Here’s another early Walt Disney pre-Code animated short from the long-running Silly Symphonies series. Released just before Halloween 1929, Hell’s Bells was directed by Disney himself, drawn by his frequent collaborator Ub Iwerks, and distributed by Columbia Pictures.

The plot (what there is of one) is a snapshot of everyday life in Hell as experienced by Satan and his various minions. They’re shown getting up to all sorts of demonic high-jinks until these junior devils seem to tire of Satan’s antics and stage what can only be described as a coup (students of 20th-century history and politics might perhaps notice resonances here…).

Like all good fairy tales (and most classic cartoons, obviously…), this is, of course, a dark and violent and transgressive story, but it still sticks to the standard ‘good vs. evil, evil looks like fun but good wins out eventually’ age-old fictional storytelling template which reaches its righteous peak here when ol’ Satan is unceremoniously booted off a cliff by his own staff at the end!

What’s particularly interesting in this context is the very obvious and literal ‘heaven and hell’ religious subtext to it all, the use of which would have been easy for audiences to recognise and understand in what was arguably a more religious era than today.  However, it would probably have been considered unacceptable in cartoons made only a few years later once the prudish Hays Code had really taken hold of Hollywood in the 1930s.

From the transitional period between the two moral standpoints that dominated Hollywood during the latter part of the 1920s and into the 1930s, in some ways Hell’s Bells neatly manages to combine both outlooks – it is weirdly moralistic and at the same time thoroughly sensational, although this mixed message is perhaps delivered in a somewhat clunky fashion at times.

It was likely that this latter slightly confused outlook fed into the mixed reviews the cartoon received, with a number of negative comparisons made between Hell’s Bells and the first of the Silly Symphonies productions, The Skeleton Dance (released that same year, this is an equally spooky but very different cartoon short).

Arguably, it was not as artistically successful as its predecessor, although maybe it was…hmmm. Maybe not. Oh, I don’t know…

Don’t ask me, ask the devil’s advocate…

Happy Halloween!

For more spooky Halloween reading (and watching), click here.

Oh, and I bet you didn’t know the devil’s name is Toby…