Le squelette joyeux

'The Merry Skeleton (1898)' depicts a happy skeleton busting some moves on the dance floor, unfazed whenever a bone falls out of place. The piece is pretty enjoyable for what it is, a silly little sideshow featuring a skeleton on a string and some camera tricks to make it seem as though it's putting itself back together after it falls apart. There isn't much to it, but it's pleasant enough and carries a lot of historical weight. I can imagine this delighting quite a few people, especially children, back in its day. 6/10.

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.

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).

What were supposed to, or else! A woman sits by a swamp thinking about what had happened before. She saw a mini purple object with a soul on a treadmill staring at a pucture of the crossed out sun. She had been entranced, and took a nap right there. The sun rose and kind of bleached here mind so she built a room full of warm water (with 0 entrance) out of play dough and set it next to the purple object. The purple object slowly turned its attention to the room, and basically ended up not looking away from it while moving on its machine. And..the woman stared at that with a blank face.

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?