Wonderfully offbeat film!

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

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.

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.