Cartoon Dance

Leave it to the New York Times to point out non-dancing dancing in animation.

... Dance ... permeates early Disney. Mickey and Minnie Mouse are gyrating from “Steamboat Willie” on. In “Three Little Pigs” (1933, a phenomenal box-office hit), the two sillier pigs keep prancing musically on their pointlike hind trotters, and they’re at it again in “The Big Bad Wolf” (1934) and “Three Little Wolves” (1936). Even the owl judge in “Who Killed Cock Robin?” (1935) does a little dance ...

But what’s dancing? Disney makes you ask the question because he gives such dance vitality and musical brio to movements that involve no actual dance steps. In “The Birthday Party” (1931), Mickey’s way of climbing the stairs to Minnie’s front door has the clickety-click of tap dancing. When the newborn title character of “The Ugly Duckling” (1931) sheds two tears, they fall, ping! ping!, like notes in music made visible. ...

The ultimate Disney dance film is “Fantasia.” Everyone loves Hyacinth Hippo and Ali Gator, rightly so: few scenes in any film are more exhilaratingly funny. Yet Disney, unnervingly, comes yet closer to the feeling of pure dance in his “Nutcracker Suite” scenes, even though here the movement is performed by mushrooms, fish, blossoms, leaves, snowflakes. The score is just about the most famous ballet music ever written, but most of the dances here (apart from the high-kicking thistles in the Russian Dance) have no footwork and no steps. ...

Woodland Cafe, cited in the Times' article, was one of Wilfred Jackson's stronger shorts. There, the bugs actually boogie.