A audience of a packed house in the Michigan Theater laughed their way through six filmic animations by Don Hertzfeldt, a California-based artist best known for Rejected. When Rejected came on the screen, the crowd cheered--ctually, when any of the titles appeared enthusiastically yelling ensued.
I would imagine the audience was composed of a mix of devoted fans, curious viewers who had only seen Rejected, and a few people completely unfamiliar with work. I fall into the second category, and so I imagined that most of Hertzfeldt's work would be plain fun and involve stick figures doing and saying random things that would make me laugh. After viewing this program, I found that Hertzfeldt's style spans an impressive range, as do his talents as a storyteller, filmmaker, and visual artist. In Everything Will Be OK, and its second chapter, entitled I am so proud of you, moments in the story of main character Bill shift from sadly perfunctory to humorously charming. At the same time, I loved the lack of meaning in events that are supposed to be so meaningful: as Bill is about to die, he thinks about it as he would any other daily activity and ends up spouting out a word salad of sorts to his loved ones in the room. The timing of the humor in I am so proud of you lightens the somber tone without overshadowing the film's existentialist quality. This piece in particular made me think about how strange it is to be a human. And how strange it is to be sitting in front of a computer right now--I need to get going to the Dark Matter afterparty at the Yellow Barn. It's starting in a few minutes!
In the Q & A session, moderated by booking agent Gabe Levinson, a modest Hertzfeldt shared advice for future animators (work hard and do what you love), his intention with the humor in his films ("The humor is more like the sugar to help the medicine go down"), and talked a little about technique and the creative process. Hertzfeldt, whose tools are a pen, paper, and film cameras, lauded the joy of working with tangible materials: "You get the film back and its like Christmas," he said. When he shared that making new films takes a long time, I'm pretty sure he was referring more to the creative process than to his more "old-fashioned" technique, and in fact he says that digital would not help him create any faster anyway. Seeing the human touch so visibly in these films--whether through a crumpled piece of paper, the twitching curves of his animated drawings, or the black construction paper peepholes--adds, well, a human touch.
Out front, the crowds were a-waiting for the 9:30 program of animated shorts. More coming soon...
-Amanda
