TODO: Bitter Films
TODO is one daily thing recommended for you, by us.
If you're not familiar with the work of animator Don Hertzfeldt and Bitter Films, you should be. There, now you're rightly consumed with hipster guilt. Fortunately, even those who scoff at cartoonery usually find Hertzfeldt eminently accessible — his toons are drawn and photographed with old-school cameras and painstaking animation techniques, with no computer-friendly touches at all. The animation style is extremely simplistic, with most figures drawn as deceptively crude stick figures or blocky two-dimensional critters. However, the animation itself is artfully arranged and fluidly executed, with blatantly obsessive attention to detail. All of which says nothing about the subjects of the Bitter Films shorts, which contain some of the most jaw-droppingly black-humored slapstick on the planet. This isn't the easy route of profane transgression, or sex, or blood, though those themes get explored in off-kilter ways. It's more like screwball comedies conceived by an asylum's more well-behaved inmates.
Hertzfeldt has just released a DVD containing his most popular cartoons from the past 10 years, including the masterfully unhinged "Rejected," which was nominated for an Oscar in 2000. The most recent work on the DVD is "The Meaning of Life," which deserves its own award for artistic masochism. Hand-animating hundreds of characters — not to mention lip-synching all their dialogue, syllable by syllable — was a process Hertzfeldt likened to "etching a novel into a rock one letter at a time with your fingernails." It's a riveting, virtuoso work of ridiculous labor and experimental photographic trickery created specifically for the production. The other shorts on the DVD (even the classic "Billy's Balloon") seem basic by comparison, but all are well worth seeing.
Hertzfeldt has a new short ("Everything Will Be OK") that's not on the DVD, as it just first appeared on the festival circuit last month. He also co-curates (along with "Beavis & Butt-Head's" Mike Judge) a traveling program called The Animation Show. Check those out if you get the chance, but definitely snare the DVD collection. You will quickly find yourself compelled to evangelize with nearly as much enthusiasm as you're reading now.
