Don Hertzfeldt

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Don Hertzfeldt
Don Hertzfeldt at his animation desk, during production of "The Meaning of Life"
Born	August 1, 1976 Fremont, California
Nationality	American
Field	Independent film, Animation
Training	University of California, Santa Barbara
Famous works	Billy's Balloon, Rejected, Everything Will Be OK
Influenced by	Stanley Kubrick, Monty Python, David Lynch
Awards	2001 Academy Award nominee 1998 Palm D'Or nominee: Cannes Film Festival 2007 Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking: Sundance Film Festival winner of over 100 other film festival awards

Don Hertzfeldt (born August 1, 1976) is the creator of many short animated films, including the Academy-Award nominated cult favorite "Rejected". Collectively, his animated films have received over one hundred awards and have been featured in over a thousand film festivals and venues world-wide. His films have already been the subject of several career retrospectives.

The popularity of his work is unprecedented in the history of independent animation and his films are frequently quoted and referenced in pop culture.

1 Filmography
2 Early life and education
3 Career in Animation
4 "The Animation Show"
5 Major Awards and Honors
6 DVD Release
7 View on Commercials/Controversy
8 References
9 External links

[edit] Filmography

Ah, L'Amour (1995)
Genre (1996)
Lily and Jim (1997)
Billy's Balloon (1998)
Rejected (2000)
Welcome to the Show/Intermission in the Third Dimension/The End of the Show (cartoons created to book-end the first Animation Show)
The Meaning of Life (2005)
Everything Will Be OK (2006)

[edit] Early life and education

Hertzfeldt was born in Fremont, California where he attended local schools and drew comic books. At 15, he began to teach himself animation with a small video camera.^[1] From a 2001 interview, Don says: "i watched films relentlessly growing up, and was fascinated by visual effects. my family used to make outings to animation festivals in san francisco every year, so credit my parents for that. i ended up seeing all of those classic [independent] cartoons throughout my teenage years. but animation production for me sort of just happened as a by-product. i've been drawing things and writing things all my life, and animating my stories was always cheaper to do and looked more interesting than low budget live action."^[2]

He is a Film Studies graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara. He lives in Santa Barbara, California and has to date produced all his films there.

[edit] Career in Animation

Hertzfeldt's films often feature hand-drawn stick figures acting out dadaist combinations of slapstick, absurd, and black humor along with heavier existential themes. Hertzfeldt usually creates his films with traditional pen and paper animation, without the aid of computers. Instead he uses 16mm or 35mm film cameras and often employs old-fashioned special effect techniques such as multiple exposures, in-camera mattes, and experimental photography (seen to large effect in titles such as The Meaning of Life, and Everything will be OK. This lends a more organic feel to his works, most evident in occasional stop-motion animation sequences (as in Intermission in the Third Dimension), as well as in the use of the celluloid and drawing mediums themselves as part of the visuals (as in Rejected and Genre).

Since 1999, Hertzfeldt has photographed all his films to date on an antique 35mm Richardson animation camera stand, believed to be the same camera that photographed many of the early Peanuts cartoons in the 1960's and 70's.^[3]. It is reportedly one of the last remaining functioning cameras of its kind left in America (if not the world), but Hertzfeldt finds it to be a crucial element in the creation of his films and their unique effects.^[4].

His films are regularly found in film festivals around the world, touring animation programs like the Animation Show, and on DVD collections. The cartoons are also featured occasionally on television. MTV, Bravo, Sundance Channel, IFC, and the Cartoon Network are a few of the channels that have carried his work internationally and in the USA. In 1998, Hertzfeldt's shorts "Lily and Jim" and "Genre" appeared on MTV's Cartoon Sushi. The Sundance Channel featured "Lily and Jim" in 1999. In November 2005, "Billy's Balloon" and "Intermission in the Third Dimension" were aired on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block. In January 2007, "Billy's Balloon" and "Intermission in the Third Dimension" were featured on MTV2. Rejected has yet to air on American television, despite being his most popular work to date. The short was scheduled to air on Adult Swim in 2001 but was cancelled for mysterious reasons 48 hours before the premiere, and after the network had spent a week promoting it. The film has since aired a number of times without incident on international channels.

The wide popularity of his films has led to a countless number of online video bootlegs, bringing Hertzfeldt's material to an audience of millions. His production company, Bitter Films, has never placed any of these films online themselves and while they "are not interested in harassing fans", Don is reportedly unhappy with the very poor quality of these video versions, as well as the fact that the bootlegs are frequently re-edited, uncredited, or remixed.^[5].

In 2005, Hertzfeldt wrote and illustrated a short piece called, Dance of the Sugar Plums (or, Last Month on Earth) for the second volume of the graphic novel anthology, Flight. His comic was entirely created on Post-It notes in pencil, with each Post-It faithfully reprinted life-size in the book, over a black background.

Hertzfeldt's most recently completed film, Everything Will Be OK, is partially based on his short-lived 1999 comic strip, Temporary Anesthetics. The film premiered unannounced at the Nevada City Film Festival in October 2006, where it won the Jury Award for Best Film. In 2007, Everything Will Be OK received the Jury Award for Short Filmmaking at the Sundance Film Festival^[6] and the Lawrence Kasdan Award for Best Narrative Film at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, among others.

