"You will only get older."

You have an hour to spare. I know you have an hour to spare. Please, please, PLEASE make this film that hour. It's one of the most amazing and gorgeous things I've ever seen. One of the most unbelievable and meaningful and important experiences that a human being can have with a work of cinema, and if you disagree with me, then I can only say that I respect your opinion but I'm also sorry that you didn't get out of this beauty what I got out of it. Right now, I feel the same way that I felt after watching Lilja 4-Ever the first time: completely, emotionally paralyzed... and also filled with joy for…

“You are forgiven.”

In the Man’s fortieth year, the braincloud overwhelmed him. It had always been there in one way or another, little grey puffs on his mind’s periphery. Diffuse misanthropy. Awkward social interactions. Strained interpersonal relations. Memories of things that may not have happened. Demons haunting the corners of his mind.

Now they were his mind. Animals clawing at his being. The smell of burning toast. The sound of waves crashing on a beach. His ex-girlfriend with the head of a wildebeest. The doctor read the Man many test results, full of long words and the most existentially insulting uses of “positive” imaginable. He did not know what it all meant, except that his days were numbered. But that…

99/100

Don Hertzfeldt, if it was up to me, would be as highly regarded and known as other contemporary film masters such as Paul Thomas Anderson, Michael Haneke, and Terrence Malick. Sadly, even with his relatively continuous filmography since the late-1990s, it still feels that viewers are distant when it comes to his oeuvre of melancholic stick-figures and surrealistic mayhem.

The animation style is definitely a component, as I've tried to show Hertzeldt's It's Such a Beautiful Day to many people and most of the responses relate back to those Pop Tart commercials. His styling and the "at first glance" look of his work is rough, to be sure, but what's within is more than worth diving into. Even his…

99

I remember watching her. In particular, I remember watching her watch the road. She'd sit on the end of the couch at attention: distant, but alert to each car or passerby. The joys of life intersecting at one specific point in an endless sea of interactions - the street by my house was a portal to a final curtain-call, and a canvas for reflection. She'd say, "there, there, there he is!" I've been waiting for him to come home." It wasn't him. Her husband, and my grandfather, died ten-years prior. She clung to fabrics of memories drifting past, and he was always in them, and he was always the one coming home. Floating up to the front of the…

Don Hertzfeldt’s first feature film is comprised of three separate shorts - Everything will be OK, I Am So Proud of You and It's Such a Beautiful Day - yet this is very much a singular and beautifully realised story about a stick figure named Bill and his existential crisis after being diagnosed with an unidentified terminal illness. Hertzfeldt is a unique filmmaker with a very distinctive voice and this collated trilogy is his greatest achievement yet.

It’s Such a Beautiful Day shares the surreal wit of Hertzfeldt’s earlier shorts (Rejected etc.) but his scope has broadened as he attempts to tackle weightier and more profound issues of life, death and self. Yet whilst his trademark absurdist humour may not…