Broken Down Film (1985) User Reviews

Really creative

[Horst_In_Translation · 6/10 · 28 July 2016]

"Broken Down Film" is a 5.5-minute short film from 1985 and I am a bit hesitant to call it a cartoon. Yes it is animated in the style of old American cartoon filmmaking, but there is still much more to it. The story is not the heart and soul here. It is very generic. The good guy is a cowboy, he wants to rescue his love interest and a bad guy (who looks like Popeye's enemy) gets in the way. But something else gets in the way too, namely the physical condition of the film roll this is one. Japanese writer and director Osamu Tezuka gives us a really creative take here on what happens to film characters when their "home" is slightly broken. But sometimes it also helps the hero, for example when the bad guy can't find him. But it sure annoys him when he cannot kiss the girl at the very end. Where did that color come from all of a sudden. It's an interesting little piece and I enjoyed the watch. It should not have been much longer because it may have gotten repetitive, but at slightly over 5 minutes, it's perfect. Go check it out.

Kinda cool

[bundjik · 7/10 · 13 December 2020]

While only lasting 5 minutes the short film is quite fun and enjoyable.

An Homage to Tex Avery?

[matt-thorn · 9/10 · 13 December 2001]

Tex Avery and others used to toss in gags like this once in a while, but Tezuka takes the premise to a hilarious extreme. Tezuka did plenty of hack work for television, and plenty of mediocre feature-length works, but he really poured his heart into his experimental shorts, and this is one of the best. It really is a joy to watch.

An Animated Tour-de-Force

[lunatim · 10/10 · 27 March 2000]

This is a real gem of a cartoon that doesn't deserve the obscurity under which it seems to have fallen. Nominally, it's supposed to be a silent animated Western melodrama. However, the real premise is that the film is a very old, very battered print that's full of scratches, breaks, bad splices, etc., which keep interfering with the hero, heroine, and villain in wildly surreal ways. The gags are excellent and there's something vaguely metaphysical in the way the physical medium of the film affects the story. Definitely one of my all-time favorites...

Freakin' brilliant and fun

[planktonrules · 10/10 · 1 November 2008]

This is a very, very fun film from Japanese director Osamu Tezuka and it gets very high marks for its originality and charm. The film pretends to be an old silent film with a very, very scratchy print. Again and again, problems develop due to the frames going out of alignment, hairs on the screen and fuzzy bits here and there. What makes it so funny is that the main character, a cowboy, uses this for his advantage--as if he knows that the print is bad and uses the mistakes to his advantage. I've never really seen a short like this before and it gets very high marks for originality as well as a great sense of humor. Oddly, Tezuka is known for his work with Japanese TV series such as Astroboy, but his non-series work (which also includes JUMPING) is great and should be sought out by anyone wanting a good laugh.

Let's Run It One More Time

[Hitchcoc · 9/10 · 23 April 2019]

This is a very creative effort by a Japanese filmmaker. Lets take a tired old Western plot and do all the things we are used to. But show it as a worn out reel of film that is filled with scratches, broken frames, snow, messed up sound, and run it one more time. The fun comes when the characters in the film begin to interact with the interference. Eventually, you will want out, but at five minutes, it's fine.