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Don Hertzfeldt Is Making Animated Films to Last Forever

In 2020, you will take any modicum of peace wherever you can find it. And I find my peace in knowing that, in the vast spectrum of the cosmos, the time we are on this planet is short and fleeting and insignificant, and that the troubles of our lives today are no more substantial than a speck of flora at the bottom of a vast ocean. Which is to say: I find my peace in the films of Don Hertzfeldt.

Don Hertzfeldt is a lifelong independent animator—he famously will not do commercial or advertising work, a mindset perhaps best summed up in his Oscar-nominated short from 2000, Rejected—whose simple stick-figure drawings bely a worldview that’s simultaneously tragic and hilarious and philosophical and crude and deeply sad and fatalist and yet stubbornly, resolutely hopeful. His first feature-length film, It’s Such a Beautiful Day, is a gorgeous, life-affirming series of stories…about a man with a brain tumor that slowly drives him insane and ultimately kills him. He’s also responsible for an infamous Simpsons couch gag in which Homer travels 8,000 years into the future and Marge’s hair develops sentience and demands us to “all hail the dark lord of the twin moons.” But his signature work is his World of Tomorrow series, which began in 2015 with the story of Emily, a four-year-old girl (voiced by Hertzfeldt’s niece) who is visited by a third-generation clone of herself from more than 200 years in the future. She is there to extract a memory from the original version of herself (called Emily Prime). The short film (it runs only 16 minutes) is a profound look at loss, death, memory, and love. It feels like a film about what really matters.

And it’s a film with a line that I think about constantly. The clone Emily says:

Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.

Which is to say: The films of Don Hertzfeldt don’t just make me feel better about how awful things are right now. They make me feel lucky for it.

Hertzfeldt is notoriously hesitant about publicity, happily toiling away in Austin in relative anonymity and isolation. (When my cowriter, Tim Grierson, and I interviewed him last year, he insisted on doing it entirely, all 3,000 words' worth, over email, sent through an intermediary.) So I’ll confess that it was jarring to see him just pop up on my Zoom screen to talk to me. He’s…a pretty normal guy, actually! He’s very Austin: long hair, skinny and reedy, patchy beard, earnest if wry grin. If you were to imagine what a Generation X action figure would look like, I think it would look a little like Don Hertzfeldt. And he was perfectly happy to talk to me about the third film in the World of Tomorrow series (not a trilogy, he insists), World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime, which was self-released last week on Vimeo. He’s such a powerful, mysterious figure in the world of animation, and film, that I had forgotten that he is an actual regular person who lives and breathes and says “um” while he’s figuring out how to answer a question.

He’s pretty normal, really, for an animator. Even during a pandemic. Especially during a pandemic. “I think animators have been sort of in training for this sort of thing our entire pathetic lives,” he says. “I had nothing else to do anymore but work.”

Hertzfeldt has the sort of self-made bio that adds to his aura of “mysterious genius.” A film-school grad from the University of Santa Barbara, he has never had a job other than working on his own films, privately, without any outside interference, in his office in Austin. His final short film from film school, Billy’s Balloon, played at Cannes; a year later he was nominated for an Oscar for Rejected and then created a traveling festival of animation with Mike Judge. But then he went in his own direction, starting with It’s Such a Beautiful Day, widely considered one of the best animated films of the past 50 years, and expanded further in 2016 with the Oscar-nominated World of Tomorrow. That universe has only grown since then: His films are impossible to get out of your head, and they grow and grow until, if you’re not careful, they’re all you can think about.

Don Hertzfeldt at an event in Los Angeles in 2017.

Film Independent At LACMA Presents An Evening With Don Hertzfeldt

Don Hertzfeldt at an event in Los Angeles in 2017.
Araya Doheny

Whereas the first film was about a little girl’s clone living on in her memory, and the second, longer film was about the idea of living, and hiding, in your own memory and even the memory of others, the third film, the longest so far at 36 minutes, adds a whole other layer to the universe. This one follows David, a minor character in the second film: He’s a clone who attempts to track down a message sent to him by Emily, another clone who had once loved him. He also has to download and upload memories that are not his, and crawl through a desert, and…you know, it’s impossible to describe the plots of these films without sounding like you’re moderately insane. But the film is more expansive, more ambitious, more experimental (it’s the most technologically adventurous of all these films, trying out different forms of digital animation and putting together some truly stunning backdrops and settings), and more…well, more like a time-travel action film, actually. Imagine if Tenet had been made by an animation genius who was more interested in exploring the nature of memory and love than Robert Pattinson’s ascot.

