Rainbow Dance is a 1936 British animated colour film, directed and written by New Zealand-born animator Len Lye. It was commissioned by the British Post Office, produced by the GPO Film Unit and was filmed using the Gasparcolor process.
A man is holding an umbrella in the rain. Then, he starts dancing, and as he does, the backgrounds completely change. Then, he starts dancing near the ocean, with a woman and fish following. Then, he plays tennis with cel-animated circles as another man watches. A colorful array of shapes follow, and the man sits and thinks, as the shapes come back and images come off the score sheet. The music ends, and a man's voice says: "Post Office Savings Bank puts a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for you", followed by "No deposit is too small for the Post Office Savings Bank".
Sight and Sound called the film a "syncopated, startlingly experimental animation ... dreamy avant-garde dramatisation of young love cruelly dashed by a faulty address, N or NW."
Jamie Sexton wrote for the British Film Institute: "The advanced effects, visual motifs and music that Lye used on this short film can be seen as a precursor to today's music videos."
In Art Monthly, critic David Trigg wrote: "It may seem rather quaint to modern eyes, but Lye's use of jump cuts and extreme close-ups was way ahead of its time â so much so that this Post Office advertisement was even lauded by the British surrealists."
The film is included on the DVD We Live in Two Worlds: The GPO Film Unit Collection Volume 2.