Sometimes I ask myself, am I sane? Perhaps we ought to ask ourselves this question more often. Todd has asked himself this question after finding what he believes to be a Urim and Thummim in a Goodwill Store and comes up with the answer: yes. He peers into this object and seems to see visions of people (in side profile) when the light shines into it just right. As a matter of fact, he builds a light focusing device so that he doesn't have to rely on the unpredictable natural light.
Even he will say that this sounds crazy. However, throughout the movie he challenges all sorts of people to look into the object and see for themselves. Somehow everyone he shows it to also see something in the object, albeit sometimes diametrically opposed things. Some actually see themselves being chased by a demonic force. Todd even takes the object to what he considers the most prestigious university in the south: Vanderbilt. Here he finds a Jew, a Mormon, and an Archeologist and asks each of them to consider his story. They are very respectful. Some challenge him, "Why does this have to be the urim and thummim and not just a sacred cup?" asks the Mormon scholar. The jewish scholar seems to be the most encouraging saying, if you think it's scared and it has a positive force in your life than you go with it.
I have to ask myself, why would I want to believe that an object has special powers. If my life really sucked because I were poor and struggling, I'd want to believe that something magical would save me from my predicament. If I felt like an outcast and that nobody cared about me, I'd want to believe that God had chosen me for a special purpose, even if that purpose were to guard a goodwill cup.
In short, if we as a human race weren't such assholes to each other, we might not have to rely on notions of magic and God-ordained authority. If people had some self-esteem because they could provide for their families and live comfortably I think we'd have a lot more self-actualization replacing religious fervor. But that's just me.
The documentary film The Object is pretty remarkable. The film provides a first person account by Todd Walker telling his story of finding “the object” in a Nashville Goodwill store. He believes the object to be the Urim and Thummim from the Old Testament. Todd also believes he has been called by God to be the modern day protector of the object and that he is to witness to the world of its divinity and of its power to connect people to the divine if they have enough faith. At one point in the film Todd describes the object as “All that and a bag of chips” and that’s exactly what I think of this documentary.
Members of the Mormon faith will likely find Todd’s story exceptionally fascinating yet also somewhat uncomfortable. Todd’s discovery and experience with the object has striking parallels to the Joseph Smith story and translation of the Book of Mormon. Todd even has designated 3 special witnesses for his Urim and Thummim just as the Book of Mormon has its own 3 witnesses. I was fascinated with this film from beginning to end and also found it unintentionally hilarious at times. Though I laughed plenty, I can’t mock Todd’s sincerity. He truly and deeply believes in the divine authenticity of the object and that he has been called by God to protect it and to witness to the world of its power as an instrument of God to communicate to the modern world.
The Object was the feature of our monthly film group and the discussion following the film was one of the most interesting we’ve had. We all share a Mormon heritage. Our reactions to the film prompted a discussion of our personal beliefs – past and present – and of our own reconciliations and/or faith in the story of the founding of the LDS Church.
Thank you to Ed for a great night and for finding this film. Since the film is not readily available I’m grateful for his insomnia and his $5 purchase. If you’re curious but don’t want to buy a copy of the movie for yourself, check out the clip below from YouTube of Todd Walker sharing his witness and testimony.
I don’t know much about animation other than I grew up watching Warner Brother’s cartoons and Disney movies. And I’ve followed animation’s trend away from hand drawn animation toward computer rendered animation largely by watching the Pixar films. Like most people, at least most Americans, I have considered animation to be synonymous with “children’s films”. I hadn’t considered the idea of animation being used to tell anything other than a family-friendly story. I think my first exposure to animated filmmaking that didn’t tell a distinctly juvenile story was when I saw Princess Mononoke by Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. Princess Mononoke and Miyazaki’s other films tell stories that can appeal to children but his audience is not so narrowly defined. His films also have some darker moments, philosophical underpinnings, and adult themes. However, unlike the rest of the world, I am not a huge Miyazaki fan. He is considered a genius by most. Maybe I lack the imagination required to truly appreciate his filmmaking. However, I am indebted to his films for giving me my first glimpse into animation being used to tell a different type of story.
In 2001 I saw the animated short Rejected by Don Hertzfeldt. At the time I really hadn’t seen anything like it before. I saw it completely by chance at the Sundance Film Festival where it was programmed as an introductory short playing before one of the films in the U.S. Dramatic Film Competition. I immediately loved it and thought it was one of the funniest films I had ever seen. This screening began my infatuation with Hertzfeldt and Bitterfilms – the name of his production company.