One of the film’s particularly ingenious ideas is that David is a clone working with technology from thousands of years in the future, which means that to even read Emily’s message, he needs to clear space on his own hard drive—which means he must shut down basic human functions. Thus, he must “turn off” various parts of himself—“empathy,” “balance,” “common sense”—just to move forward and survive. Which sounds pretty close to what it’s like to live in the year 2020. The film is also packed with sight gags and, not coincidentally, is more straightforwardly “funny” than his other films. That’s by design.

“You just have to laugh at a certain point. The last thing you lose in bad times is your sense of humor,” Hertzfeldt says. “I went through a period of reading a lot of survival stories, and in a lot of World War II stories and Holocaust dramas and memoirs, you get to this realization where the survivor is finding the humor in their suffering because it was the only way they could survive. They could tell one of their friends was suddenly too far gone when they stopped laughing—when they stopped sharing in the humor of the bleakness around them. You just have to laugh. Laughing is going to be the only way we’re going to make it through the next few months.”

Like all his films, Episode Three feels eternal. It is about, more than anything, time: How time extends forward and backward and ultimately dwarfs everything, making even the most overwhelming concerns and monumental events feel small and insignificant. The films seem to argue that with our petty trivialities, so tiny and meaningless, we must hang on to what we have: the touch of someone who loves us. A frolic through a field. The remembrance of a lost family member. A drawing of a triangle. Love. What happens in the moment will not matter in a thousand years, or at least what happens now will long be lost and forgotten. To be sad, to be happy, to feel at all, it is the only thing that matters about being alive. The movies remind you that your life means nothing in the long term…and that is why you must value it with the utmost gratitude now.

Not that Hertzfeldt necessarily feels all this when the films are released. Episode Three was supposed to originally be part of a package with the first two films, released theatrically, in a similar fashion to It’s Such a Beautiful Day. The pandemic put an end to that, so Hertzfeldt is now releasing all three films individually, for rent on Vimeo, which also allows the perfectionist (he spent two years making this 36-minute film) to constantly tweak anything he wants to fix. And he always wants to fix something. “Honestly, if every review came out bad and everyone was just like, ‘This is trash, this is the worst thing ever,’ I could just make it all go away,” he says. “Doing this in isolation, you're just kind of hunting for comments online and looking for any feedback you can possibly get, which is weird. It's very hard to be objective, and it's harder now because I don't have a movie theater to sit in. I don't hear people responding to it, laughing or not laughing. That’s usually my catharsis—my final note, where I can say, ‘It’s okay, humans are watching.’ Not having that has been strange and disorienting.”

Hertzfeldt says he wants to keep making as many World of Tomorrow films as he can, for as long as he can. (He jokes they might become “Boyhood in space.”) And it helps that he owns the films himself. “Now I own everything I've ever done, other than the Simpsons thing,” he says. “That is unusual because most filmmakers, from poverty-stricken to multimillionaires, don't own their own work. That has made pretty much all the difference.” It’s the sort of indie rock, Austin DIY idea—the playing of the long game—that has allowed him to make his movies exactly the way he wants them. They can be about everything. And they can go on forever.

And, ultimately, we got to the question I wanted to ask all along: It is okay that his movies make me feel better now? Do they make him feel better?

Hertzfeldt answers, and I’ll let him take it from here:

“On one level, I think these films are some form of therapy for me,” he says. “I think, on a real level, I'm working out things I’m having nightmares about on the paper. I don't know if that makes them more universal or less universal. I think probably every artist, whether you're in a band or painting pictures or writing novels, there's that level of personal angst going on there. This one took two years, and while a lot of that was written before the current madness, it was still part of the Trump era. There’s a lot to unpack in that, and I don't know if I'm the person to do it, but…I'm sure that it's in there.

“The most important thing is some sort of truth. You want to have some sort of honesty in what you're writing, because I think audiences can sense it if you're bullshitting or if there's something that you're half-assing in a way.

“I don't have much to hide, you know? These movies have all their cards on the table. That’s how I stay sane. Making these movies.”

Originally Appeared on GQ