It's Such a Beautiful Day

Don Hertzfeldt's animated film, made with stick figures. There is a man called Bill. He falls ill. What it is is never quite stated, but his memory begins to break down: he confuses faces, lives the same day again, misremembers his own past. The form joins the subject. The drawing is extremely simple; a few lines and a circle. But around that simplicity sit photographs, bursts of light, superimposed images and long silences. As Bill's mind degrades, so does the screen. The work is actually three separate short films; Hertzfeldt made them one at a time over years and then joined them into a feature. He did nearly all of it alone: wrote, drew, shot, and narrates it himself. Most of the effects are not digital; they were done optically in the camera. The register of the telling is dry and funny; the film laughs even at its most painful. One of the most original works of recent years for anyone who likes independent animation and formal experiment. For a viewer expecting conventional animation, both the storytelling and the image here stand somewhere else entirely.