User Reviews

This is seven stars because of the last 4 episodes, because the first 4 are not really that good. The characters just seemed flat in those episodes and the way they handle SA in episode 4 makes me extremely uncomfortable in hindsight. (How the hell does calling a victim a 'loser' help????).

Edit: I've heard that some actual SA survivors can actually identify with this episode, if that is so than that great! It made someone like me who's never had to deal with that stuff uncomfortable but shouldn't it be up to the people who experienced the issue in the first place to speak on it?

The songs are also kinda forgettable in those episodes.

Regardless, episodes 5 to 8 pick up the quality substantially: The world is more fleshed out, characters are more likable, the jokes land more, and everything is just in general more likable.

However, despite the higher quality the pacing still feels like a bullet train on crack. Characters have conflicts and resolve them within a few minutes, new discoveries about the world are made in rapid succession. An army of people is put together in a single episode and a pretty serious conflict between two lovers is resolved (to me at least) way too quickly.

I have some problems with this show, but when I was watching it I was able to just able to sit back and enjoy it. So do I recommend this show? Yeah, it's an enjoyable (and sometimes thrilling) experience if you keep an open mind.

(Also keep in mind that while I am writing this I have not watched the pilot, so I'm not sure if that effects anything.)

My biggest issue however is the pacing. We go from a week after the pilot, to like a month, to FIVE MONTHS. The characters are severely underdeveloped, and there's a lot of telling rather than showing. We barely know any of the main characters back stories! Why are they there? Why do they want redemption? Why should we care about them? We get to know more about some of the background characters than the main ones! The show says the guest are getting better, but we barely get to see any of that happening. The show says two characters have a father daughter relationship, but we never get to see that form. Everything just needs to slow down! They had plenty of time to have the characters interact and form connections that feel natural, but noooo! They wanted to get straight to the big boss fight!

Before I get into my criticisms, I would first of all like to say that I am very happy for Vivienne! Getting an indie adult animated show greenlit must have been actual agony, and I am genuinely glad to have seen this come out. I do hope we can see more shows from indie animation studios become big, as it is something i have a lot of love for.

For background, I have actually followed development of Hazbin Hotel for multiple years; I in fact remember Alastor's original design! I remember when Baxter was a thing, and I remember Angel Dust's brother! I really didn't want to find this show just meh, I genuinely wanted to enjoy it more. I'm not hating the show to hop on the hate train, and I'm not going to glaze it just because I like Vivzie's other work.

Let's do the positives first. The animation is very impressive most of time, and I do find the artstyle enjoyable. The amount of detail that's been animated on some of these characters is incredible, and I can only imagine how much of a nightmare animating the more intensive characters like Husk, Alastor and Pentious must have been. The backgrounds are pretty and appealing to the eye. The voice acting has also been pretty impressive! I thought the new choices were good, and for the most part they worked well across both the speaking and singing segments. Emotions were generally believable, and it was great for a cast with so few voice-acting roles between them. The show got a couple of laughs out of me.

Unfortunately, I do now have to get into the negatives. The pacing is absolutely terrible and unbelievable. There's no sense of time within the first 4-ish episodes, and then in the 5th or 6th episode you're slapped around the face with a revelation that 5 MONTHS HAVE PASSED. So little has actually happened in the plot during this time, that I genuinely thought only a week had passed in the plot. For a show that's allegedly about 'sinner rehabilitation', very little time is actually spent on improvement. I don't find it believable when Angel Dust proves himself to heaven because we haven't really seen him make improvements beforehand. Like sure, he had a song with Husk where they talked about his issues but I don't believe he would have changed that much. He didn't really show any difference in the time between this big character moment and the heaven trial, anyway! I just think it was waaay too rushed, there should have been another episode or 2 where we see Angel Dust starting to change between the Husk song and the Heaven trial.

In the 5th episode, Charlie is freaking out about the hotel not working but... We've barely seen her try anything? All the episodes are so squished together, so lacking for time that I feel like I should be getting whiplash from the amount of info crammed into the episodes, but not a whole lot happens. I've watched episodes 1-6 twice, now, and I'm just... sat here wondering where the rest of the show went? I'm sure part of this is because of how Amazon controlled the episode numbers and length, but that doesn't mean the show gets a free pass. I do feel sorry for the staff that worked on the show, probably crunching majorly to get this out on a shoestring budget, but that doesn't mean I have to pour praise onto the show.

