ while the skeletons dance. It's a fun watch for Halloween.

8/10.

Cartoons are tough to assign as genre, but this is one, with actual dancing skeletons and other tropes. Enjoyable if repetitive, but it's only 7 minutes or less. Great animation... FREE ONLINE.

Haunted House is a true Disney's classic. Mickey is that innocent,funny and sometimes naughty mouse that finds refuge in a old and of course haunted house. Several times Mickey appears to look at the camera when he finds himself in a difficult situation or when he gets surprised by an event. This short movie, made in 1929, has amazing special effects for such an early cartoon. I enjoyed the story simplicity but interesting. I consider this cartoon the best of Disney's black and white era. Also it prompts you to ask yourself how the current TV cartoons, like the horrible Cow and Chicken, has taken the minds of our children.

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.

This is a nicely done black and white Mickey Mouse cartoon, where he stumbles upon a haunted house after finding shelter from the pouring rain. Mickey runs into a few live skeletons who demand that he plays the piano to entertain them while they dance. What results are some delightful and characteristic moves with music matching sound effects.

There's some harmless creepy moments when skeletons appear in the dark and scare Mickey as he lets out a loud screech; this reminds me of a Disney screensaver I had that used clips of this cartoon's images and sounds.

The short has plenty of Halloween related things as well, from skeletons to bats, and from spiders to clawry trees. Even the haunted house itself sports a fierce-looking face image. Fun stuff here!

Grade A