According to Hertzfeldt's production journal, Everything Will Be OK is intended to be the first chapter of a three-part story, and he is currently animating the second chapter.

Hertzfeldt prefers to not sell any of his original or production artwork. Instead, through Bitter Films in the late 90's and early 00's, he annually auctioned pieces off online to raise thousands of dollars for local Santa Barbara charities. Other original artwork has been occasionally given away through the Bitter Films online store through special promotions. Because Hertzfeldt also rarely does signings, his artwork is very rare for animation collectors or casual fans to own.

In 2007, Hertzfeldt accepted an invitation from the George Eastman House's motion picture archives to indefinitely store and preserve the historically important original film elements and camera negatives to his collected work from 1995-2005.

[edit] "The Animation Show"

In 2003, Hertzfeldt created The Animation Show with Beavis and Butt-head creator Mike Judge, a semi-annual North American touring festival that brings independent animated short films to more movie theaters than any distributor in history. The program is personally curated by Hertzfeldt and Judge. A second Animation Show edition toured throughout 2005, featuring Hertzfeldt's short film The Meaning of Life and films by animators like Peter Cornwell and Georges Schwizgebel. The third season of The Animation Show began its nationwide release in January 2007, featuring new work by animators Joanna Quinn, Mike Judge, and Bill Plympton, as well as Hertzfeldt's own Everything Will Be OK. A stated goal of The Animation Show is to regularly "free the work of these independent artists from the dungeons of Internet exhibition", and bring them into proper movie theaters where most of these short films were meant to be seen. The Animation Show has also launched a DVD series of animated short films, though the content often varies from the annual theatrical programs.

[edit] Major Awards and Honors

In 1998, Billy's Balloon was nominated for the Short Film Palm D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, where Hertzfeldt was the youngest director in competition.

In 2000 the animator's fifth major film, Rejected, was nominated for the Academy Award for Animated Short Film.

In 2001, Hertzfeldt was named by Filmmaker Magazine as one of the "Top 25 Filmmakers to Watch".

According to the animation industry website Cartoon Brew, Everything Will Be OK advanced to the final round of voting as a contender for a 2007 Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short, but did not make the ultimate list of five nominees.

In January 2007, Everything Will Be OK won the Jury Award for Short Filmmaking at the Sundance Film Festival.

Collectively, Hertzfeldt's work has received over one hundred film festival awards. A list of individual awards for each film can be viewed on his website.

[edit] DVD Release

Bitter Films Volume One: 1995-2005

An exhaustive DVD collection of all of Hertzfeldt's films from 1995 to 2005 was released in 2006. The short films were remastered and restored in high definition from the original film negatives. The DVD was self-produced and released by Bitter Films, and made available only to fans via the http://www.bitterfilms.com website.

The DVD marked the first time his student films such as Genre and Lily and Jim were made widely available to the public - many of these works were only previously found on limited-release VHS collections of animated shorts, long out of print.

The special features for "Bitter Films Volume One: 1995-2005" include:

The documentary, Watching Grass Grow: Animating "The Meaning of Life"
The Animation Show Trilogy cartoons
"Lily and Jim" deleted dialogues and outtakes
"Rejected" trivia captions
"The Meaning of Life" special effects audio commentary
An extensive 140+ page "Archive" section, featuring rare footage from Hertzfeldt's earliest cartoons, original pencil tests, deleted sequences, abandoned footage, and sketch to scene comparisons
"Lily and Jim" reunion commentary with the original voice actors
"Rejected" audio commentary
Preview of Everything Will Be OK
"The Animation Show" interviews with Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt
"Ah, L'Amour" bonus 2005 soundtrack
16 page retrospective booklet, featuring liner notes by Hertzfeldt
Original animated menus and transitions

The first 750 pre-orderers of the DVD received an "exclusive mystery gift": either a 35mm clipping from Rejected that was autographed by Don, or a unique drawing by Don on a Post-it note.

In 2001, Bitter Films released a limited edition DVD "single" of the popular short Rejected, and a similar 2007 "single" release of Everything Will Be OK is said to be in the works.

[edit] View on Commercials/Controversy

Hertzfeldt has been offered numerous lucrative commercial deals, including one from Cingular Wireless. However, he has turned all of these offers down, as he personally feels that commercials are "lies", and feels that he should not lie to his audience - this was stated in the caption "commentary" of Rejected on the Bitter Films Vol. 1 DVD. Hertzfeldt has promised his fans many times that he'll never have anything to do with making a commercial. ^[5]. Nevertheless, several national ad campaigns have borrowed heavily from his unique style and bear enough resemblance to Hertzfeldt's work as to be mistaken for it.

The most well-known instance of this was a series of 2004-2006 television ads for Kellogg's Pop-Tarts, which used black and white stick figures, "squiggly" animation, surreal humor, and even an occasional crumpling paper effect, all very similar to Hertzfeldt's style. Despite these similarities, Hertzfeldt was not involved in any way. It is unclear how much the Kellogg Company was intentionally trying to mimic his style, or if all these similarities are purely coincidental.