Two Motorcycles, Just Before the End

On 'Bobby's Girl' (1985) and 'A Drop Too Much' (1954).

A still from A Drop Too Much (1954)

Welcome! We’re here with a new Thursday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. And this one is about motorcycles — and filmmaking, and influence.

In ‘85, Japan saw the release of a film named Bobby’s Girl: an anime experiment, around 45 minutes long. It’s about a boy who loves motorcycles. He rejects the world’s expectations, stops going to high school and runs away from home. Finally, while riding to his apartment to catch a phone call from a girl, he crashes.

Around 31 years earlier, a very different film came out in Czechoslovakia. It’s called A Drop Too Much (1954), and it’s a stop-motion puppet short. The subject here is another young motorcyclist, riding to meet his girlfriend in the city of Pilsen. He stops to rest at an inn — and leaves drunk. Ultimately, as he heads to his destination, he crashes.¹

Each film closes on a disaster. Just before the end, though, each one gives us a long, intricate, beautiful sequence that follows the lead character as he rides.

Both sequences are fireworks. But they express different things, and come from opposing styles of filmmaking and animation. The Japanese team and the Czech one brought the energy and speed of motorcycling to screen — and yet one didn’t visibly copy the other. That’s despite the shared influences between the two, and the likelihood that one team knew of the other’s work.

A closer look at these moments, and how they came to be, reveals a lot about filmmaking as a whole.