Studio: Walt Disney Studio (Silly Symphonies)
Distributor: Celebrity Productions
Produced by: Walt Disney
Short Synopsis
Fire fills the screen and burns away to reveal Hell: a cavern with a pit of flame, bats circling, a spider swinging over the pit on its thread and swallowing the camera until the fire drags it down, an alligator that snarls and crawls into the pit, a three-headed dog, a snake that eats a bat and grows the bat's wings. A demon orchestra plays for Satan, one musician bowing a spine and pelvis for a cello, another popping bubbles of lava with his tail. Demons dance; one runs into the zigzag wall and comes away zigzagged. Satan rings for his supper, and servants milk a cow-like creature for white-hot milk, which he drinks in a gulp. He then picks up one of two small demons and feeds it to the three-headed dog, and reaches for the other, who refuses. Satan chases the little demon through Hell to the edge of a cliff, where the demon sneaks round behind him and kicks him over into the fire.
Why It Matters
- Made a few months after The Skeleton Dance and released for Halloween, it is the Disney studio's one real horror cartoon, with Iwerks drawing Hell as a place of genuine grotesquerie, and the small demon who kicks the Devil into the pit is a hero of a kind the studio never used again; the spine-and-pelvis cello is pure Iwerks.
- As a 1929 publication it is in the American public domain. Variety called it "the weirdest of places", and later critics have noted how little its imagery resembles the Disney that followed; it was one of the last Silly Symphonies Iwerks directed before leaving to found his own studio.
Notes and Trivia
- Stalling's score quotes "Funeral March of a Marionette" and Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King".
- The film was reissued in the 1930s with a Columbia title card, which is the version most often seen.
- See also: The Skeleton Dance (1929), Springtime (1929), Swing You Sinners! (1930).