It's Such a Beautiful Day is a 2012 American experimentalanimatedcomedy-drama film written, directed, animated, photographed, produced, and narrated by Don Hertzfeldt. It follows Bill, a stick figure who struggles with memory loss and surreal visions, among other symptoms of an unknown neurological problem.
The film employs both offbeat humor and philosophical musings. It mostly consists of stick figures with stylized real-life footage appearing in many split-screen windows that are photographed through multiple exposures. The film is divided into three chapters, all of which were originally released in theaters as animated short films: Everything Will Be OK (2006), I Am So Proud of You (2008), and It's Such a Beautiful Day (2011). The three short films collectively received over 90 film festival awards upon their original releases, including the Sundance Film Festival's Grand Prize for Everything Will Be OK.[1] In 2012, the three chapters were combined and released as a new feature film.
It's Such a Beautiful Day received widespread critical acclaim, with its experimental storytelling and surreal elements being singled out for praise.[2][3] Many listed it as one of the best films of 2012, and it has since come to be widely regarded as one of the greatest animated films of all time.[4][5][6]
Plot
Bill is a man whose daily routines, perceptions, and dreams are illustrated through multiple split-screen windows that are in turn narrated.[a] He often has meetings with his ex-girlfriend, but suffers from an unnamed illness which interferes with his seemingly mundane and uneventful life. One day, he visits his doctor, who informs him that his illness is getting worse; as the days pass, Bill's hallucinations and thoughts grow worse until he has a hallucinogenic mental breakdown and passes out in an alley.
To help him recuperate, Bill's mother comes to take care of him, but Bill mistakenly believes she is about to kill him and attacks her. He is then taken to a hospital but his health fluctuates rapidly and confuses his doctor, who concludes that Bill will not die, which surprises and inconveniences his relatives. He returns to work the following day.
A flashback to Bill's childhood features the narrator explaining the death of Bill's half-brother Randall, who ran into the sea as a child while chasing a bird. After Randall's death, Bill's mother soon became fiercely protective of Bill and rarely left home, eventually causing Bill's stepfather to leave. The narrator details the surreal history of Bill's family, many of whom suffered from mental illness and died in unpleasant ways.
A few days after leaving the hospital, Bill receives a call telling him that his mother had died in a "fit of senile hysterics". After the funeral, Bill finds a notebook where his mother practiced writing love notes to send to him when he was young. Bill again visits his doctor, who is shocked to find that nothing appears to be wrong with him. However, on his way to lunch, he suffers a seizure and collapses. During the seizure, various memories of his infancy and childhood flash before him.
Bill returns to the hospital, where his ex-girlfriend frequently visits him. His new doctor questions him, revealing that Bill cannot remember basic information about his life. After a brain exam, Bill is asked various questions and shown photographs that appear irregular or nonsensical. His doctor explains that Bill is having trouble understanding past tense and present tense, and it is implied that many of his childhood memories and family history could have been confabulated.
Bill is allowed to go home for family care, but he arrives home to find no one there. He starts to repeat and then forget various tasks, such as buying food and going for walks, and he does not seem to understand that he is ill. His doctor eventually explains that he does not have long to live. Bill's outlook on life undergoes a stark change, such as noticing more of life's small details. This change is complemented by the film's animation style, with full-color photography of real-life images being merged into the animated scenery.
Bill rents a car and starts driving, only to find that his instinct has taken him to his childhood home. His uncle gives him the location of a nursing home where Bill can find his real father, whom he has not seen since childhood. After spending time with his father, Bill forgives him and leaves to continue driving. Feeling his health deteriorating further, Bill stops to lie under a tree, and the screen cuts to black.
Realizing that Bill will almost certainly die under the tree, the narrator instead decides to describe a different outcome: Bill becomes immortal, accomplishes many wonderful achievements, and outlives humanity and all of the earth's future inhabitants. He survives until the death of the universe, looking up at the stars as they disappear one by one.
