SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Solidrariol Am I Missing Something?

Glucedee It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Robert Reynolds This is the second Silly Symphony short released by Disney. There will be spoilers ahead:I was disappointed by this cartoon. It disappoints me each time I watch it and I have seen it at least half a dozen times. It looks reasonably good visually and there are a few good gags. But it reminds me of work being done in the early 1930s by Paul Terry or the Van Buren studio. There's nothing terribly special about this short apart from the music. It has a fill in the blanks feel to it more than anything else.I freely admit that this disappoints me because it was done by Disney-and that's hardly fair to the short. But even with that admission, it still wouldn't rise to much more than average even for a Terry short. It sort of starts falling apart when they repeat the same visuals three times when the villain is trying to eat in the cantina very early in the short and never seems to recover. The villain is basically wasted.The bullfighting sequence starts off with one tone and then abruptly shifts from silly to semi-serious for no discernible reason. When the toreador and the bull come skipping out into the ring holding hands, a playful mood is set which seems to be the intended tone of the rest of the short, only to have it veer into a more serious contest and then it lurches headlong into silly with the bull skipping and prancing around the ring seeming for all the world to b playing a bizarre game of "tag" with the toreador. Then it goes serious again It's quite strange, to say the least.This is available on the Disney Treasures More Silly Symphonies DVD release. The set is worth getting and this is a curio worth watching at least once.

Foreverisacastironmess 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...

Dawalk-1 In the intro on one of the discs of Walt Disney Treasures: More Silly Symphonies DVD set, film critic Leonard Maltin mentioned that not all the SS (Silly Symphony) shorts were great or successes, or something like that along those lines. And I think that I just may have found (and can see) this as being one of them. This is the SS featurette (if not one of them) that's definitely just at the bottom of the barrel, having seen it and judging from what reviewers at the Disney shorts site wrote about it. There are probably many others who'd choose and name this their least favorite or one of their least favorites out of the series. One reviewer claimed that the animation isn't quite up to par, even by late '20s standards. I hadn't really noticed that or, as much as I'm an animation fan/lover, I'm not quite enough of an expert to tell the difference between the illustrations in this and, say, those other SS and Disney cartoons in general. I just don't see it and have failed to do so, maybe I should watch again and closely this time eventually, just to see what the commentator was really writing about exactly. Anyway, I found it to be a so-so short, nothing truly special nor spectacular, there are better I've seen. One toreador challenges another to a bull-fighting contest after the latter toreador tries to steal away his girlfriend, a waitress, basically. Even though I find it average and not top-notch, I was okay with it anyway until near the end, when the first toreador turns the bull inside out, by reaching inside his mouth and pulls his innards outward. Now that was just way too freaky, repugnant and even cringe-inducing. That was the worst, if not only really bad part about it I found. That was a big what-the-blank surpriser or shocker of a moment right there that no one would've seen coming (I know I didn't), unless he/she were clairvoyant. If anybody is still curious and wishes to view, be my guest and check it out anyway, but you'll be repulsed by the twisted ending like I and a few others I know of were. You'll, too, be wondering just what the writers/animators were thinking, why the conception of that scene was green-lit and why (if this was actually the intent) thought it might get big laughs. That isn't even the slightest amusing. I give it half the highest star rating.

Ron Oliver 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.