Hertzfeldt’s films are summed-up nicely by the title of an article that I saw on the Sundance website a couple of years ago: “The Existential Life of a Stick Figure”. Hertzfeldt’s hand drawn animation is primitive. They are stick figures. All of the artifice is stripped down to reveal nothing but pure idea. And those ideas are bleak and violent, but damnit if they aren’t also hilarious. Some critics have pointed out that there is a common thread in his films of innocent creatures suffering. His films combine dark humor with silliness and violence.
He made his first film, Ah, L’Amour, in 1995 when he was still a freshman at UC Santa Barbara.
The film takes on the battle between the sexes. It depicts the battle in terms of physical violence rather than emotional. In the film, a man is shot, stabbed, chainsawed, and even beheaded by the women that reject him. It has no audio dialog and the characters speak through voice bubbles. The film operates like a comic strip.
Lily and Jim is a 13-minute short Hertzfeldt made in 1997.
It is a film about a bad and very awkward dinner date. This film introduced audio dialog and it also displayed Hertzfeldt’s natural comic timing. The film is a restaurant dinner filled with painful small talk between a couple on a date. The awkwardness of the scene is not achieved as much through dialog as it is through the use of pauses or silence. The negative space in the conversation creates the pain and the comedy.
Hertzfeldt went to Cannes in 1998 with Billy’s Balloon. At 22, he was the youngest director in competition. There is no dialog in this film, and he focuses purely on action. This short is about a vengeful toy balloon. Some reviewers compared it to Hitchcock’s The Birds and to Kubrick’s 2001. Some responded less favorably and were grossed out by the violence that the balloon inflicts on the innocent baby. Joe Baltake for the Sacramento Bee wrote, “Some things are not funny, and child-abuse is one of them.” As for me, it reminds me of a twisted version of the French classic The Red Balloon ………..and I love it.
Hertzfeldt was making a name for himself and corporate offers started to come his way but he snubbed them all. He is fiercely independent. The idea for his next film, Rejected, grew from one of the offers for commercial work that he received and turned down.
The story goes like this: Hertzfeldt received a request from a TV network to create some animated program IDs. He joked that it would be fun to accept the work and create ridiculous spots that had nothing to do with the network and then see if they would actually run them. This idea led him to Rejected.
Rejected tells the story of an animator, also named Don Hertzfeldt, who’s approached by the fictitious Family Learning Channel to make some promotional spots only to find that none of his ideas make the cut. The film splices together one spot after another and we soon understand why the spots were rejected. As the film goes on he is asked to design more commercials and the animator begins to lose his mind under the pressures of commercialism. The spots he makes get stranger and stranger – bizarre ads for Kelp Dip and Bean Lard Mulch. The cartoons begin to literally fall apart, clouds dropping from cartoon skies. The real-life Hertzfeldt calls Rejected “a collision between art, commercial culture and madness.” Rejected went on to earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short.
If this blog has piqued your curiosity to the work of Don Hertzfeldt, then I encourage you to explore it further on your own. There is The Meaning of Life which traces the evolution of the human race. Then there is the Everything Will Be OK film cycle. This is conceived as a trilogy and tells the story of Bill and his rather dull life. The humorous story turns dark as you begin to question whether he is suffering from a possibly fatal mental disorder. The second film in the trilogy is I am so proud of you and was released in 2008. The third and final chapter in the story has not yet been released.
You can find most of his films on YouTube but his website is a great source for all things Hertzfeldt – www.bitterfilms.com . I will leave you with one more link……….this one to his most recent film Wisdom Teeth. Enjoy!
UPDATE I'm kind of embarrassed that I didn't include his film "Genre" in my original post. It perfectly addresses the idea that animation can be used to tell literally any type of story. It's pretty hilarious.
Sometimes I ask myself, am I sane? Perhaps we ought to ask ourselves this question more often. Todd has asked himself this question after finding what he believes to be a Urim and Thummim in a Goodwill Store and comes up with the answer: yes. He peers into this object and seems to see visions of people (in side profile) when the light shines into it just right. As a matter of fact, he builds a light focusing device so that he doesn't have to rely on the unpredictable natural light.
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