How Shorts Can Accelerate Creative Growth
Disney’s Silly Symphonies illuminate a path toward tapping into our artistic innovation
Halloween has long been my favorite holiday, so even though it’s November now, I hope everyone will forgive me one last Halloween-inspired entry!
This October was my best Halloween as a parent. At five and three, our kiddos were thrilled to dress up, decorate, and appreciate the finer distinctions between ghosts, skeletons, and zombies.
My youngest in particular, adores skeletons. Together, he and I passed hours conversing with skeleton decorations around our neighborhood. Skeletons on chairs, skeletons in a swimming pool, a skeleton band (my son loved the bone drum sticks), jumbo skeletons, miniature skeletons, and loads and loads of skeleton dogs. My little guy and I became friends with them all.
Given his fascination with skeletons, I shouldn’t have been so surprised when my son unearthed the musical animated short, The Skeleton Dance, on our Disney+ app.
Like rediscovering Humbug Witch earlier this October, rediscovering The Skeleton Dance brought back vivid childhood memories, and was just compelling to me now as it was when I encountered it as a kid. My three-year-old wanted to rewatch The Skeleton Dance pretty much every evening in October. The repeated viewing sparked my curiosity to learn more about the history of the animated short’s production.
Not only were its origins interesting, but its history illuminates a great path that creative types like me can implement to innovate and improve their craft. I can testify to how productive that path can be, since I went down it this summer.
1929
The Skeleton Dance seemed like ancient history to me—I watched it all the way back in third grade! Turns out the origin of The Skeleton Dance considerably predates my time in Mrs. Romer’s classroom. The Skeleton Dance was made all the way back in 1929!
The Skeleton Dance was actually the very first entry in a series of seventy-five Silly Symphonies produced over a decade by Disney. The idea behind the animations was to pre-record music, then have the animators create a short film based on that music. Composer Carl Stalling was commissioned to write the scores, which were inspired by classical music.
The Skeleton Dance is in black-and-white. It features some early cartoon-style gags: heads doing three-sixty turns, eyes bulging with shock, fur scaring right off a cat. It also presents some timeless, innovative moments of animation, such as when the skeleton leaps off its tombstone, and as a viewer, we travel down the hollowness of the skeleton’s body and out its hip bones.
In particular, this magical moment has stayed with me ever since third grade. The wonder and excitement I felt when seeing it as a kid didn’t dim for me in the least.
It turns out that taking the viewer on a ride through a skeleton was only the first of many, many innovations that would blossom out of the Silly Symphonies.
The right length to experiment
It turns out that Disney saw this series of short animations as the perfect place to experiment. It was the perfect platform to test new techniques (such as Technicolor, follow-thru animation, and the multi-plane camera), try out new storytelling methods, and to play with new characters (including Donald Duck) many of whom would later appear in feature films.
It makes perfect sense. Think of the cost of producing a feature-length film, the number of craftspeople involved, the number of years needed for production. Now shorten the film to a few minutes, and suddenly you have the perfect testing ground. A place to play with new techniques without a huge investment of time and money. A way to gauge audience reactions.
This summer, unknowingly, I reinvented this technique with my own writing practice.
My flash fiction experiment
This summer I set myself a challenge: write ten flash fiction stories. I defined flash fiction as anything under 1,000 words, and I didn’t limit myself to any particular genre. I naturally gravitate toward writing long, and recognized the need to practice telling a story well in a tighter space.
What I didn’t expect, was that the challenge would provide me exactly the conditions for innovation that Disney found with Silly Symphonies.
For me, committing to writing a flash fiction story every week felt daunting, not just because writing short is a challenge for me, but because it meant coming up with an idea on the fly week after week. To my surprise, idea generation was not a problem. In fact, the pressure to quickly generate stories lead me to some fun experimentation.
Techniques I played with this summer included: write fictional instructions to someone; write a fictional recipe; write a story based on alliteration; write a story where the POV alternates between two characters every paragraph; write a story backwards; write a story as a letter from the protagonist to the antagonist; write a story in the style of a children’s picture book.
Were all of these stories a success? No! Several of them (recipe story, I’m looking in your direction) were total flops. One I quite liked (thank you, fictional instructions), and one took me in a very promising direction (hooray for the backwards story).
In terms of cost, I don’t have to pay studio time or salary to a bunch of animators, but my cost is time. Attempting one of these techniques in a longer piece would have taken weeks. Turning down a dead end might mislead me for a month!
Writing flash fiction helped me process the flops and clunkers fast. I quickly identified more promising paths. At the end, I even have a couple stories worthy of revision and submitting.
I also learned that the pressure of producing something new every week, far from impinging creativity, provided a huge boost to the scope of my innovation. Again, I am far from the first person to discover this. If you don’t already know him, meet the late Carl Stalling.
Weekly challenges and innovation
Carl Stalling was the composer who wrote the music for The Skeleton Dance. He worked for Disney for about two years before moving on Warner Brothers, where he produced music for cartoons such as Loony Tunes and Merrie Melodies.
Stalling was an innovator in his field, one of three composers credited with the invention of the click track, a pioneer in the use of the metronome to produce film scores, and known for his ability to write musical puns and create musical sound effects that brought life to cartoons.
How did Stalling do it? He wrote hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of scores. According to his Wikipedia entry, he averaged one score per week for twenty-two years.
One score per week for twenty-two years.
It’s tempting to believe that pounding out creative work on a tight schedule, week after week, is a recipe for producing boring, uninspiring work. Based on my flash fiction experiment this summer, and on everything I learned researching Silly Symphonies and Carl Stalling, the opposite is true. Making a thing a week may be the best way to advance our craft and unearth previously unknown wells of inner inspiration and innovation.