Walt Disney | El Terrible Toreador / 1929

toreador and bullfriend

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ub Iwerks, Burt Gillett, Wilfred Jackson, Les Clark, Jack King, and Ben Sharpsteen (animators), Walt Disney (director) El Terrible Toreador / 1929

 

It seems strange perhaps to include a film whose major homosexual expression is limited to a toreador and a bull, but then cartoon figures are often so anthropomorphized to become, at least momentarily, indistinguishable from human beings; moreover, as I hope my essays have already made clear, being queer in a film does not necessarily mean that it has anything do with actual sex.

      This short, animated cartoon version of Carmen begins at a bar instead of a cigar factory, and the Carmen of this variation is a waitress serving up beers to over appreciative Spanish soldiers, one of whom attempts to manhandle her and regularly provides her with tips so that she might pull out her blouse to drop the coins between her breasts. I love how dense the contributor to Wikipedia on this film was about most of the film’s events, but in this case, it’s almost funny as she or he notes: “The man gives her a coin, and she modestly puts in her shirt.” Even Walt Disney on a Sunday family picnic is sexier than this description of events!

       The toreador, however, has her heart and saves her from the clutches of the soldier. She even has a special seat in the arena so that she might bring luck to her handsome lover.

       But the toreador’s heart, we soon realize, actually belongs to the bull ring itself wherein he and his bullfriend dance out hand-in-hand to the cheering crowds, before playing a few rounds of a boxing match and catch-me-if-you-can. When the bull knocks the Toreador onto his back, the bullfighter successfully balancing on the bull’s tail (or is it tale?) the crowd goes wild. As the applause continues the two enter into a cloud of thunderous dust which, when it clears, reveals the two playing patty-cake like two little queer boys.

     And after a few pats on the bull’s rump, our now aroused bull—aroused evidently in a manner we had not expected—immediately turns into a dancing pansy, flailing his arms and turning his hands into a flutter. The toreador quickly follows him as the two dance a pansy dance a year before the real cinematic “Panze craze” that began in 1930 and lasted until Joseph Breen of Motion Picture Production Code closed it down in late 1933 and 1934.

 

    Here the audience is most agreeable until the villainous soldier puts pepper on Carmencita’s bouquet of flowers which, when she tosses it to her lover and his bull sets them off into a sneezing fit that ends, inevitably, in violence, our formerly friendly bull fighter finally turning his former buddy literally inside out—proving, yet again, critic Vito Russo’s thesis, that all gay beings, human or animal, had to die in films made before 1990.

        Our not so eloquent Wikipedia scholar demonstrates how any and all “gay” behavior goes missing or is whitewashed away: “Then another scene opens with a bullfighting ring and the bull (strangely reminiscent of Clarabelle Cow) and the toreador walk in together. Followed by a few gags and musical performances, the toreador finishes up the scene by pulling out the bull's insides.”

        For years this episode was not released because of its graphic scene of violence; it was released finally in 2006, on Walt Disney Treasures “From the Vault” section.

 

Los Angeles, October 21, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).