The following notes on Don Hertzfeldt's feature-length animation It’s Such A Beautiful Day were written by Garrett Strpko, PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. Don Hertzfeldt's latest work, ME, will have its first Madison-area screening at the Cinematheque on Thursday, September 5 at 7 p.m., followed by the full-length version of It's Such a Beautiful Day. The screening, part of our Thursday night Premieres series, takes place at the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is free!

By Garrett Strpko

Those unfamiliar with the work of Don Hertzfeldt will likely be surprised just how far his seminal film, It’s Such a Beautiful Day, pushes the thematic and aesthetic limits of animation as a medium. Originally released over the course of five years as a series of short films, garnering numerous accolades and much critical acclaim along the way, the short feature follows Bill, an average, rather lonely character who learns he is suffering from some unspecified illness of the mind. As Bill’s condition worsens, it leads to embarrassing misadventures, horrifying hallucinations, and moving philosophical reflections, all depicted through Hertzfeldt’s trademark sardonic and subjective style.

Most audiences tend to associate the medium of animation with the simple themes and the creative, eye-popping design of children’s media. While Hertzfeldt’s approach is certainly no less imaginative than the likes of Disney, it embodies a simple yet often ingenious sensibility which in a certain way takes animation back to its roots: pen, paper, and camera. Traditional animation generally proceeds by photographing or digitally imposing moving figures over a static, pre-drawn background. By contrast, It’s Such a Beautiful Day was painstakingly hand-drawn on copy paper. First among the many distinctive features viewers will probably notice is the modest design of the characters and environments. Bill and his counterparts are stick figure-like. His exploits are often depicted against the pure white background, imbuing the film with a character of a doodle, like a flipbook one might have drawn on pad of sticky notes.

Hertzfeldt mixes this relatively simple design with avant-garde optical effects afforded by the 35mm rostrum animation stand on which the film was captured. The animation stand, built in the 1940s and, according to the film’s description on Vimeo, “one of the last surviving cameras of its kind still operating in the world,” allows one to not only capture images frame-by-frame against a flat surface, but also to move the camera in a variety of ways. This gave Hertzfeldt the opportunity to mix his animation with changes in camera movement, focus effects, and other unorthodox techniques. For instance, many of the film’s sequences are depicted through a peculiar ‘split-screen’ effect, in which action occurs simultaneously or sequentially in different ‘bubbles’ distributed across the frame. To achieve this, Hertzfeldt poked holes in a piece of paper, attached it directly to the lens, and lined up his drawings so that they would be framed within those holes. All these techniques combine to create an aesthetic where the materiality of animation—the crumpling of paper, the stroke of a pen, the physicality of a camera—is brought to the forefront and made a spectacle in and of itself.

Also among the film’s distinctive features is the omnipresent, omniscient third-person narration provided by none other than Hertzfeldt himself. Giving us a window into Bill’s hopes, fears, dreams, and memories, Hertzfeldt’s plain, matter-of-fact delivery is the source of much of the film’s humor and broader irony. One cannot help but laugh out of absurdity as he explains in a cool and practical tone the bizarre deaths and ailments in Bill’s family history. Despite the narration’s omniscience, it remains highly subjective; we are kept in Bill’s mind, and things are explained to us from his point of view, which, because of his illness, occasionally defies what we as the audience know to be true.

In addition to being the source of the film’s humor, the narration is also the source of its philosophical concerns. Much of the narration focuses on Bill’s inner life. Besides being surreal, his journey is also existential. His diagnosis (forever kept vague to us, and, we must assume, also to Bill) leads him to mentally explore his sense of identity. One might consider the film a sort of journey of self-discovery—or, even, self-creation. We understand from the get-go, through his unassuming, generic demeanor and appearance, that Bill is a bit of an everyman. But what makes him him? Is it his family, the people and circumstances that led to his birth? Or is it his life choices, the decisions or lack thereof that defined him and his environment? And what if his knowledge and memories of these things are not as certain as he believes? What is he or the world to make of his apparently impending death? Through a careful balance of wit, creativity, and earnestness, Hertzfeldt pushes the boundaries of what we might be used to in the medium to explore these questions with tact and humor.