ME (2024)

Don Hertzfeldt’s newest animated film ME is a 22-minute musical odyssey about trauma, technology, and the retreat of humanity into itself. Indiewire has described it as “soul-shaking” and “a triumph”.

IT’S SUCH A BEAUTIFUL DAY (2012)

Returning to theaters for the first time since 2012, It’s Such a Beautiful Day has been hailed by critics and audiences alike as one of the best animated films of all time.

Originally released as three short films over the course of six years, the picture was captured entirely in-camera on a 35mm rostrum animation stand. Built in the 1940s and used by Hertzfeldt on all of his animated films since 1999, it was one of the last surviving cameras of its kind still operating in the world, indispensable in creating the story’s unique images and visual effects. It’s Such a Beautiful Day painstakingly blended traditional hand-drawn animation and experimental optical effects with new digital hybrids, printed out one frame at time and placed under the camera.

The film’s signature “split screen” effects were achieved by photographing the animation through small holes that were positioned just beneath the camera lens. One area of the film frame would be individually photographed, the film was then rewound, another section of the frame would be exposed through a different hole, and the process repeated until all elements of a scene were composited together.

Towards the end of production, the old camera’s motor began to fail and could no longer advance the film properly, riddling the final reels with unintentional light leaks.

In 2012, the three completed short films about a man named Bill were seamlessly combined to create a new feature film. Upon its original release, It’s Such a Beautiful Day was named by many critics as one of the best films of the year. The L.A. Film Critics Association named it runner-up for “Best Animated Film”.

In 2014, Time Out New York ranked It’s Such a Beautiful Day #16 on its list of the “100 Best Animated Movies Ever Made”.

In 2016, The Film Stage’s critics ranked the film #1 on their list of “The 50 Best Animated Films of the 21st Century Thus Far”.

In 2019, The Wrap named It’s Such a Beautiful Day the #1 “Best Animated Film of the 2010s”.

The same year, Vulture’s film critics ranked it #12 on their overall list of the “Best Movies of the Decade”.

In 2021, IGN’s Cinefix placed it #1 on their “Top 10 Animated Films of All Time” list.

It’s Such a Beautiful Day is currently ranked #67 on Letterboxd’s official list of the top 250 highest-rated narrative feature films of all time.

Acclaim for It’s Such a Beautiful Day

“There is a moment in each installment of Don Hertzfeldt’s masterful trilogy of animated shorts where you feel something in your chest. It’s an unmistakably cardiac event, the kind that great art can elicit when something profound and undeniably true is conveyed about the human condition. That’s when you say to yourself: are stick figures supposed to make me feel this way? In the hands of a master, yes. And Hertzfeldt is to stick figures what Franz Liszt was to planks of ebony and ivory and what Ted Williams was to a stick of white ash: someone so transcendentally expert that to describe what they do in literal terms is borderline demeaning.” – Steven Pate, The Chicagoist

“One of the great outsider artworks of the modern era, at once sympathetic and shocking, beautiful and horrifying, angry and hilarious, uplifting and almost unbearably sad.” – Tom Huddleston, Time Out New York

“Because he has worked primarily in the realm of simple line-drawing animation for darkly comic short films, Don Hertzfeldt hasn’t gotten nearly the recognition he deserves as one of the most genuinely brilliant filmmakers alive… [It’s Such a Beautiful Day] turns into an astonishing epic of the human experience with mortality and the frailty of the flesh, rendered in the combination of Hertzfeldt’s stick figures, flashes of real-world pictures and a jaw-dropping sound design.” – Scott Renshaw, SLC Weekly

“With his humor, darkness, philosophical yearning, and insistence on drawing every line himself, [Hertzfeldt] may be the only legitimate successor to Charles M. Schulz. Except for all the money and fame, of course.” – J.R. Jones, Chicago Reader

“There aren’t many films where the characters and philosophical ideas stay with you for months afterward, but this is one of them.” – Trilby Beresford, Nerdist

“A truly moving meditation on identity, family and the meaning of life… Hertzfeldt’s magnum opus.” – John DeFore, Hollywood Reporter