Simple Animation, Hard to Pin Down: Don Hertzfeldt’s Bitter Films

Using a simple style and traditional techniques, Bitter Films’ output stimulates, amuses, disturbs, and is acclaimed as genius, winning awards worldwide, as well as an Oscar® nomination.

We’re not sure, but this could qualify as an eating disorder; a scene from Don Hertzfeldt’s Rejected(2000) (copyright Bitter Films)

I have a rather shameful admission to make.

Reviewing the creative issue of Don Hertzfeldt and his enterprise, Bitter Films, as represented by the DVD Bitter Films Volume One, 1995-2005 is a hell of a lot tougher than you’d think it would be.

Don’s work isn’t something you can sum up in a short, pithy paragraph or two, because you just know, somehow, that you’re leaving something out. What is the most important thing to say–that it’s amazing that the animator can make so much happen with just a few lines, or that his dark humor tends to make you laugh despite yourself, or that, in this world, a talking banana just sort of makes some absolutely weird sense?

It has made me fall back in love with animation, an art form that I had felt was pretty much tapped out by entertaining and well-made but artistically-shallow CG blockbusters over the past decade or so.

Rejected

Perhaps the best place to start is would be with the singular short Rejected (2000). This movie, which is arguably Hertzfeldt’s most well-known work, has been posted on YouTube many times (against the artist’s wishes) and is acknowledged by the conventional wisdom as the inspiration behind a recent advertisting campaign for Kellogg’s Pop Tarts.

The film details the ordeals that a notional version of Don Hertzfeldt had in producing commercials for two corporations: interstitals for “The Family Learning Channel”, and product ads for the “Johnson & Mills” manufacturing conglomerate. The ads, featuring non-sequiturs and bizarre cartoon violence, are rejected by the companies, never to be aired. The effect of the rejection is so profound that it not only affects the animator’s output but also intrudes into the imaginary space where the animated characters themselves live, causing their world to break down into a cacophonous crumpling of animation paper, eventually ending it utter oblivion for all.

Along the way, the viewer is treated to various absurdities, including (but not limited to):

• A man stands alone, with a spoon far too large to be useful and a bowl of uneaten food at his feet, his only attempt to handle the situation being to remark thrice “My spoon is too big!” An anthrpomorphic banana enters scene-right, stating simply that it is a banana, and a vacuum starts somewhere in the background.
• Two men attempt a discussion: “Tuesday’s coming–did you bring your coat?”;”I live in a giant bucket!”. A grotesque face with two arms then suddenly sprouts from the head of the left-hand figure, growling out gibberish. The right hand figure reacts witha bleeped word. Then the attention of all three faces is arrested by a tentacled pig’s head, flying high overhead, passing with a ramject’s scream
• A figure stands in a lanscape empty but for a single “YIELD” sign. Suddently a flying saucer descends; the hatch opens with an ominous sound to allow a tentacled alien creature to emerge, who promptly plucks the figure’s eyes out and leaves, just as quickly. The figure then crosses the scene, predictably (and there are few such moments) yet ironically running into the “YIELD” sign.

The world is simply drawn but amazingly expressive. The occupants are bizarre, dada-esque, profane, and violent by turns; literal oceans of blood pour from them, and they are unaccountably blunt (”Now With More Sodium”, enthuses a small puffball creature flogging Johnson & Mills’ Fish Sticks; “Sweet Jesus!” another cries). In another scene, one figure physically rips a large hole in his companion’s side, allowing small cartoony organs to fall out, only to addtionally club the head of his injured companion until he falls to the floor with the selfsame body part, then place it atop his head, declare himself “The Queen of France”, and close the scene with a arm-wave backed up by a simple drum beat.

This strange film, to use a trite expression, took the world by storm. Premiering at the San Diego Comic Convention in 2000, it went on to be nominated for an Academy Award® in 2001, one of the lowest budgeted films ever to be so honored according to Bitter Films’ website. It has won 27 awards since then and was ranked as the third most important short film of all time by the IMDB in 2004.

Ten Years of Bitterness

Bitter Films’ existence dates from the production of Ah, L’Amour: A Bitter Film, a 1995 short done as a student project and never meant to be shown publicly; the studio’s name apparently taken from it’s very tag line. To this day, the major productions of Bitter Films number:

• Ah, L’Amour: A Bitter Film (1995)
• Genre (1996)
• Lily & Jim (1997)
• Billy’s Balloon (1999)
• Rejected (2000)
• The Meaning Of Life (2005)

Each one is remarkable not only in Don’s complete exploitation of his signature style but also in its approach to its subject–Lily & Jim being Blind Date as seen through an animator’s lens darkly; the malicious title toy in Billy’s Balloon, the long view taken of a million years in The Meaning Of Life.

Don’s creative activity isn’t limited to his films: for the last three years he’s been taking The Animation Show, a curated travelling exhibition (in cooperation with Beavis & Butthead and King of the Hill creator Mike Judge) on the road. The third edition, opening this month, includes Hertzfeldt’s latest work, Everything Will Be Okay, amongst other unusual animation from around the world

Evolution in Action

The DVD itself not only has Bitter’s five main features on but also is fairly stuffed to the gills with extras which are almost more entrancing than the features, because they are all about how the films are made; production notes, pencil tests, deleted scenes, and forgotten sketches.

The formula for one of Don’s films is deceptively simple: pencil, pen, paper, and photography, traditional methods. No computers are used; backlit films, films mounted on glass for depth and sometimes manipulated by hand whilst the camera is running, and literally tens of thousants of individual drawings create the animation; not a Pixar computer to be found anywhere.

For our interest the most valuable extra is Watching Grass Grow: Animating The Meaning of Life, which is nothing but a fast-forward of Don creating the drawings. If Don is genius, it’s accessable genius; it’s animation the way it was, not the way it is.

And somehow this allows a singularly compelling vision to manifest itself as we watch, which all goes back to what, essentially, to say about Don’s work. It’s hard, as I said to come up with a description of what to expect or to make a statement about what Bitter Films’ work so far has meant to animation in general. It certainly has made Don Hertzfeldt an important name in animation as well as generated him a deserved oyal fan following.

In the end, though, watching Don’s cartoons is an intensely personal thing. The jokes he makes are strange and sometimes very tasteless, but you find yourself laughing at them anyway; something ineffable about them causes them to move into your own head and live there, illuminating corners of your mind that you didn’t know you had and by making light of them, causing you to face something equally ineffably human about yourself.

But then, I’m probably missing something.

And, by the way, I’m strongly suggesting you get yourself this DVD. It’s an NTSC all-region DVD, it’ll cost you $24.00, and you can find it here at Bitter Films’ website.