Cast your mind back to 2012. What was the best animated film released that year? I'll help jog your memory: no, it was not Pixar's pleasant but inferior Scottish parable Brave, even though it won an Oscar. It wasn't video game love letter Wreck-It Ralph either, even though it should have won the Oscar. "Para-Norman", I hear you chant. Nope, not even close. It wasn't Tim Burton's Frankenweenie either, although we're getting warmer. And as charming as French buddy-movie Ernest & Celestine was, it's still not the one I'm thinking of.
The best animated film released in 2012 was It's Such A Beautiful Day. Admittedly a compilation of three hand-drawn, animated shorts - Everything Will Be OK, I Am So Proud of You, and It's Such A Beautiful Day, released in 2006, 2008, and 2011 respectively - but compiled together in 2012 with enough new material to flesh it out into a 60-minute long film, it's one of the strangest, most ambitious reflections on life, death, and the universe I've ever seen. The most striking thing about it, however, is that it's all the effort of a single animator from California: Don Hertzfeldt.
"Who?"
Unlike, say, John Lasseter or Hayao Miyazaki, Hertzfeldt is not a household name, possibly because he spends most of his time in his basement carefully constructing each frame of his work. He's also not the kind of guy whose work frequents the public domain: his films' primary exposure to the world is through festival circuits, such as Sundance (where he's won the Short Film award twice) or through late-night showings on Cartoon Network.
It's equally likely, though, that if you've spent enough time on the internet - particularly YouTube - you'll have seen something by Don Hertzfeldt, even if you didn't know it. One of his most famous bits is the surreal comedy short The Animation Show, a collaboration with King of the Hill's Mike Judge that centres around two talking clouds trying to teach the audience about the endless possibilities of the animated medium. Which I suppose it does, only its inclusion of flying unicorns and psychedelic dream sequences places its appeal in the same league as Cartoon Network's Adventure Time, or the animated videos of prolific YouTube star Tom Ska - inventive, ironic flights of fantasy and randomness that are packed with enough surrealist catchphrases to satisfy the internet's primary audience of young teenagers.
But this comparison doesn't do justice to the complexity of Hertzfeldt's work, whose comedy often acts as a mask for the more disturbing aspects of his soul. Take his Oscar-nominated short Rejected, for example, which begins as a series of darkly comedic takes on commercialisation but soon develops into a Lynchian nightmare, as the wacky characters are destroyed by their own creator. Or his multi-award winning student film Billy the Balloon, where children are murdered by multicoloured, innocent-looking balloons. They're undoubtedly amusing but seem to be the products of a tortured creative mind; it should hardly be a surprise that Hertzfeldt's production company is titled "Bitter Films".
Let's return to It's Such A Beautiful Day, then. Even by Hertzfeldt's standards this is an exceptional film, which acts as both an existential cry of despair and a profound reflection on the cruel beauty of the world. I suspect much of its key appeal comes from its strange concept: Bill is a middle-aged guy who's got a brain tumour of some sort (the specifics are never revealed) that's making him somewhat forgetful. Like most of Hertzfeldt's work he's drawn as a crude stick man, whose only identifying feature is his hat. But it's to the story's credit that he feels like a fully fleshed-out character, and we explore his mind at first through his daily routine, then through flashbacks and experimental asides using colour and real photography. Uniting it all is Hertzfeldt's own narration; his dry intonation may actually be the weakest part of the film, but it's essential for constructing his unique and (I suspect) deeply personal vision.
Again, just describing the film doesn't do it justice. It's packed full of ideas and images that are so affecting you barely have time to process it all until afterwards, when you sit in stunned silence as the credits roll. The best moments come when music, image, and the story's ideas about the great and small come together in perfect harmony, such as a sequence where Bill watches rain fall on a bus window to the tune of Wagner's Das Rheingold Prelude, or in a flashback where he watches his crippled brother chase a seagull into the ocean and drown. It's a funny film, too - the aside about his family's unfortunate history with trains is a highlight - but this only serves to make the story's tragic focus on death more poignant, the narrative flights into the cosmos (Bill wants to be ejected into space after his death) more transcendent. It sounds terribly depressing, and it is, but it's also a masterpiece in the same vein as Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, a must-watch for fans of animation and its detractors alike.
And more importantly it's his masterpiece. In an age where animation is a thoroughly industrial affair, where Pixar and Disney have the ability to churn out films every other year, it's refreshing to see one man's singular talents celebrated. Don Hertzfeldt might just be one of our few real artists.
It's Such A Beautiful Day is now available on Netflix (UK) and Vimeo. His latest short film, World of Tomorrow, will be released on March 31 at bitterfilms.com. You can watch the trailer for it here.
