Two little children are playing in the woods with their dachshund when a wicked witch dumps a trunk in their living room. When the girl opens it, all the evils of the world are let out, and last is Hope... which would seem to mean that hope is evil... in this 1934 Terrytoon.
1934 was the year in which Paul Terry's studio turned out cartoons based on well-known children's stories, spiced up, so to speak, with operatic scores. They were all much of a piece and, considering that the competition was Disney and the Fleischers -- although the latter were hobbled by the recently enforced Production Code, they still had Popeye -- they basically had a situation in which they were doing all the stories yet again with some new strictures. This must have resulted in a certain amount of boredom in the staff which, it seems to me, shows up in the work.