Tv Review: Hazbin Hotel (2019). Excitingly creative and cheerfully dark. A fiendishly good cartoon.

Image Courtesy of: Vivziepop

Tv Review: Hazbin Hotel (2019) by Ben Jeffries (29/11/2019)

Season 1 Episode 1 - Pilot (28/10/2019)

31 minutes

Animation, Comedy, Drama, Musical,

Streaming now on Youtube

This crowd-funded, adult oriented, animated musical comedy about a plucky Demon Princess, is one hell of a good time.

Once a year Angels descend to the plane of Hell to conduct a violent cleansing in an effort to control demonic overpopulation. Charlie (Jill Harris), the princess of Hell, is on a mission to help her fellow citizens of the underworld escape this violent ritual through a more peaceful solution: redemption. With her devoted partner Vaggie (Monica Franco) by her side, Charlie opens a hotel, where she hopes to help her fellow residents of Hell to improve their souls to the point where they eventually “check out” into Heaven. Most of Hell’s residents mock Charlie, calling her plan foolish, and if her first test subject, adult-film star Angel Dust (Michael Kovacs), is anything to judge by, they might be right. When a powerful being known as the “Radio Demon” (Gabriel C. Brown) offers to help Charlie for his own amusement, her dreams are given a chance to become reality.

Hazbin Hotel is the brain child of animator and cartoonist Vivienne Medrano. Described in short: it's an adult animated comedy musical about queer demons who want to get into heaven. The show is a completely independent production, years in the making and paid for by crowd-funding, and was released to Medrano’s personal Youtube channel for free where, at the time of writing, it has clocked over 16.5 million views in the month since it’s release.

Angel Dust sneaks out to blow off a little "steam".
Image: Vivziepop

It’s a wild mix of traditional animation principals, Disney-esque animated musical numbers gone punk, Fleischer style character design, late 90’s/early2000’s animated comedy action, emo/goth aesthetics, bold stark colours, intersectional representation, mature content, crude humour, passionate ambition, and a lot of fun. But don’t get the wrong idea, this isn’t some clever take on a kids show. Hazbin Hotel is definitely targeted at an adult audience. Woven through the cartoon slapstick and bright, musical sensibilities are swearing, drug abuse, strong violence, sexual exploitation, and the show’s numerous LGBT characters and people of colour come up against casual racism and homophobia. The hellish setting here isn’t just a gimmick or an aesthetic choice, Medrano leverages it to reflect the worst of people, which gives her heroine Charlie’s plucky, hopeful, nature a real weight and poignancy.

From the opening moments it’s clear that Hazbin Hotel is a unique object. The visuals, rendered in black, white, and red, present the aftermath of the horrible yearly cleansing, with the already misshapen bodies of various demons and hell dwellers bloodied and dismembered amid the streets of Hell. At the same time, the sweet, sad sounding vocals of a ballad provide a thematic overture to the show. Charlie (whose singing voice is provided by Elsie Lovelock) sings forlornly about her frustrations at being unable to find her own happy place in Hell, unlike the demons and damned souls around her. The song wouldn’t feel out of place in a classic Disney musical, orchestrated with massed strings and lyrics about “always chasing rainbows” sung with long, drawn out, vibrato, but set against the gruesome imagery of dead demon bodies being cleared out of the streets it’s signposts that, while Hazbin Hotel might be drawing on a broad swathe of influences, it clearly has it’s own take on the ideas and influences that inspired it.

Just by looking at the way the show animates you can tell that Medrano, who wrote and directed the episode while also serving as lead animator and character designer, clearly loves the medium of animation as an art form. Each of the characters is designed to provide maximum visual impact, from their colouring, to the shape of their hair, to the cut of their clothing, right down to the various little embellishments and decorations that adorn each new creature and demon. Simple dialogue scenes in animated shows can often feel bland, with characters left to simply stand and talk to each other without a lot of physical business to highlight the conversation, but almost every line of this episode is punctuated or inflected with a dramatically animated pose or gesture. There’s a physicality to the characters that’s reminiscent of Loony Toons shorts or Cartoon Network shows like Dexter’s Laboratory or Johnny Bravo. Characters bend and stretch in cartoony ways to amplify the drama of their dialogue, and there’s an almost endless attention to detail layered into the backgrounds.

The show’s colour palette is eye popping with it’s focus on deep, bloody, reds, dirty greys, and glowing greens, while the characters are rendered mostly in stark black and white relief highlighted by pops of pastel green and red. The background environments are littered with details and decorations, from pictures, posters and signs hung on walls, to elaborate furniture and architecture, to the bizarre shapes of the various background characters . A scene that takes place in a TV news studio features signs in the background that say “Murder!” “Sex!” “Weather!” and another sign in the break room encourages smoking with a big green tick. Later, picture frames hanging at the eponymous Hazbin Hotel itself might hold clues which help explain Charlie's complicated family life. All the while, demons of various shapes and sizes go about their business wearing horns and hooves and dinner jackets and tattoos and wild eyes. 

