Onboro firumu

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.

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

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.

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.

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...