Film — Animated
- Allegro non Troppo (a feature film composed of animated shorts, like Fantasia) has its most depressive short, Valse Triste, followed by an hilarious short of a bee having her meal interrupted.
- Cars 2 is more or less this among Pixar films following 3 years of tearjerkerage from WALL•E, Up, and Toy Story 3. It ended up being Pixar's first critical flop, mostly for this reason.
- It also serves as a breather movie before the third, which came out 6 years later, focusing on Lightning's sudden downfall and fear of an imminent retirement from racing forever.
- Hercules is this, sandwiched in the middle of some of Disney's Darker and Edgier Renaissance films - namely, The Lion King (1994), Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Mulan, and Tarzan.
- The Emperor's New Groove may probably count as well. It was released some time after all of the following had been, but is an extremely comedic film that isn't exactly for the same audience of the aforementioned Darker and Edgier films.
- Similarly, for the modern era of animated Disney films, which have been dubbed the "Disney Revival" or the "Disney Resurgence," by some, the lighter and more comedic Winnie the Pooh (2011) was released right in between the much darker and very emotionally heavy films The Princess and the Frog, Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph and Frozen (2013).
- In the Dreamworks Mr. Peabody & Sherman film, there is a scene where the main characters time-travel to Renaissance-era Florence, Italy. There they meet Leonardo Da Vinci, Mona Lisa, and overall their visit there was much more peaceful and relaxing than other time periods like The French Revolution or The Trojan War.
- Gore Verbinski intended Rango to be this career-wise following his work on the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy. Of course, he underestimated how painstaking and time-consuming animation really was.
- Hotel Transylvania for Genndy Tartakovsky, following the more dramatic Sym-Bionic Titan, Star Wars: Clone Wars, and Samurai Jack.
- When it comes to the The Land Before Time franchise, there's the relatively light sixth installment (The Secret of Saurus Rock, which mostly hinges on whether or not bad luck really exists) placed smack between The Mysterious Island (Involving a famine, kids getting stranded on an island, and providing hints of the cast's sharptooth friend Chomper turning against them when he grows up) and The Stone of Cold Fire (Likely the most philosophical entry in the series, namely discussing the outside universe in an adult manner, plus the fact that it deals with an antagonist who had been banished from the Great Valley for accidentally causing the deaths of several migrants).
- An earlier example would be The Time of The Great Giving (Bullying and a drought for most of the plot), which is low-stakes compared to its cohorts The Great Valley Adventure (The children wandering upon the aforementioned Chomper as a newborn and causing his disgruntled parents to almost kill Littlefoot's grandparents) and Journey Through The Mists (The kids are left for themselves to travel to the Mysterious Beyond to find a cure for a gravely-ill Grandpa Longneck).
- Furthermore, movie 9 (Journey to Big Water, a somewhat smooth affair in which Littlefoot and co try to escort an Ophthalmosaurus to the ocean whilst trying to return to the Great Valley) is gentle compared to The Big Freeze (A catastrophic blizzard takes the Great Valley by storm, and part of the plot involves a close examination of Ducky and Spike's relationship) and particularly The Great Longneck Migration (Littlefoot has a premonition about an eclipse-related disaster, one of the longnecks burns his foot in a lava-related accident, and Littlefoot finally meets his long lost father Bron.
Film — Live-Action
- Beau Is Afraid: The third act, which Beau spends with a traveling theater group called the Orphans of the Forest. It's the only time no one has any malicious intentions for him, and he spends most of the time engaging in a haunting but harmless fantasy as he loses himself in their play.
- DC Extended Universe:
- Suicide Squad was noticeably lighter in tone and more straightforward after the heavy drama and action of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
- SHAZAM! was smaller scale than the epic Aquaman and the most overtly comedic film in the setting yet.
- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is this (or appears to be this) for the Harry Potter movie series. It follows the angst ridden Order of the Phoenix and precedes the dark two part finale. The movie has a much heavier focus on comedy than the others, prominently features multiple light-hearted romance subplots, and though not without dark moments was the only post Prisoner of Azkaban movie to earn a PG rating rather than PG-13, however, viewers who had already read the 7th and final book and knew all the secrets ahead of time might argue that this movie is actually a first-class combination of a Wham Episode, and an Innocuously Important Episode, all cunningly disguised by J.K. Rowling as a Breather Episode to downplay the seriousness involving Snape and Dumbledore's storyline.
- The costume party in Mystery Team.
- Ingmar Bergman added a film break to Persona (1966) to give viewers a break from the copious amounts of Mind Screw.
- Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is mostly less action-filled and has relatively less plot threads with lower stakes compared to previous installments in Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. The main characters eventually are not facing the same impact like in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.
- Co-writer and Director Leonard Nimoy has acknowledged in interviews that Star Trek IV was a breather episode after Star Trek II and Star Trek III.
- And another face from Star Trek, Jonathan Frakes, said in the DVD Commentary for the infamous Thunderbirds that the movie served as one of these for both Ben Kingsley- who wanted a less emotionally-taxing film to work on, and took the role of The Hood on the urging of his children- and Anthony Edwards, who- after so many seasons of ER where things never went well for Dr. Mark Greene- needed a bright, optimistic project to boost his spirits.
- Cloud Atlas: The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, while creepy in places, is funnier and more light-hearted than the other segments.
