It's Such a Beautiful Day
2012 · Don Hertzfeldt
For when you want a film to chew on for days and don't mind being emotionally ambushed — a short commitment with an enormous aftertaste. Challenge dressed as comfort.
What it's about
Bill is a stick figure in a hat, and his mind is coming apart. Assembled from three of Don Hertzfeldt's self-financed shorts, this hour-long feature follows Bill through doctor's visits, family history, and increasingly unreliable memory as illness reshapes how he sees his ordinary days. It starts as absurdist comedy about mundane life and drifts, without ever announcing the turn, into a meditation on memory, inherited illness, and death.
The experience
You'll laugh hard at deadpan non sequiturs and then find yourself gutted, sometimes within the same sentence of narration. It's an hour that feels vast — strange, funny, and quietly shattering, the kind of film that rearranges your afternoon.
Performances
Hertzfeldt's own flat, affectless narration is the film's true lead performance — the calm voice reading catastrophe like a weather report is what makes it devastating.
The craft
The drawings are willfully crude; everything around them is virtuosic. Hertzfeldt shot on one of the last working antique 35mm animation cameras, building split-screens, floating vignettes, and photographic superimpositions in-camera with hand-cut mattes and multiple exposures, so the film flickers and breathes like something recovered from an attic. Watch it in the dark with good sound — the texture is the point.
Why it matters
A landmark of independent animation, proof that one person with a camera stand could make something as formally ambitious as any studio feature, and the film that cemented Hertzfeldt's cult from festival shorts into a devoted following.
Reception & legacy: how It's Such a Beautiful Day was received, argued over, and remembered →
Don Hertzfeldt assembled this hour-long feature from three self-financed shorts — Everything Will Be OK, I Am So Proud of You, and the title film — following Bill, a stick figure in a hat whose mind is coming apart. The drawings are willfully crude; everything surrounding them is virtuosic. Hertzfeldt shot on an antique 35mm animation camera, one of the last of its kind still working, building his split-screens, floating vignettes, and photographic superimpositions in-camera with hand-cut mattes and multiple exposures rather than digital compositing, so the film flickers and breathes like something recovered from an attic. His own flat, deadpan narration steers the material from absurdist gag-writing into memory, inherited illness, and mortality without ever announcing the turn — the joke and the devastation frequently share a single sentence. Made entirely outside the studio system and initially toured by Hertzfeldt himself, it has become perhaps the most beloved American animated feature ever produced by one person at a desk, and its shadow falls across a whole generation of independent animation.
Lines of influence
- Neighbours (1952) — McLaren achieved superimposition, mattes and optical trickery photochemically in-camera on an animation stand rather than an optical printer — the same vintage-rostrum discipline Hertzfeldt revived to build his effects one exposure at a time.
- Dog Star Man (1964) — Brakhage stacked dense multiple exposures and hand-worked emulsion into bursts of abstract 'closed-eye' light, the exact perceptual vocabulary Hertzfeldt borrows for Bill's seizures, auras and cosmic dissolves.
- La Jetée (1962) — Marker built an entire meditation on memory, death and time from near-static images welded together by grave, measured voiceover — the still-image-plus-deadpan-narration engine driving Hertzfeldt's feature.
- Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969) — Gilliam's hand-cut paper cutouts composited over photographic backdrops for absurdist non-sequitur established the collage grammar behind Hertzfeldt's stick figures floating on multiply-exposed live-action plates.
- Fuji (1974) — Breer's single-frame, constantly metamorphosing line drawing legitimized the scribble and reduced figure as serious formal vocabulary rather than a placeholder — the aesthetic license behind Hertzfeldt's stick-man protagonist.
- Walking (1968) — Larkin's NFB metamorphic walk-cycles, where minimal figures fluidly dissolve and transform, prefigure Hertzfeldt's economy of a bare outline carrying full emotional and bodily weight.
- Dimensions of Dialogue (1983) — Švankmajer's tactile, decay-obsessed frame-by-frame animation stages the body and mortality as memento mori — the death-haunted materialism Hertzfeldt channels through disease, forgetting and dissolution.
- The Tune (1992) — Plympton proved one artist could hand-draw, self-finance and self-distribute a feature outside any studio, the exact one-man economic and authorship model Hertzfeldt operates under.
- Rejected (2000) — Hertzfeldt's own earlier short fixed his stick-figure absurdism and the meta device of the film's own image breaking down, the deterioration-as-content technique he later turns toward mortality.
- World of Tomorrow (2015) — Hertzfeldt carries the same deadpan child-narration, memory-and-mortality essay structure and anthology-of-consciousness form forward, swapping the 35mm camera for digital vector art but keeping the method intact.
- Rocks in My Pockets (2014) — Baumane self-finances a hand-drawn feature that uses relentless first-person deadpan narration to map inherited mental illness across a family, the same voice-plus-drawing confessional machine as Hertzfeldt's.
- Anomalisa (2015) — Kaufman deploys animation specifically to render one ordinary man's existential dread and dissociation, treating mundane hotel-life as a cosmic crisis exactly as Hertzfeldt inflates Bill's small routines.
- Waltz with Bashir (2008) — Folman uses animation as the medium for fractured memory and trauma, shifting visual textures to depict dissociation and unreliable recall — the same formal argument that only animation can show a mind coming apart.
- Sita Sings the Blues (2008) — Paley single-handedly self-financed and self-authored a feature that fuses several incompatible animation registers with personal narration, the same solo mixed-technique feature economy Hertzfeldt embodies.
- Rick and Morty (2013) — It fuses cosmic-nihilist mortality gags and existential punchlines with deliberately crude character animation, extending Hertzfeldt's deadpan bleakness-behind-simplicity into serial comedy.
- BoJack Horseman (2014) — An animated comedy that lurches into mental illness and mortality through abrupt tonal shifts and interior-monologue sequences, inheriting Hertzfeldt's move of letting a joke curdle into despair mid-scene.
- Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) — The Daniels wield rapid absurdist tonal whiplash and multiplicity-of-self montage over an existential-mortality core, and openly cite Hertzfeldt as the model for lo-fi cosmic overwhelm.