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.

MissSimonetta Honestly, if this cartoon has committed a sin, it's that it's not as imaginative or impressive as its predecessor, The Skeleton Dance (1929). One would think that this cartoon came out before that one, because in comparison, El terrible toreador is underwhelming and not that well animated. It also borrows from the Mickey Mouse silent, Gallopin' Gaucho (1928), in which outlaw Mickey romances and rescues dancing waitress Minnie.The structure is very disjointed. The first half involves the titular toreador rescuing a sexy waitress from the unwanted advances of an officer. he proceeds to humiliate his rival, and then we get to the second half where the toreador engages in a comical bull fight. It is loosely connected to the first part only by the presence of the waitress and officer in the audience. The gags are occasionally funny and the animation is average. The last bit where the toreador pulls the bull's insides out is rather gruesome and will no doubt bother some viewers.Basically, the cartoon is average and unremarkable. Unless you're an animation nerd or you're trying to watch all the Silly Symphonies, you can skip this one without missing a thing.

MartinHafer 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.

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.