Don Hertzfeldt
- 2012It's Such a Beautiful Day
- 2015World of Tomorrow
- 2000Rejected
Fed intoInternet comedy
He draws stick figures with a pen, shoots them on a 1940s animation camera, and has twice been nominated for an Oscar for it.
Hertzfeldt studied film at the University of California, Santa Barbara, graduating in 1998, and made his first shorts there. He releases his work himself, through his company Bitter Films, by touring theatres, selling home video and streaming. He has said he has never had a job other than making his films, and he has turned down advertising work.
His films are hand-drawn stick figures, first in pen on paper. From 1999 to 2011 he photographed them on a 35mm rostrum animation stand built in the late 1940s, making multiple exposures and split-screen windows in the camera. World of Tomorrow (2015) was his first digital film, drawn on a tablet. He does his own sound design, camera work and editing.
He has been nominated for the Academy Award twice, for Rejected (2000) and World of Tomorrow, and has won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for short film twice. In 2003 he and Mike Judge started The Animation Show, a touring programme of animated shorts. In 2014 he made a couch gag for The Simpsons.
Films
Where to start with Don Hertzfeldt, in the order they were made. Runtimes are approximate.
Rejected
An animator's commissioned cartoons keep getting rejected and grow more unhinged, until the paper they're drawn on crumples into a void. It was nominated for an Oscar.
It's Such a Beautiful Day
Three shorts joined into one feature, following a man named Bill as his mind comes apart. Hertzfeldt narrates, and every effect was made in the camera.
World of Tomorrow
A small girl, voiced by his four-year-old niece, is visited by an adult clone of herself from the future. It won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and was nominated for an Oscar.
Echoed in
Where Hertzfeldt's ideas turned up next.