Charlie's musical numbers take her to some magical places
Image: Vivziepop

Given how visually intense the episode is, from the stretchy, mobile, characters breaking into expansive, elaborate showtunes, to the detail rich backgrounds, it would be easy to miss the amount of attention that’s been paid to the sound design. Throughout the episode characters movements are accompanied by cartoony sound effects. A bent neck crunches uncomfortably, a lewd gesture splorches as a hand goes up and down, characters yoink and sproing as their features stretch and move to amplify their expressions. It’s another of the many nods Hazbin Hotel makes towards the cartoons of the past which influenced it.

While the visual and sound design reference the past, the screenplay is both modern and elegantly economical, working in concert with the show’s visual design to move fluidly from scene to scene. A scene where two characters get into a brawl over the right to control a portion of Hell opens into a scene where the TV news organically explains the turf war, before the news anchors move on to interview our heroine Charlie about her new plan to help Hells citizens avoid the yearly cleanse. Following an impressively directed pop-punk ballad showtune called “Inside Every Demon is a Rainbow”, where Charlie invites all of Hells various denizens to try and improve themselves at her new hotel, the news anchors break in with a special report on the unfolding turf war that now includes Charlie’s star subject, Angel Dust, leading to an argument that swiftly becomes another fight in the TV studio. The two scenes intercut at an ever increasing pace as they proceed in parallel, climaxing in a split-screen collage of closeup shots where everyone is screaming as the two battles become one conflict. It’s a neat section of storytelling that economically delivers exposition, action, comedy, character, and plot.

There's a charming whimsy to this Demon Princess
Image: Vivziepop

And the plot which it delivers is built on a solid foundation of ideas that have been thoroughly developed. The episode balances the competing needs of having to establish an entire world and having to tell a story that functions beyond the simple mechanics of exposition. It's clear that the world of Hazbin Hotel has already been built, and the events of the episode take place on a stage that is well constructed and alive with energy and depth, while at the same time sketching out the central cast of characters and their complicated goals.

The 30 minute episode drips potential and passion from just about every frame, but it’s not without it’s problems. As a work of animation, it’s clearly a compromise of budget and ambition. While there have been zero shortcuts taken when it comes to designing and laying out the show, a lot of scenes feel only about 75% finished. Design and art of this calibre really deserve the smoothness that comes from being animated on 1’s or 2’s, but that’s a pricey and time consuming undertaking, and at times this episode feels like it’s barely been animated beyond the keyframes. An understandable compromise, given the sheer amount of animation that’s going on in each scene, and sometimes it’s only an element or two inside a shot that hasn’t been completed. Medrano was ultimately forced to make smart choices in deciding where to commit her animation budget, and she chose well, as the elaborate musical numbers and action scenes throughout the episode are all well polished.

The sound design might add a lot to the physicality of the show, but some of the mixing is pretty rough. As Charlie approaches the big finish of her pop-punk showtune the sound mix gets away from the engineer and the audio starts to get muddy. As the song peaks in volume, pitch, and tempo, Charlie’s voice gets lost in a sonic jumble of instruments and backing vocals that feels grating rather than gratifying, spoiling the end of what is otherwise a well produced number. Elsewhere in the episode sound effects occasionally overpower lines of dialogue.

The energy of the visual design matches
that of the vocal performances.
Image: Vivziepop

Medrano’s directing is strong throughout the episode but there are a few spots, like quick cuts to insert shots that are gone before the viewer can really understand what they’re looking at, or jumpy edits that throw off the rhythm of a scene, where it feels like her choices were made according to her deadlines rather than her skill. The completed episode isn’t quite as polished and fluid as it perhaps could be, but these rough edges are all marks of a person learning their craft and honing their skills while making the best of what they have to work with, and it seems fair to say that given the time and budget it deserves, the show would be polished to a stunning level of finish. Given the truly independent nature of the production, the show is an astounding achievement.

The only real problem with Hazbin Hotel is that there isn’t more of it. This pilot episode is the only one that’s been produced so far and, at the time of writing, there’s no news about when we can expect any more, so if you're the kind of viewer who gets easily invested in compelling story, be warned: There's no resolution at hand here.

For a single 30 minute stretch of animation, this is a lot of show. It might not have the glossy veneer of a modern studio backed tv production, but with how richly textured it is, it seems unlikely that veneer will be missed. It’s part musical, part comedy, and part drama. It’s edgy and rowdy and wild and sweet and winning and surprising and deliciously complicated. The characters are complex, layered, and well drawn both dramatically and visually, and the world is deeply imaginative and thoroughly realised. The songs are catchy and the visuals are engrossing. In Hazbin Hotel Vivienne Medrano has teased out of the narrow space between influence and rebellion a piece of work that feels both a deserving part of the continuum of American animation, and also wholly it’s own self. However the next installment arrives, whether as an independent production, or as part of a studio backed series, I eagerly await the moment I get to check back in at the Hazbin Hotel.

7.5/10

Hazbin Hotel Stars: Jill Harris, Elsie Lovelock, Michael Kovach, Monica Franco, Edward Bosco, Gabriel C. Brown, Stamper, Faye Mata, Joshua Tomar, Krystal LaPorte, Mick Lauer, Michelle Marie,

Created by: Vivienne Medrano

Written by: Dave Capdevielle, Kendraw Cook, Raymond T. Hernandez, Vivienne Medrano, Daniel MacDonald, Mritza Medrano

Directed by: Vivienne Medrano

a Production from: SpindleHorse Toons

Distributed by: Vivziepop (Youtube.com/Spindlehorse)