Andrew Cook
On January 17, 2001, writer/director Brooke Burgess, technical director Ian Kirby, and artist Andrew West released the first chapter of their epic sci-fi motion comic Broken Saints. Broken Saints was among the first of its kind, using Flash animation to add a sense of movement and featuring music and sound effects to round out the experience. When Burgess and his team began uploading the chapters on Newgrounds.com its popularity skyrocketed. It quickly became a cult phenomenon, showcasing the potential of the new millennium through an innovative evolution of an established form, delivered through a new medium: the internet. The series won several awards and was met with critical praise, and after the series concluded on July 13, 2003 (with this article timed to celebrate the finale), it received a victory lap via a trip to the Sundance Film Festival and a DVD box set released by 20th Century Fox in cooperation with Telefilm Canada.
With the 25th anniversary of the series now upon us, I decided to revisit it for the first time in many, many years, curious what I’d make of it in the modern day. What I found is a passionate, thematically dense work of art which has grown along with me, hitting me in ways it never did as a teenager or young adult; a work more relevant now than it has ever been, ripe for rediscovery.
Inspired by director Burgess’s trip around the world after leaving a lucrative career in the video game industry, Broken Saints tells the story of four different people, each receiving an apocalyptic vision which upends their understanding of the world and pulls them into a conspiracy reaching into the furthest heights of political, financial, and technological power.
Each of the four characters hails from a different corner of the world, with a highly divergent set of cultural and philosophical beliefs. Shandala hails from Fiji, a young white woman who washed up on the shore of a remote island as a child. Raimi is a young urban professional from the United States, a cynical and profane lapsed Catholic working in the tech industry. Oran comes from Iraq, fighting against Western clandestine ops being waged in the region even before the opening salvos of George W. Bush’s post-9/11 invasion. Kamimura is an elderly Shinto priest, whose temple is burnt down by a former student over his possession of a mysterious parcel.
Broken Saints foregrounds character and theme over plot. As the characters make progress on their respective journeys, separate for much of the series’ 12 hour runtime, the chapters are united by the call-and-response nature of what the cast goes through. The show’s pacing is patient, urging us to stop and smell the roses, to luxuriate in the chance to experience the worldviews of such widely disparate people. Broken Saints makes extensive use of inner monologue, which often transcends the typical speech boxes of the comic book, going beyond providing mere narrative context and taking center stage in truly literary fashion.
This combination of image and text forms the basis for the show’s minimalist aesthetic; their interpretation of the “motion comic” concept leads away from the split panels of the graphic novel and into beautifully drawn full-screen compositions, creating a series of moving paintings with elegant use of color and negative space to lead the eye. Artist Andrew West’s style is highly informed by anime, with an excellent sense for collage and montage. His strong sense of visual theme daisy-chains the compositions along and ultimately ties each chapter together.
All four of Burgess’s leads have a very strong voice, and one’s soul-searching will often lead directly into the next, inviting us to compare and contrast their varied insights.
Through Raimi, Burgess explores consumerism and modern urban life. How our desire to strive for comfort and fulfillment leads us into the jaws of sprawling metropolitan beasts, tiny humans inhabiting massive human works at once beautiful and terrifying. Raimi is cynical and conspiratorial, seeing deeper, darker machinations behind the seeming chaos of the world.
Through Oran, Burgess explores matters of faith and geopolitics. A devoutly spiritual man struggling against imperialist oppression, Oran understands the world as a series of struggles demanding piety and grace.
Through Kamimura, Burgess explores the beauty and impermanence of the material world, or mono no aware. That the truth of the world is that all things must pass, and it’s the finality and rarity of every single element of existence which lends the world its beauty. The joys we give and share with others will eventually end and recede, becoming a faded note in the chorus of existence, special for the silence which defines its irreplaceable sound.