Production
Six years in the making, the completed film was captured entirely in-camera on a 35 mm rostrum animation stand. Built in the 1940s and used by Hertzfeldt on every project since 1999, it was one of the last surviving cameras of its kind. The film blended traditional hand-drawn animation, experimental optical effects, trick photography, and digital hybrids that were printed for photography one frame at a time.[2]
The film's signature split-screen effect was achieved by framing the drawn animation through tiny holes placed beneath the camera lens during photography, with each element in the film frame individually composited through careful multiple exposures.[2] Towards the end of production of the final chapter, the old camera's motor began to fail and it could no longer advance the film properly, riddling the final footage with unintentional light leaks.[2]
Release
The three chapters of the film were originally produced and released theatrically as three animated short films.
The first installment, Everything Will Be OK, was released in 2006 and won the 2007 Sundance Film Festival Grand Prize for Short Film. Despite the film's short running length, Variety film critic Robert Koehler named Everything Will Be OK one of the "Best Films of 2007".[7] The film was extremely well received by critics, describing it as "essential viewing" and "simply one of the finest shorts produced over the past few years, be it animated or not".[8][9]The Boston Globe called the film a "masterpiece" with the Boston Phoenix declaring Hertzfeldt a genius.[9] The short film was a cover story on the Chicago Reader, receiving four stars from critic J.R. Jones.[10]
Everything Will Be OK advanced to the final round of voting for Best Animated Short Film at the 2007 Academy Awards, but did not make the final list of five nominees.[11]
Outside of theaters, Everything Will Be OK was first released as a limited edition DVD "single" in 2007. The DVD featured an extensive "archive" of over 100 pages of deleted scenes, Hertzfeldt's production notes, sketches, and layouts, as well as a hidden Easter egg that plays an alternate, narration-free version of the film to highlight the sound design.[12]
The second installment, I Am So Proud of You, was released theatrically in 2008. It continued the dark and philosophical humor of the first film, seeing Bill's recovery haunted by the apparently genetic inevitability of his mental illness, the lack of control over his own fate, and the sudden death of a loved one. The short suggests "simultaneous" connections throughout time, through his strange family history, his childhood, the present, and his old age.
For the first time, Hertzfeldt embarked on a solo tour with the film, presenting a special "Evening with Don Hertzfeldt" program in multiple cities.[13]
I Am So Proud of You received similar critical praise and received 27 film festival awards, including the Grand Jury Prize at the Florida Film Festival and the Golden Starfish at the Hamptons Film Festival.[14]
Director David Lowery wrote that the film is "as good a pick as any for film of the year... full of grand and complex thoughts about life and death and bodily fluids and years rapidly advancing, coming to ends and beginnings, back and forth, over and over, until one slips indistinguishably into the next".[15] Chris Robinson, author and director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival, described I Am So Proud of You as a masterpiece.[16]
Following its theatrical release, a DVD "single" of I Am So Proud of You was released in August 2009, featuring another extensive "archive" of production materials.[17]
The final chapter of the trilogy, It's Such a Beautiful Day, was released in 2011, winning several awards, including a Special Jury Prize from the Hiroshima Animation Festival.[18] In 2011 and 2012, Hertzfeldt again toured the United States and Canada to support the final chapter in another "Evening with Don Hertzfeldt" program.[19] While this theatrical program presented all three of the short films together for the first time, it still presented them as individual shorts, not yet as a unified feature film.
The final, unified feature film version, It's Such a Beautiful Day, shared the same title as the third short film and had a limited theatrical release in 2012. It was nominated for Best Animated Feature Film by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.[20] It subsequently became available on DVD,[20] Vimeo On-Demand,[21]iTunes,[21] and streamed for a two-year period on Netflix.
In 2015, the film was remastered and released on Blu-ray.[22] In 2021, the film was released on the Criterion Channel.
Re-release
In 2024, It's Such a Beautiful Day was re-released to theaters for the first time since 2012, paired with the release of Hertzfeldt's newest animated short film ME.[23]
Reception and legacy
Hertzfeldt received critical acclaim for the film
It's Such a Beautiful Day received widespread critical acclaim; it is regarded as one of the best films of 2012 and among the best animated films of all time. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of perfect 100% based on 33 reviews, with an average rating of 8.4/10. The website's critical consensus calls the film "an impossibly dense and affecting piece of animated art".[24]Metacritic gives the film a weighted average rating of 90 out of 100, based on reviews from 7 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[25]
Upon its original release, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association voted it runner-up for Best Animated Feature Film of the year, behind Frankenweenie.[2]IndieWire ranked Hertzfeldt the 9th best Film Director of the Year in its annual poll (tied with Wes Anderson),[1][26] and film critics for The A.V. Club ranked the film No. 8 on their list of the Best Films of 2012.[27]Slate named It's Such a Beautiful Day their pick for Best Animated Feature Film of 2012.[20]
In the UK, the film was ranked third on Time Out London's list of the 10 Best Films of 2013 and fourth on The London Film Review's list of the same. In 2014, Time Out ranked It's Such a Beautiful Day at No. 16 on their list of the "100 Best Animated Movies Ever Made". Critic Tom Huddleston described it as "one of the great outsider artworks of the modern era, at once sympathetic and shocking, beautiful and horrifying, angry and hilarious, uplifting and almost unbearably sad".[4]
In 2016, The Film Stage critics ranked the film first on their list of the "Best Animated Films of the 21st Century (So Far)".[28] That same year, three critics polled by the BBC named It's Such a Beautiful Day one of the greatest films made since 2000.[29]
In 2019, The Wrap named It's Such a Beautiful Day the "Best Animated Film of the 2010s".[30]Vulture film critics also ranked it at No. 12 on their overall list of the "Best Movies of the Decade".[31] In 2021, IGN's CineFix gave it the top spot on their "Top 10 Animated Films of All Time" list.[5]
Steven Pate of The Chicagoist wrote of the film, "There is a moment in each installment of Don Hertzfeldt's masterful trilogy of animated shorts where you feel something in your chest. It's an unmistakably cardiac event that great art can elicit when something profound and undeniably true is conveyed about the human condition. That's when you say to yourself: are stick figures supposed to make me feel this way? In the hands of a master, yes. And Hertzfeldt is to stick figures what Franz Liszt was to planks of ebony and ivory and what Ted Williams was to a stick of white ash: someone so transcendentally expert that to describe what they do in literal terms is borderline demeaning."[32]
Mike McCahill of The Guardian called it "funny, oddly affecting and cherishably personal" and said that "in a better world, this would be on 300 screens, and filler such as The Croods would have to be smuggled in under the radar".[33] Paul Bradshaw of Total Film called it "an existential flip book and a heartbreaking black joke: stickmen have never looked so alive".[34] Glenn Heath Jr. of Little White Lies gave it a 5/5 score and called it "one of the great films about memory, perspective, and past history".[35]
Toy Story is a 1995 American animated adventure comedy film produced by Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures. It is the first installment in the Toy Story franchise, the first entirely computer-animated feature film, as well as the first feature film from Pixar. The film was directed by John Lasseter, written by Joss Whedon, Andrew Stanton, Joel Cohen, and Alec Sokolow based on a story by Lasseter, Stanton, Pete Docter, and Joe Ranft, produced by Bonnie Arnold and Ralph Guggenheim, and features the voices of Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Annie Potts, John Ratzenberger, Don Rickles, Wallace Shawn, and Jim Varney.
Shark Tale is a 2004 American animated comedy film produced by DreamWorks Animation SKG and distributed by DreamWorks Pictures. The film was directed by Vicky Jenson, Bibo Bergeron, and Rob Letterman, from a screenplay written by Letterman and Michael J. Wilson. The film features the voices of Will Smith, Robert De Niro, Renée Zellweger, Angelina Jolie, Jack Black, and Martin Scorsese. It tells the story of an underachieving fish named Oscar (Smith) who falsely claims to have killed the son of a shark mob boss Don Lino in an attempt to advance his community standing. Oscar teams up with the mobster's younger son Lenny (Black) to keep up the facade.
Ah, L'Amour is Don Hertzfeldt's first 16mm student animated short film, completed at the age of 18 at UC Santa Barbara. Though produced for a beginning film class and never meant to be exhibited, the short had a long life at animation festivals, launching Hertzfeldt into cult status at a young age. In 1998, the short won the Grand Prize Award for "World's Funniest Cartoon" from the HBO U.S. Comedy Arts Festival.
The Animation Show is a touring festival of animated short films that was first held in fall 2003. It was sponsored by MTV, and was created by award-winning animators Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt.
Rejected is an animated surrealist short comedy film directed by Don Hertzfeldt that was released in 2000. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film the following year at the 73rd Academy Awards, and received 27 awards from film festivals around the world.
Billy's Balloon is a 16 mm animated short by Don Hertzfeldt. It was his fourth and final student film at UC Santa Barbara. Similar to his other cartoons, he uses a minimalist stick-figure technique.
The Annie Awards are accolades which the Los Angeles branch of the International Animated Film Association, ASIFA-Hollywood, has presented each year since 1972 to recognize excellence in animation shown in American cinema and television. Originally designed to celebrate lifetime or career contributions to animation, the award has been given to individual works since 1992.
The Big Snit is a 1985 animated short film written and directed by Richard Condie and produced by the National Film Board of Canada.
Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer is a 1984 Japanese animated fantasy comedy film produced by Kitty Films and distributed by Toho. It is the second film in the Urusei Yatsura film series based on the manga of the same name by Rumiko Takahashi. In the film, a group of Japanese high school students including Lum and Ataru prepare for the annual school cultural festival and begin to question the reality around them after a series of perplexing events. The film experimented with concepts such as a time loop, dreams, and simulated reality, in departure from the previous film Only You which was more faithful to Takahashi's original manga and anime series.
Hair High is a 2004 American adult animated horror romantic comedy film by American filmmaker Bill Plympton. The film is a spoof of late-1950s and early-1960s high school films.
Das Rad meaning "The Wheel" is a 2001 German animated short film written and directed by Chris Stenner, Arvid Uibel and Heidi Wittlinger. Produced using a mixture of stop-motion, puppetry, and CGI animation, it was nominated for an Oscar in "Best Animated Short Film", but lost to The ChubbChubbs!
Genre is a 1996 animated meta-comedy short film by animator Don Hertzfeldt, his second 16mm student film, produced at the age of 19.
The Meaning of Life is a 35mm animated short film, written and directed by Don Hertzfeldt in 2005. The twelve-minute film is the result of almost four years of production and tens of thousands of drawings, single-handedly paper animated and photographed by Hertzfeldt.
The Pebble and the Penguin is a 1995 American independent animated musical comedy-adventure film directed by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman. The film stars the voices of Martin Short, Jim Belushi, Tim Curry, and Annie Golden. Based on the true life mating rituals of the Adélie penguins in Antarctica, the film focuses on a timid, stuttering penguin named Hubie who tries to impress a beautiful penguin named Marina by giving her a pebble that fell from the sky and keep her from the clutches of an evil penguin named Drake who wants Marina for himself.
Shane Richard Acker is an American animator, film director, screenwriter and animation teacher known for directing 9, which is based on his 2005 Academy Award-nominated short film of the same title. He is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles.
Don Hertzfeldt is an American animator, writer, and independent filmmaker. He is a two-time Academy Award nominee who is best known for the animated films It's Such a Beautiful Day, the World of Tomorrow series, ME, and Rejected. In 2014, his work appeared on The Simpsons. Eight of his short films have competed at the Sundance Film Festival, a festival record. He is also the only filmmaker to have won the Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize for Short Film twice.
Dick Figures: The Movie is a 2013 independent American adult animated fantasy action-adventure comedy film produced by Remochoso and Six Point Harness and distributed by Mondo Media. It is based on the animated web series Dick Figures. The film was written and directed by Ed Skudder and Zack Keller and produced by Nick Butera and Andy Fiedler. Skudder and Keller star as Red and Blue, two best friends and polar opposites who set out on a journey to find the Great Sword of Destiny for the Raccoon in order to save their friendship, Pink's birthday, and the world from Lord Takagami. It also features the voices of Eric Bauza, Ben Tuller, Shea Carter, Mike Nassar, Chad Quandt, and Lauren K. Sokolov.
The Red Turtle is a 2016 animated fantasy drama film directed by Dutch animator Michaël Dudok de Wit who co-wrote the film with French screenwriter Pascale Ferran. The film is an international co-production between Japanese anime company Studio Ghibli and several French companies, including Wild Bunch and Belvision. The film, which has no dialogue, tells the story of a man who becomes shipwrecked on an uninhabited island where his attempts at escape are repeatedly thwarted by a red turtle.
World of Tomorrow is a series of animated science fiction short films written, directed, produced, animated, and edited by Don Hertzfeldt.
Arthouse animation is a combination of art film and animated film.
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