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.
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