Through Shandala, Burgess explores innocence. What it’s like to know only the beauty of the world, to only begin to understand sorrow and regret. All the other characters are reflected in her. She’s spiritual like Oran, a naturalist like Kamimura, and her profound optimism provides counterpoint to Raimi’s cynicism.
Something which stood out in this rewatch is just how well Broken Saints has stood the test of time, and not only because of the subsequent two decades of political and technological development drawing closer and closer to Burgess’ dark vision.
One thing I find especially refreshing is how strongly it resists the obsession with narrative as a plot delivery device and the drumbeat of death-march pacing so often seen in eight episode streaming seasons. The chapters range in length from nine to 83 minutes, and we often peek in on steps in the journey which seem inconsequential at first, only for us to come away with a much deeper understanding of who they are as people. Kamimura’s trip with the egg farmer Masayuki and Raimi’s flirtationship with work friend Sandra are a few highlights.
Another refreshing element is just how earnest the show is. While certain characters may be cynical, the storytelling never is. Broken Saints is a passion project, a true labor of love. It doesn’t pander to any online cliques, it doesn’t feature any corporate synergy. It exists because someone needed it to. After 15 years of spinoffs and reboots and shared universes and endless platters of microwaved nostalgia, experiencing something like this, let alone something this extensive, feels like a true treasure.
Broken Saints wears its heart on its sleeve, and its influences are proudly referenced as well. Burgess pays tribute to Twin Peaks, The Matrix, Watchmen, Street Fighter, Brazil, and many more. While the influences are obvious, the show is quite prescient as well. Nearly a year before the iconic design of the Eye of Sauron in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Brooke Burgess gives us a similar vision of an all-seeing eye, burrowed deep in the nightmares of our leads. Years before Damon Lindelof’s Lost gave us a mind-melting blend of sci-fi, action, and fantasy with a multicultural cast on a spiritual journey through the web of synchronicity, there was Broken Saints.
Yet another refreshing element is the series’ DVD release. While the original edition of the series had no voice acting, this release is fully voiced, utilizing the talent of actors such as David Kaye and William B. Davis. In addition to that, the art for several chapters has been updated and it’s packed with special features. Not only do Burgess and his collaborators offer an in-depth look at the creation of the box set, of what their grant from the Canadian government allowed them to add, and their trip to Sundance, it also has additional narrative context for the show itself. It collects the various TV spots recorded for the series on shows like G4’s Attack of the Show, various lectures and presentations Burgess was invited to give on the subject of emergent media, as well as trailers for films such as Donnie Darko, collected for seemingly no other reason than that they made an impression on the team. There are hidden features as well, including an excellent, highly personal poem recited by Burgess himself. The DVD set itself feels like a labor of love, and it’s very powerful in the age of bare-bones releases, or no physical release at all followed by the license being revoked and your purchase being taken from you.
After the Broken Saints DVD release, the team produced a series of motion comic shorts to tie in with the Francis Lawrence film I Am Legend, then Burgess split off to collaborate with Guillermo del Toro on a motion comic tie-in for Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Burgess then turned to writing, producing the children’s novel The Cat’s Maw and the traditional graphic novel Becoming. Kirby and West continued to work together, collaborating with Christopher Nolan on a motion comic tie-in to Inception as well as the series H+. Kirby is currently the Creative Director at Sequence, an animation studio, where he’s worked with Marvel, DC, Dungeons and Dragons, and on several prominent video games.
Though Broken Saints has sunk back into obscurity after its brief time in the sun, it stands as a definitive example of 2000s art. Burgess’s creation is technologically, formally, and creatively groundbreaking. Broken Saints is both retro and fresh, serving as a time capsule to a more earnest and creatively unshackled time, but also stark, prophetic, and above all underseen enough to still feel new. The original editions of the episodes can be found on YouTube via the Broken Saints Archive, uploaded with the permission of its creators. The DVD set can be found on Amazon for about $10. For a set this detailed and a series this long and impassioned, that’s a great deal and well worth taking a flier on, even if the motion comic aesthetic proves not to strike your fancy.
