It's Such a Beautiful Day · reception & legacy

2012 · Don Hertzfeldt

How It's Such a Beautiful Day has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

It arrived in 2012 with almost no theatrical footprint — Hertzfeldt self-distributed it, touring it himself — and then the internet did the rest: over the following decade it climbed the Letterboxd charts to sit among the highest-rated films on the entire site, hailed as one of the greatest animated features ever made.

What's debated

The perennial fight: is a hand-drawn stick-figure film really better than Citizen Kane (as its Letterboxd ranking implies), or is it the most hyped movie on the app — with devotees insisting the skeptics just haven't let it wreck them yet.

Its footprint

It's the internet's shorthand for 'a stick figure will make you sob' — recommending it to unsuspecting friends is practically a ritual, and Bill, its simple line-drawn everyman, is instantly recognizable to a generation of online cinephiles.

Where it stands

The quintessential Letterboxd-canon film: a one-man indie animation the internet elevated into must-see status, now a rite of passage for anyone getting into film.

★ Did you know? It's actually three short films stitched into a feature, made over roughly six years — and the first chapter, Everything Will Be OK, won the Grand Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking at Sundance 2007. Hertzfeldt animated and photographed the project almost entirely alone on an antique 35mm animation camera, achieving its dreamlike effects in-camera rather than digitally.