The demons of Hell gather together for a mad frolic. Everything's cool until Satan starts feeding the underlings to Cerberus! You can't have a cartoon that's set in Hell! That's not fun! It's too grim and not at all conductive to a positive atmosphere! Not of course that every early Disney short need be all bunnies and flowers and sunshine and lands of candy, but Disney, keep the action above ground and outta the graveyards please! If done right, which to me this wasn't, it could have been all infernal and impressive, but as it is, it feels like a mere playful romp through Hell rather than anything surrealy creepy and nightmarish like Some of the fantastic Betty Boop Cab Calloway shorts. It's not at all bad, but I thought it was very dull. The dancing does drag and becomes annoying. I mainly enjoyed this short for its darker qualities. We see wretched souls tossed into the hungry maw of Cerberus, and the Devil himself is usurped from his throne, but it's not at all as impressive and interesting as it sounds. There are those darn bats and that spider that like to fly at the camera again-you see them more than a few of times during the course of the Silly Symphonies series! Well what happens to the spider is a nice deviation, and it also foreshadows the ending. The ending is truly bizarre. Satan, hanging from a cliff, is spanked and then consumed by the fires of the underworld!!!:::2::: The black and white tones are not this particular short's friend. I've enjoyed several of the other colourless Symphonies, but not so much this one. Although the grim merriment feel is conveyed well enough, a little colour would have worked wonders. I think they might have reused some of the backgrounds or something later on in The Goddess of Spring. I liked the portrayal of Hades a lot better in that one. It's not a particularly brilliant, humorous or well animated short, but still a fairly enjoyable and entertaining one. Thank you.
Review of Hell's Bells
