Broken Toys

This quite charming Disney short depicts a group of discarded and generally damaged toys give spirit and a new lease on-well, not "life", per se-a new found functionality to do what every toy wants-find a child to join in the vital task of playing. One toy decides that the scrap heap is no place for a toy and gets the others to work changing their lot. Most enjoyable, even if you can see the ending a mile away. Typical Disney quality across the board and great fun on several levels. Well worth watching. Recommended.

So visually this is a big improvement over 1930's "Midnight in a Toy Shop", the other Silly Symphony to feature animated toys, and is very richly detailed, but I personally don't really enjoy it any more than that short, I think it's a little on the weird side! To say it's about walking talking toys, it doesn't have all that much fun and wonder to it, I didn't care for the sequence in which the eyeless doll is given new baby blues in a kind of mock operation procedure that I found bizarre and vaguely macabre rather than cute, and that also goes for the part where the toy soldiers are replacing their lost limbs, the way it was done with them marching in and out with makeshift limbs and crutches wasn't too hard to make the connection to real life warfare victims getting patched up, is this fun for a short about singing toys? Enjoyable and well animated but not exactly inspiring work in my opinion.. I liked the animation the best, and how much personality was put into each of the toys, and the details of how they were broken in different ways, and it's sweet how the sailor doll rallied all the toys to get out of the dump together to fix themselves and guide them to a new home at an orphanage where they would be loved by children again. It's an interesting idea for a short and a nice message of pulling yourself together and carrying on, literally in the case of these guys! I've seen much better, but it's still another cute and entertaining Symphony, if a little heavy handed in some areas. X

This is a nice little innocent and non-pc cartoon about a group of discarded toys who want to better themselves to have a new shot at life. It's great Disney quality with plenty of children innocence and classic themes. Nice for the family.

Grade B+

This is a really well crafted animated piece. It starts with a bunch of cast off toys landing in a dump. They are all pretty much damaged in some way. One little character takes it upon himself to get things rolling, helping to repair everyone. Some of it is makeshift, like using pencils to replace the limbs of damaged soldiers. Or using a thimble for a helmet. This is nicely done. Once again, sixty some years after the Civil War, the black characters are still being treated as weak, lazy characters. There is a Stepin-Fetchit guy who doesn't want to do any work, even to help, but gets coerced into helping. He also falls asleep during the surgery of the little doll and her "heart" stopes beating. These are more abrasive than the usual stupidity. But the overall effect is good.

I always enjoy Disney Silly Symphonies, and Broken Toys is no exception. It is beautifully animated with vibrant colours and fluid backgrounds, and I liked the energy and whimsy of the music. The story is a very sweet one, with some clever individual scenes such as the humorous and tense operation scene and the heartwarming ending(without it ever feeling overly-sentimental), while the characters are more individualised than characters with a similar feel like Funny Little Bunnies and Santa's Workshop, with some smartly used caricatures of WC Fields, Zasu Pitts, Ned Sparks and especially Stepin Fetchitt. All in all, truly delightful. 10/10 Bethany Cox