Gopher Broke (2004)

Load of rubbish!!

As Good As It Gets

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

I probably would not agree with this film's Academy Award nomination, but it's not worse than the eventual winner "Ryan" either in my opinion. "Gopher Broke" is a short film that only runs for 4 minutes, is animated and tells us about the unsuccessful attempts of a gopher to get a meal. And when he finally seems to manage, it's just a gigantic cow that falls down on him. I hope he is alright. The animation was okay, the story wasn't bad either for four minutes. yet something's missing for me to recommend this work. It was not as funny as I hoped it would be. Can't say I am too surprised that writer and director Jeff Fowler has not managed to build a career on this in the last 10 years. So, not recommended, although it's not horrible either.

"Gopher Broke" pretty much well represents the medium standard of CGI animation at this particular moment of time. It's titular character is cute and goofy looking, it's a modern throw-back to almost Looney Tune-esquire humor, and it gets a few Aws and Giggles.Basically, the gopher is hungry and digs a rut in the road so that farmers going to market will spill some food for the gopher to eat. However, the gopher is too busy celebrating each victory that something always comes along and steals the food away. Poor hardworking gopher just can't get a break, so he.... doesn't. He gets crushed by a cow and that's it. Because, I guess, that's ironic.Gotta admit, of all the cute goofy gopher characters out there, I wouldn't really distinguish this one. I don't know precisely why we're watching this gopher, except that he's cute and goofy lookin'. But he's not really all that inventive or resourceful, he just kinda keeps trying everything over again, just at higher degrees, and so he and the story gets nowhere. But oh well.--PolarisDiB

GOPHER BROKE was nominated for the Oscar for Best Animated Short and while it is a cute four minutes of film, it also seems a bit ordinary. Now this isn't to say that it's bad. It's just that in the last decade there have been so many similar looking films that it just doesn't seem very special. With Pixar, Dreamworks, Fox and many, many independents making films of about comparable graphic quality, GOPHER BROKE isn't exactly innovative. Now the main character is pretty cute and the story engaging, but I also wished the film had been longer than just four minutes.With this style of animation getting better and better, the bar is being raised and GOPHER BROKE seems like yet another CGI film and that's really it. By the way, if you'd like to see a smaller studio that did an exceptional job with similar graphics, try watching the Welsh film FETCH. While only about a minute and a half long, it seems to pack in more laughs and is a delight.

...wait till a cow lands on you.You'll never look at a trip to the Farmer's Market the same way again. "Gopher Broke" is a colorful look at one animal's frustration in trying to get what he wants, namely food. And how he is thwarted from that goal at every turn. He hits a bump in the road and tries to make it work for him (literally). But there are more aggressive scavengers than he. Such is the way of life, and not just for gophers, either. It's now available for purchase, for a mere five dollars, at www.Filmporium.com. The DVD includes two other shorts, "The Hill Farm" and the off-beat romance "The Fan and the Flower."