Another negative is the... 'reveals'. I'm sure a lot of people have heard this already, but I didn't really think the Vaggie is an angel reveal hit how it should've. I agree with what other people have said; finding out at the same time that Charlie found out would have been much more emotionally dramatic and interesting. Being told about 5 minutes beforehand, and then revealing it to Charlie again was a strange choice, to say the least. I think a better way to do this, if the writer wanted the audience to know before the other characters knew, would be to reveal Vaggie to the audience alone WAY earlier in the show. That way you could build the tension more, show ways that Vaggie was trying to hide it, seeing Charlie almost find out before the trip to heaven. I think that would've been a lot more interesting than what we got.

I do have a very very slight problem with the humour. A lot of the jokes just do not land. Obviously, humour is absolutely subjective so if you found it funny then more power to you. I'm genuinely glad you could enjoyment in places I didn't! However, a lot of the background jokes were a lot funnier than the up-front, in your face jokes. When I re-watched it with friends, we all laughed more at Niffty constantly throwing herself off the stage than any of jokes you were meant to be paying attention to. The memes about the over-the-top swearing are genuinely real as well, though toned down slightly from the pilot. My friends and I were drinking everytime there was a swear, and we all had to stop drinking halfway through the second episode.

I also think it's... kind of bad as a musical. I'm not gonna claim to be an expert on these things, but it just wasn't believable. The songs are all diegetic, and other characters react to people singing. I think this breaks the illusion, to the point that I can't really suspend my disbelief which is something you REALLY have to take into consideration when writing a musical. A musical has songs when the characters are emotional, and in my opinion a lot of the songs come out of nowhere. I enjoy musicals, but if I'm wondering why the characters are singing at this moment IN A MUSICAL, then maybe it should have been rewritten. I also think a couple of the songs should have been cut so that more story-telling could have been included, as a lot of the songs say nothing that hasn't already been explained in the speaking segment.

Overall, it's alright. If you think it would appeal to you, then it probably would. It's a very love it or hate it show. I think I've simply grown out of the demographic in the years and years I've been watching this project be put together. Genuinely, give it a try, especially if you're passionate about animation. This show does need all the support it can get, to prove that indie animation is worth picking up to big companies.

Edit to add: The very last episode was very good. It was a strong 7 leaning toward an 8 for me, but unfortunately one very good episode cannot drag up the rest of the series for me. The animation is amazing, the humour hits like it was meant to in this one, the songs are the best they've been so far! The Lucifer/Adam fight is especially good, very well laid out and the use of Lucifer's powers in interesting, thoughtful and funny. I actually feel and understand the character's emotions in this one, and the episode is overall enjoyable, with the little hints of side plot being very interesting. It gives me hope for season 2, and I hope they can carry the height of episode 8 through into it. Episode 7 was a little bit nothing-burger though.

Having seen the fact that reviews of this show are critically negative, or critically positive, with very little middle ground I thought I'd make an attempt to reviewing this title.

Starting with the plot, which can be lost from the show's pacing, is that Hell is overpopulated due to how tough it is to get into Heaven, therefore creating a problem, which i solved by a once the year purging happens, where the strongest demons in hell cleanse the populous in one of the 5 points of the pentagram, and take it as their own realm. To solve this problem, we have Charlie, who is the daughter of Lucifer and the Beast Queen Lilith, who decides to open a rehabilitation center for lost souls to get back to Heaven.

With all that being said let's go into pros and cons of the show.

Pros: The show doesn't glamorize the process of forced rehabilitation, showing the souls in the Happy Hotel don't necessarily want to be rehabilitated, because the fear of death is no longer lingering over them, and they can get away with any life style, and debauchery they want. This is clearly shown by Angeldust still drinking, doing drugs, and being overall violent and sexual as an individual, with no regards to the fact he is in rehab.

Alastor's character also shows that where he wants to help with the rehabilitation process, it's less about seeing people get healthy, and more about how he wants to see people fail and repeat the cycle, to just be a sadistic individual.

Charlie is a good individual, with a kind heart, who has been shown to have problems with her parents, being that she is the opposite of what they want her to be. Living up to the expectations of the Fallen Angel who caused the great war of heaven, and the Beast Queen Lilith who is the one who raised the Behemoth, and Leviathan, who also nursed Lucifer back to health as he was slowly turned into a goat by Jehovah,charlie has some pretty big shoes to fill, especially since Lucifer is quoted in saying Charlie is a failure, and Lilith refuses to return any call, or answer the phone from her daughter. Which leads me into a minor con of the show, where the character development of Charlie seems slightly Aped from Damian's personality from Zoophobia, the comic written by Vivian.

Cons: First and foremost to get off my chest, I think the sounds mixing for character's like Alastor do need to be edited down a bit. I feel the filter used for the character fits his personality, and design fantastically, but it sounds like a 50/50 blend of the old timey filter mixed with the actor's voice, but if it was taken down to around a 40/60 filter to voice, it'd capture the same effect and clean up the characters voice enough, easy enough fix.

Another big glaring issue is I don't feel like the team was ready to release for a 2019 Halloween release, and slapped together the cleanest parts they had finished, and tried to make a cohesive story, since this was a 3 year project, that had promised a 2019 release, and didn't want to be pushed back to 2020, that said, it's a torn between damned if I do, damned if I don't situation, which do you disappoint people by continuing on with making something cleaner, and have fans pull from the wait, or do you release some content, and have fans disappointed with the pacing. I feel the second episode will be a lot cleaner and more cohesive now they got the base established.

I also feel with that said, that we have an over saturation of characters with too much going on. I understand that everyone is a hero of their own story in their own life, but establishing a minor character, like Sir Pentious in the first episode, where he wasn't really designed to be a main antagonist, did outshine the importance of Alastor's character development. With that said as well, we also have an array of characters who didn't make it in yet, who will be established as going thru rehab, and trying to get better, that the plot does seem like it will get muddied by introducing too many people too quickly.

Finally I feel like we don't learn enough about the main cast, being that I can't be the only one to miss the part where Charlie and Vaggie were a couple? I'm not asking for flat out gratuitous PDA. but the personality of Vaggie, and how she treats Charlie is that more of an assistant or best friend then a lover. There is no "I love you" or "I know you can do this" with the gentle shoulder grab showing the support, it's just inferred by Vaggie being in the hotel, and no real evidence of them actually being a couple in any form, even if we are going for the "gay couples are just like straight couples" portrayal, I don't buy them as dating even if they were heterosexual.

So, if you take out Sir Pentious in the pilot, and added some more one on one time with Charlie having an existential crisis about her project to rehabilitate hell, and Vaggie showing a bit more support, we would be able to get a better concept of the direction of characters, and plot.

Overall I'm genuinely curious to see where this show goes, and I do love the audio and vocal talents of the cast and crew, and have been following Vivian since this was originally the Zoophobia cartoon project, before changing over to Hazbin. I fully support this project and want to see the group grow, overall rough start, but I feel like a learning curve has been hit by the crew, that the fans who have eagerly awaited this release of the project, is being either too tightly defended by fans who want this to be good, but are criticized by the fans who expected this to be something it wasn't more harshly.

It has potential, and I'm hoping, and expecting, that the team behind the show will be able, to see where they succeeded and where they failed, and just working on moving forward with a well planned sense of how to tackle and improve the show, not just to the fandom wishes, but to the story they want to tell. Fall too much into the fans, lose the message, fall too much to your guns, the next few episodes will be a bit too muddled, and impossible to follow.

I think this pilot deserves an "A" for effort and passion. You can tell a lot of sweat tears went into making this pilot and it is probably one of the most professionally looking pilots I have ever seen.

As someone who didn't follow the development of this (other than a few rare occasions where I ran into concept art or fan-art) I had almost no expectations for it. I will say, however, I really didn't like the look of it from the trailer and the concept art that I did see. Something about it screamed that the show would be incredibly juvenile and just be edgy for edgy's sake (I'll get to that later). That being said, I thought it was entertaining for the most part, the characters had very definable personalities and played off of each other pretty well. The animation itself really sells how extreme and over the top the characters can be and I like subtle design shifts that the characters get when they are mad or not (like when Charlie sometimes looks like a demon, but only for a couple of frames).

The character designs themselves are very expressive, with my only issue being that too many of them have a very similar rhythm/flow to their design. Most of them have popsicle/balloon body proportions with super huge smiles. Granted, the designs are still really good but it would be nice to see a little more variety.

That being said, the premise of the show does give way to some possible problems if it were expanded upon. The basic idea of the show is actually pretty clever: A demon wants to bring demons to redemption but absolutely nobody in hell (literally) wants to be saved. Everyone in hell wants to be a miserable and self-destructive being. The premise has a lot of potential for depth and comedy where demons have to fight their inner urges to be terrible yet continue to be awful, but where the issues come in is more about how the show frames the characters. While the characters are all awful, they are all awful in a quirky and cartoonish way. The demons are in hell so nobody really cares if they are sexist, racist, homophobic, mean, selfish, etc.. That's all fine, but when the show's basic premise is about redemption then the show also needs to make sure that it knows what "good" is.

I hate to use the fan-base as a lens to view the series through, but the fan-base of the show seems to view a lot of characters as not "bad" but just quirky. One of the characters is a drug-addicted porn-star/prostitute. The show presents him as "cute and quirky" while also being immature. As an adult, I can understand that drug-addiction and prostitution aren't good things for society so I don't need the show to explain to me why they are bad. However, I don't think the audience of the series (mostly tweens) really understands that while the characters are designed to be cute that they themselves are not cute. They are all awful characters in their own way but they need to be awful to be redeemed. But I don't think the fans of the show (or possibly even the creators) are aware that they are bad. I've seen so much fan-art that seems to praise the characters based on how edgy they are and seem to be missing the point that you aren't supposed to like their personality traits.

It feels to me like most of the people who are watching this pilot are young and may not fully understand that none of these characters should be considered role-models. This kind of concerns me that the message of "redemption" and "quitting addiction" is interpreted by the fans as "be edgy, extreme, and live however you want" which is the exact opposite of the message.

I think the potential of this show really hinges on whether it takes morality seriously. If it just leaves the characters as cute, quirky, and relatively harmless, then I think I would dislike it very much. However, if it actually tries to make a point that being self-destructive, selfish, and careless are genuinely bad traits and that people should work to change themselves then I think it could bring about something good.

The other thing I really hope the series doesn't do is make angels, heaven, god, etc. some abusive evil regime. A lot of modern media seems to make easy jabs at "whoever is in power is really the cause for all of your problems" which wouldn't work about a series that wants people to have personal change. If the angels are evil (which would be cliché) then that would mean that the demons don't really need to change because they would view themselves as the lesser evil. I also find it odd that the main character is labeled as queer (though nothing specific is given as to why she would be labeled as queer) when that itself is traditionally considered sinful. If the show is about getting rid of sins from demons then what is the gauge that the creators are using to determine sin? Is swearing a sin? Is violence a sin? Is homosexuality a sin? Etc..

Long story short, I think the pilot itself is pretty good and well made, but it is hard detach it from its fanbase that seems to embrace all of the aspects of the characters instead of finding them reprehensible.

Firstly, let me add a disclaimer for the fellow Christian such as myself. Don't watch this show expecting it to be Biblically accurate or Holy. Watch "The Chosen" if you want something like that. This show isn't designed to be a story about Jesus and God, moreover it's supposed to flip the story we already know of redemption in the Bible on its head in a really creative way.

I first watched this show with my agnostic girlfriend and I was originally worried she might gain a bad view of Christianity, but ultimately, it's only bad if you delve deep into the "oh of course they're making heaven look bad" aspect of the show. Don't do that, keep the idea that this is entirely fictitious and LOOSELY BASED ON the Christian "mythology".

Now that that is said, even as a Christian, I LOVED this show. Every character is beautifully written, even Adam the pretentious prick that he is (I'll get into that more later). The animation is out of this world stellar, and the songs man...THE SOOOOOOONGS. All except one song was amazing (I'm sorry but that power ballad of Vaggie and Carmella wasn't it), and the lyrics are very catchy.

On the note of the characters, each one is their own seperate entity with their own distinctive personalities and I love it. The story follows a standard Disney plot of "a goody two shoes princess attempts to save her kingdom from destruction" but makes it in a way Disney could only DREAM of. My personal favorite characters are Angel Dust and Husk. Angel is such a broken and tragic character and the issues presented within his life are taken very seriously and handled very well. Husk is a perfect opposite to Angel, making them work very well.

The biggest problem I think people might have with this show is exactly what I mentioned at the beginning. It IS a bit on the nose with the idea of "Heaven is not that great either". But! What people are very obviously missing is that Sera didn't WANT to exterminate Hell, it was, as she said both in private to Adam and at the court house, an incredibly hard decision to protect the ones she loves. Adam and his sidekick are the ONLY angels out of all of Heaven that seem to be evil, everyone else seems to be very empathetic and welcoming to everyone even their supposed "enemy". Other than this issue though, people need to liven up a bit, again, they aren't saying "Yeah Christian's are evil and so is God." In fact, God was never mentioned and the only time He was half IMPLIED was during the beginning when they said the order of Heaven lost all the good they made.

Other than these issues, Hazbin Hotel is my new favorite animated show of the past decade and I will happily ride that horse into Hell and back (see what I did there?)