El Terrible Toreador (1929)

Undescribable Perfection

Highly Overrated But Still Good

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

This is a nice Disney take to Bizet's Carmen opera. Funny song and dance characters and catchy tunes. Not terribly entertaining, but somewhat of the more unique Silly Symphonies.Grade B-

I did not enjoy this short. It's old. And it's ugly. In fact, if you squint your eyes, it kinda looks like the surface of the moon. I thought the strange spaghetti arms and springy neck stuff was just grotesque. Also the sound was just brutal and crude. And I found it completely boring, the only thing I reacted to was what happens to the bull at the end. Yikes! Some of the old time Disney animators had a bit of a twisted streak! After seeing the jolly dead rise from their graves in the creepy yet awesome The Skeleton Dance, it seems that there is at least one similarity between the first and second Silly Symphonies-grisly imagery! And it's funny, it's not like I disliked Terrible Toreador because I felt that it was stupid or only good for little babies-the fact is, I nothinged it. It was a complete blank, a grey wall, flavourless ice-cream! You know how in giant supermarkets they have those dead cheap brands of food that are all white and have the plain bar code design? Well that's what this was to me, a "no frills" cartoon! There's not much worth saying, as it's just a horrific second entry in a mainly timeless series. There were far better things to come...

Before you can get to see "Cannibal Capers" and a few other 'special' cartoons on the "Walt Disney Treasures: More Silly Symphonies" DVD set, you are forced to watch an introduction by Leonard Maltin. He talks about the times in which they were made and how politically incorrect the films are. I am not against this, but hate how once you view it, you must ALWAYS view Maltin's speech again if you come back to any of the offensive cartoons. The same thing happens in some of the other Treasures DVDS--such as the second Donald Duck set.As far as "El Terrible Toreador" goes, I was rather at a loss to understand why it was placed among the infamous shorts introduced by Maltin. Now I am not Hispanic nor am I a bull--if I were, I might feel otherwise. Perhaps someone took offense at the way the folks were depicted or the idea of showing a bullfight--though it was very non-violent. Perhaps someone thought the bull was gay or the cartoon offended bald folks--I'm just grasping at straws trying to figure out what's 'incorrect' about this rather charming cartoon.

A Walt Disney SILLY SYMPHONY Cartoon Short.A vile officer takes liberties with a barmaid, who is the girlfriend of EL TERRIBLE TOREADOR. The bullfighter then proceeds to proudly show-off his skills in the bullring.An interesting & somewhat violent little black & white cartoon, with a great many of Disney's obligatory posterior gags. Most of the music, appropriately, is from Bizet's Carmen. The surprisingly gynandrous bull could almost be seen as a precursor of the celebrated Ferdinand.The SILLY SYMPHONIES, which Walt Disney produced for a ten year period beginning in 1929, are among the most fascinating of all animated series. Unlike the Mickey Mouse cartoons in which action was paramount, with the Symphonies the action was made to fit the music. There was little plot in the early Symphonies, which featured lively inanimate objects and anthropomorphic plants & animals, all moving frantically to the soundtrack. Gradually, however, the Symphonies became the school where Walt's animators learned to work with color and began to experiment with plot, characterization & photographic special effects. The pages of Fable & Fairy Tale, Myth & Mother Goose were all mined to provide story lines and even Hollywood's musicals & celebrities were effectively spoofed. It was from this rich soil that Disney's feature-length animation was to spring. In 1939, with SNOW WHITE successfully behind him and PINOCCHIO & FANTASIA on the near horizon, Walt phased out the SILLY SYMPHONIES; they had run their course & served their purpose.