Don Hertzfeldt is an American animator whose work, while not widely known among the general public, has been hugely influential throughout the 21st century. He stands as one on animation’s (and independent film in general’s) most singular and daring directors of all time.
We’ve collected and ranked each of his major works, though it should be noted that even the films on the bottom of this ranking are major triumphs, and might even be the best place for those new to Hertzfeldt’s work to begin, with their shorter run-times and more straightforward premises. There is no ‘worst’ Hertzfeldt film.
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8 Wisdom Teeth
Bitter Films
Wisdom Teeth is a short, five-minute cartoon that Hertzfeldt completed and premiered, unannounced, at the Ottawa Animation Festival. The film would later screen at the Sundance Film Festival and eventually be aired on Showtime as a part of an animated series called Short Stories.
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The film is simple and fast-paced, a great distillation of the things that make Hertzfeldt’s work unique. Two friends meet and briefly discuss one’s trip to the dentist, before the second requests to remove the stitches in his mouth. When the first character agrees to this, the cartoon races to its gruesome but endearing conclusion.
The strange straightforwardness of the premise and the exaggerated simplicity of Hertzfeldt’s animation style leaves the viewer unprepared for how powerful and profound these short films can be. Wisdom Teeth, in just a few lines and just a few minutes, puts forward a total redefinition of intimacy and friendship.
7 Rejected
2000’s Rejected was released in 2000 and nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. The film is a satire on advertising and commercialism, both as applied to the world of animation and beyond, and a good explanation of how Hertzfeldt has avoided the compromises that might have given him more mainstream success and exposure.
The film is composed of four sections of supposed advertisements, for the fictional “Family Learning Channel” and “Johnson & Mills Corporation,” before finally deteriorating into darkly surreal scenarios, morbidly inhuman characters, and gibberish dialogue. This provides Hertzfeld with a premise that allows him to push beyond the boundaries of what’s acceptable in animation. If these animations are “rejected,” then the outlandishness they contain is ironically permitted.
In place of beautiful or sophisticated drawing, punchy dialogue, or complex plots, Rejected is filled with images that become increasingly simple and crude. And while it’s clear from Rejected why Hertzfeldt never sought nor found employment in advertising, in shunning the polished veneer of 21st century animation, he became able to aim for deeper, more thoughtful and moving territory.
6 The Meaning of Life
Bitter Films
In 2005, Hertzfeldt would make The Meaning of Life, a 12-minute animated short shot on 35mm film. Despite its brevity, the film took almost four years and thousands of hand-drawn images, each drawn and photographed by Hertzfeldt himself, to complete. All that time and effort paid off, as The Meaning of Life looks and feels like nothing anyone else has ever made.
Working entirely on paper and in-camera, without recourse to computers or other digital tools, The Meaning of Life is filled with special effects achieved through trick photography, double or multiple exposures, and innovative lighting, all captured with an antique 35mm camera.
The film is a great encapsulation of what makes Hertzfeldt’s films so unique. Deliberately shunning modern technology in order to achieve something idiosyncratic, deeply personal and deeply unique, investing enormous amounts of time and energy into something shorter than most Bugs Bunny cartoons, has allowed him to carve out a place not only in the world of independent animation, but in the history of animation and film itself.
5 World of Tomorrow Episode Two: The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts
The second of three time and universe-spanning short films, The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts finds Emily Prime, a little girl from the first World of Tomorrow film, encountering a time traveler who happens to be a backup copy of Emily’s own adult clone. This clone, known as Emily 6, is in the midst of an existential crisis, confused about her own identity and place in the world.
As Emily 6 attempts to replace her own mind with Emily Prime’s, using a faulty artificial intelligence program, the movie becomes a gorgeous and mind-bending meditation on what it means to be alive, to be human, and to be here, now. Blending Hertzfeldt’s elegant and simple line animations with glorious computer-generated backgrounds, it recontextualizes the impact of the animation style itself, suggesting a future in which, to hang on to ourselves in a sea of artificial minds, we need to recognize and embrace what is most strange, unique, and fundamentally ours inside of us.
4 World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime
In the final chapter of Hertzfeldt’s World of Tomorrow series, Emily meets another backup clone. This one, Emily 9, enters the room of an infant named David, implanting a brief transmission in his brain that he will receive later in life.
This transmission informs David that Emily 9 has a copy of the memories of a future clone of David, and she doesn’t want these to be lost. Like the rest of the World of Tomorrow series, The Absent Destinations of David Prime uses its intellectual sci-fi premise to engage with complex philosophical ideas that are as old as time. The proliferation of clones and copies of clones, each with memories that may or may not be unique and which may or may not be transferable raises thorny questions about what makes us who we are, and how we know.
3 It’s Such a Beautiful Day
It’s Such a Beautiful Day is a 2012 film compiled from earlier shorts (It’s Such a Beautiful Day, Everything Will Be Okay, and I Am So Proud of You) about a man named Bill whose mundane life is riven through with symptoms of a mysterious illness that makes normal life seemingly impossible for him.
As Bill’s illness progresses and he begins to take more notice of life’s small details, the film, too, transforms. Hertzfeldt incorporated full-color photography into the films already dazzling blend of hand-drawn animation and computerized backdrops. The seamlessness with which Hertzfeldt merges his thematic concerns with his aesthetic ones is strikingly elegant, and it marks It’s Such a Beautiful Day as a triumph of the style and approach he’d been developing for over a decade.
As the story draws toward its heartbreaking conclusion, the film itself seems to revive Bill, to grant him something that seems an awful lot like immortality. Time, particularly these kinds of inconceivably long spans of time, is a central concern of Hertzfeldt’s, both in It’s Such a Beautiful Day and elsewhere, and here the role played by art in confronting the vast endlessness of time becomes clear.
2 The World of Tomorrow
Taking off from the stylistic innovations of It’s Such a Beautiful Day, The World of Tomorrow introduces us to Emily Prime and the multiple clones, backup clones, and copied consciousnesses that the rest of the series would explore in more depth. The film sets up the idea that the human mind contains a vastness and incomprehensibility that is on par with the depths of space or the endlessness of time.
Hertzfeldt approaches this boundless complexity by embracing contradiction. His animations are famously crude, but they move with an easy, disarming elegance that is evidence of the time and care put into making them. These child-like drawings and child-like characters are dwarfed by the towering minimalist computer animations that populate the background of the film. Likewise, Emily’s brief life stretches out toward infinity, and in 26 minutes Hertzfeldt accomplishes more than countless multi-film science fiction epics. The short and long, young and immortal, human and computer, are all resolved into a singularly beautiful film that itself now likely belongs to the ages.
1 Bonus: The Simpsons “Clown in the Dumps” Couch Gag
20th Television
Long-time Simpsons showrunner Al Jean has said that broadcasting Hertzfeldt’s staggering couch gag to launch the series 26th season was “the most insane thing we’ve ever done,” and it’s hard to argue with him.
Meg Shields at Film School Rejects points out that “Hertzfeldt was likely working on World of Tomorrow around the same time he created the couch gag for the 553rd episode of The Simpsons,” and it shows. Hertzfeldt beams the iconic Simpson family into the endlessness of his own boundary-breaking films. As the Simpsons become immortal and begin morphing horrifically to fit the awful events transpiring in the world around them, they eventually become The Sampsans, mindless catchphrase-spouting mutants. If anything, this couch gag is the strongest evidence yet why The Simpsons should probably end before it’s too late.
