It’s the final week of Halloween season and we thought it would be fun to drop a few Halloween cartoon facts. These deal with some small rumors and interesting information regarding some amazing Halloween themed animated shorts, and movies. Toon in below for some frightening facts in animation history.
The Fright Side of Animation: Halloween Cartoon Facts
1929 The Skeleton Dance
The spooky scary skeletons are some of the most famous animation sequences of all time was the first ever Silly Symphonies in the Disney line-up. This would lead to 75 shorts produced for the course of 10 years for distribution of movie theaters nation-wide.1
1949 The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
The short known for terrifying visuals at the hands of Mary Blair2 and Disney animators was juxtopposed by the folksy tones of Bing Crosby. For more talk about how this music helps make this short even scarier have a read of our article on Sleepy Hollow: How to Build Suspence and Fear.
1966 It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
The Peanuts holiday specials are classic and The Great Pumpkin is no exception. This year in 2026 Linus’ wait for the Great Pumpkin is no 60 years old hitting its Diamond Jubilee anniversary.
1993 The Nightmare Before Christmas
It is a common misconception for a lot of people that Tim Burton directed The Nightmare Before Christmas but he actually only created the story and some of the concept art. The first stop-motion animation Tim Burton actually directed was The Corpse Bride.
2009 Coraline
LAIKA’s debut movie was the Stop-Motion classic Coraline and it was also the first stop-motion animated feature conceived and photographed in stereoscopic 3D. 3 Each frame required separate left-eye and right-eye images to be filmed and matched to create the effect.
These Halloween cartoon facts come from the following sources:
