...Hard to say which is worse: The pink smoke, or the Devil Dog?
All Dogs Go to Heaven may have been best known as a feature-length cartoon that was defeated at box office by the director's former employers, but given that's it's director is none than fellow scare master Don Bluth, there can be no doubt about this: this is bound to be one creepy film locked and loaded with extremely spine-chilling showcases of the real dangers of mortality and the afterlife, to the point that it makes the MPAA's G rating for the movie all the more dubious.
Just hope that you won't be needing a therapy session after you finish reading...
Spoilers Off applies to all "Moments" pages, so all spoilers are unmarked.
- The abandoned Mardi Gras float that Carface, Charlie, Itchy, and the rest of Carface's gang use as a hideout, which more than resembles a huge, skeletal demon.
- Look at the design closely. It's clearly a giant scorpion.
- The vivid depiction of Fire and Brimstone Hell from Charlie's nightmare, forever putting the fear of divine punishment and existential dread into God-fearing children. Charlie imagines that his pocket watch has stopped, thereby ending his borrowed time, as he hears the Heavenly Whippet's voice echo "You can never come back." Suddenly, his watch explodes and he's sucked into a storm of green lightning towards a vortex, where a tornado bursts from the ground and pulls him down into a lava pit onto a ship made of bones that's sinking into the river. He's met by a hideous rat/bat/skeleton hybrid who roars at him as he tries to get away onto the ship's bow, only for a gigantic hellhound (heavily implied to be the canine version of Old Scratch himself) to burst flaming out of the bubbling lava in front of him with a dinosaur-like roar, then send several imps after Charlie to bite and tear at him as his ship sinks further and further into the lava. The last thing he hears before waking up is the monster bellowing with the Voice of the Legion "YOU CAN NEVER GO BACK!! There's a little Nightmare Retardant when the imps turn out to be Flo's puppies trying to wake him up; also, the fact that Charlie has unconsciously taken refuge on the end of a broom.
- Don Bluth used the same technique he'd used with the tractor from The Secret of NIMH and the Giant Mouse of Minsk in An American Tail for the sinking ship of bones by rotoscoping to make it look creepy and out of place.Demon: CHAAAAAAAAAARLIE! YOU...CAN...NEVER...GO BAAAAACK!!!
- The uncut version
cranks it up to eleven and yanks the knob off. Not only do we get an unsettling close up of the boat monster, but the hellhound slinks down to Charlie, bellows in his face "Now, you are MINE!" and lets an Evil Laugh out. Is it any surprise that this was cut for being too scary for children?
- Don Bluth used the same technique he'd used with the tractor from The Secret of NIMH and the Giant Mouse of Minsk in An American Tail for the sinking ship of bones by rotoscoping to make it look creepy and out of place.
- The absolute gut-wrenching tension of watching Charlie's pocket watch at the bottom of the river filing up with water. The second we see it ticking irregularly, knowing that any one of those ticks is going to be the last, Charlie winces in pain, then dives down as fast as he can to get it. We cut back to the watch one last time... just in time to see it stop. Cue the whole frame getting obscured by inky black bubbles. And like his murder, we never see Charlie's body.
- Charlie's murder. Especially terrifying in that to him, everything is perfectly fine: he's out of jail, everyone's happy to see him and he's off to start his own business with half of his partner's profits. He then goes out to celebrate with his friends and gets so drunk that he can't tell that he's being led into a trap or that his best friend is screaming at him to warn him until it's too late. And the whole thing happens so fast that it actually feels like you've been hit by a car! Charlie doesn't even realize something's up for a few minutes until he's told point-blank that he died.
- Oddly enough, heaven is like this too. Part of it is the Mood Whiplash from a deep, frightening crime-related death scene of the main character to a fluffy, sugar bowl-based afterlife, the strangely calming music and the overly nice and law-abiding dog angel. And this is just a tiny part of it that we see. It all seems too perfect (which is why Charlie immediately hates it), and it is, because there's a catch: you can either spend eternity stuck in this boring, sweet place or be damned to Hell for trying to go back to Earth (which many people/dogs who died unexpectedly most likely did).
- The fact that (unlike Carface later on) Charlie is never told outright that turning the watch back will damn his soul forever. He knows he's not allowed to and he knows it will make the Whippet Angel mad, but at that point he's lived a life of beating the system easily. The watch isn't exactly under lock and key. It's a frighteningly tempting position to be in, because as far as he knew, he could have lived a long life and returned to a smack on the wrist.
- Itchy getting jumped and almost killed by Carface and his lackeys, who later burn down the casino. The scene makes it clear that, for the rest of the movie, these guys are not playing around.
- Itchy is so traumatized by Charlie's death at the beginning that he cries for Charlie in his sleep. Then we hear the door to their home open and see a shadow approaching Itchy's sleeping place. It turns out to be Carface, who begins strangling Itchy in his sleep as Itchy begins screaming for help. Thankfully, it's only a nightmare. Charlie was just shaking him awake.
- Upon returning to life, Charlie drags himself up from the water, gasping and frantic and a sickly grey color. It takes his life watch a good ten seconds to start ticking, and only then does his color change back and his ability to breathe return. He was basically a living corpse. If you look closely, you can even see his spine reforming.
- Itchy later says that Charlie's hand are cold.
- Until Charlie is saved by the Big-Lipped Alligator Moment, for a second, it looks as if Anne Marie is going to be Forced to Watch a huge monster eat her dog!
- King Gator has evidently been fed so many helpless victims that it’s why he’s so obese.
- Despite coming to the rescue later, one can't help but shudder when King Gator comes face to face with Carface. King Gator giggles at how "delicious" Carface looks, and quickly advances on Carface. At the end of the film, Carface arrives in Heaven, clearly having been eaten by King Gator.
- Charlie returning to Anne Marie, at least at first. A giant, fiery figure clearly standing in for the devil looms over the town in the distance, turning the sky red as blood-red smoke billows through the streets. The smoke pours into Anne Marie's open window and for a second, it looks as if the devil is coming for her (it's just Charlie's ghost floating in). The implication is that Charlie has either come back from hell or was in limbo and the devil was coming for him. The devil even calls out to Charlie from the streets... not with the bellowing roar he gave in Hell, but with a malevolent, grinning whisper, knowing that Charlie can no longer escape his fate. He knows exactly where he is. And he can wait. (Though thankfully the Whippet Angel appears and banishes the demon before welcoming Charlie back to Heaven for his Heroic Sacrifice.)
- The monster in the distance shares a silhouette with the creature identified, by Don Bluth, as a hellhound in Charlie's nightmare from earlier in the film. That name alone implies that the thing we see isn't even the biggest or baddest demon out there.
All Dogs Go To Heaven 2
- While more Laughably Evil than the Hellhound of the first film, Red sticks out as the one Satanic figure in the franchise that successfully manages to "cheat" and reap innocent souls from Heaven, by means of manipulating his way to possession of Gabriel's Horn. Even Annabelle, who handily punished both the Hellhound and Belladonna for trying to illegally take a soul, is easily sucked into a cage, as the souls' prison slowly descends down to the underworld.
- Red, who has grown into a giant demon, easily swats aside Charlie when he tried to fight him. Annabelle could only scream in horror when it looked like Red was about to finish Charlie off.
- After Red is defeated, Carface shrugs him off, only for Red's voice to suddenly bellow from beneath that Carface legally sold his soul to him, with a terrified Carface promptly Dragged Off to Hell. To worsen this, it is never elaborated how Carface possibly managed to escape this Fate Worse than Death in the TV series.
The TV Series
- In "The Perfect Dog", Charlie becomes a sickeningly sweet "perfect dog" towards Sasha, so that he can mess with her and prove her wrong about wanting one in the first place. When she finds out, Sasha has a rather unnerving breakdown, paired with an Evil Laugh and punctuated by some kind of deranged roar.
- Carface's vision of his fate in An All Dogs Christmas Carol, despite being (or rather because it is) a catchy gospel number.
- Belladonna has her moments, like transforming into a naga-like monster at the end. She gets defeated immediately by Annabelle's snow.
- The very real possibility that Annabelle, an angel, actually killed her cousin.note
- Another example is trying to throw Itchy through a dog food meat grinder in her first appearance.
- Belladonna, compared to the other demonic characters, represents the Satanic power of temptation to get people in her power. In other words she's dangerously manipulative and can trick people into unwittingly offering their souls to her. She nearly twice makes Charlie her servant, first willingly by pretending to simply be a more hedonistic but fun-loving employer than her cousin, the second forcibly by convincing everyone in Heaven to revoke his angel status via his Hero with Bad Publicity status.
