The transformation itself is incredibly scary, the way that Lampwick’s hands turn into hooves and pretty soon he’s fully donkey-fied. The sequence in question, in which Lampwick, a nogoodnik Pinocchio befriends on the way to Pleasure Island, is transformed into a donkey, is definitely one of the most profoundly disturbing animated sequences Disney ever committed to film. While post people point to a single sequence in Pinocchio for its intensity and creepiness, there’s an argument that can be made for the entire movie being disquieting and unnerving. When the film was released it was too dark and demented for some territories (the New York Times reported that Denmark had banned the film completely), but it is now rightfully seen as a classic of early animation – and a Halloween staple. And yes, it is very fun to watch, but it’s equally unsettling, from the opening with an owl’s wide eyes (that soon also reveal the moon) to the tree that takes on human proportions to the skeletons themselves, at once both identifiably human and outrageously ghoulish. The short is very much what the title suggests, with skeletons dancing and turning their bones into musical instruments and the like. To be sure, there are a bunch of super unsettling early Walt Disney animated shorts (if you like this list, maybe we’ll go into more depth), but there’s always been something particularly eerie about “ The Skeleton Dance.” Directed and produced by Walt, animated by Walt’s right-hand man Ub Iwerks and featuring music from Carl Stalling, “The Skeleton Dance” was the first of Walt’s innovative and highly influential Silly Symphonies series of animated shorts. Below are the scariest Disney movies ever made. Hang on tight (you might want to leave the light on for this one). The short films, features, and whatever “ Frankenweenie” is, represent the company at its most fearlessly thrilling. The inoffensiveness of the post-Walt period was shaken loose and some weirdness crept in.īut here we are celebrating the darkest of the dark, the bleakest of the bleak, the scariest of the scary, in Disney’s entire catalogue. The studio was, in many ways, fighting for its life, and the need to diversify and expand the brand took hold. And it makes sense – it was one of the most restrictive periods, politically, and one of the most uncertain for the Disney Company itself, which was under fire from hostile takeover attempts, green-mailers and corporate raiders. The 1980s is where a majority of the scariest Disney movies come from. It’s a shame in recent years, those responsible for making Disney product have forgotten how important the edginess of earlier movies really was. Darkness has always been a part of Disney, because it makes the light seem that much brighter. But Disney has always had unsettling moments in its entertainment, from the early short films to some of the first features like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (the Evil Queen’s transformation into the old crone still rattles) and in their live-action work, which would regularly mix gentle fantasy with darker, more disturbing images and ideas. In 2020, Disney is so synonymous with squeaky clean, family-friendly entertainment that anything even remotely outside of the boundaries of what a “Disney movie” should be is dismissed out of hand.
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