Foreverisacastironmess123 Review of The Hot Choc-late Soldiers

The Hot Choc-late Soldiers (1934)

Why can't civilisations of cookies and coco live in peace? Oh the humanity! The horror! The sugary, ooie-gooey chocolaty horror!!!

[9/10 · 20 March 2013]

I'd never even heard of oldy The Hollywood Party, but I'd definitely buy it just for the sake of having this adorable sweet little gem! The live action part at the beginning was...different, but it was a relief when the actual cartoon started. Kinda thought I was watching the wrong feature for a second there... This fine animation is really a Silly Symphony in all but name. It would have made a grand addition to the series. A group of chocolate soldiers go to war against a neighbouring cookie kingdom-now that's a wave of destruction that's easy on the eyes, a battle you can sink your teeth into! War looks delicious in this world, and the sight gags fly fast and furious. The battle has all the classic elements, there's the cavalry, which in this particular instance consists of soldiers saddled on the backs of cute little fluffy baby chickens, and bunny-drawn chariots-both of which are even more impossibly cute than they sound! There are catapults which hurl molten marshmallows, a candy-cane battering ram which shatters on impact, one of those rampart-boarding ladder thingies which is used in an attempt to breach the cookie castle-doesn't work, and after everything the chocolate soldiers actually end up winning via means of a dirty trick, they enter the cookie fort with a Trojan horse, which ironically is in the form of a dove of peace! Cue a heck of a lot of Disney death! Quite dark I'd say, especially for a short about anthropomorphic candy! They really beat em' good too, no mercy given here-not at all! And as the show draws to a close things get really strange when everybody winds up melting into puddles of sweet goo, courtesy of jolly ol' Mr.Sun! Ha! The moral from my point of view is clear: in war there are no victors. That's what you call a bittersweet ending! I really loved this. Everything looks so cute and delicious-but it's still war! Know what I mean? Excellent stuff, it deserves to be better known than it seems to be. Still, it's probably a good thing to have one or two little treasures left undiscovered-and this was a very sweet surprise indeed!