Broken Toys (1935)

For having a relatively low budget, the film's style and overall art direction are immensely impressive.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

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+

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

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.

A Walt Disney SILLY SYMPHONY Cartoon Short.Landing in a dump, a lively sailor doll finds the place has become the home for a collection of discarded BROKEN TOYS who have all given up hope of finding happiness again. Instilling new enthusiasm & dignity in them, the sailor doll helps get them repaired & cleaned-up. He even replaces the button eyes on a beautiful blind doll, finding romance in the bargain. But now, with Winter coming on, the sailor doll has big plans for the toys' future...This very charming film was Disney's Christmas cartoon for 1935. Good animation & story are a real plus. A few Hollywood celebrities are caricatured amusingly: Ned Sparks, Zasu Pitts, W. C. Fields & Stepin Fetchit (in unedited versions).The SILLY SYMPHONIES, which Walt Disney produced for a ten year period beginning in 1929, are among the most interesting of series in the field of animation. Unlike the Mickey Mouse cartoons in which action was paramount, with the Symphonies the action was made to fit the music. There was little plot in the early Symphonies, which featured lively inanimate objects and anthropomorphic plants & animals, all moving frantically to the soundtrack. Gradually, however, the Symphonies became the school where Walt's animators learned to work with color and began to experiment with plot, characterization & photographic special effects. The pages of Fable & Fairy Tale, Myth & Mother Goose were all mined to provide story lines and even Hollywood's musicals & celebrities were effectively spoofed. It was from this rich soil that Disney's feature-length animation was to spring. In 1939, with SNOW WHITE successfully behind him and PINOCCHIO & FANTASIA on the near horizon, Walt phased out the SILLY SYMPHONIES; they had run their course & served their purpose.