RejectedInternet comedy
My spoon is too big
Pirated copies of Rejected spread across the early web, and its lines became catchphrases of the era's deadpan, surreal humour.
Hand-drawn animation
Animation drawn by hand, picture by picture, with the drawing itself left visible on screen.
Hand-drawn animation goes back at least to Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur, from 1914. Studios later streamlined it with cels and assembly lines. Independent animators often return to pencil and paper, and let the line wobble and breathe.
Don Hertzfeldt's stick figures and Jim Trainor's marker drawings on typing paper look simple. Both men leave the roughness in on purpose, and the wobble is part of what the films mean.
Films to start with
In the order they were made. Runtimes are approximate.
Still from The Bats to come. The Bats
A mock nature documentary. A bat born in a cave near a Mayan temple learns to echolocate and lives through sexual and metaphysical discoveries to the end of his life.
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.
Where it led
Lines from these films into work you may already know.
RejectedNearby
Movements, forms and techniques that share filmmakers or methods with this one.