It's Such a Beautiful Day

Bill is a character drawn as a stick figure. His daily life goes on: he walks, goes shopping, waits for the bus, talks to his ex girlfriend. Then things start going wrong. He has trouble remembering, mixes up words, what he sees turns strange. He goes to a doctor. There is something wrong in his brain and the diagnosis is not clear. As the narrative proceeds Bill's past, his family's story and his own memory run together. A narrating voice tells all of it in a calm tone, and the calm of the tone contradicts the weight of what is told. Don Hertzfeldt wrote, drew and directed it, and is the narrating voice himself. The film was formed by joining three short films; the parts were shown separately first. It was shot on a film camera and the effects were produced in camera rather than on a computer, using multiple exposures and masks. The drawing is deliberately at its simplest; stick figures and empty white ground. The matter it treats is memory and death; the narrative says so directly and offers no consolation. The humour is inside the narrative and holds even in the heaviest sections. It runs a little over an hour and was made single handed. Who it is for: viewers who like independent animation and experimental narrative. Who it is not for: the subject is heavy, the form unfamiliar, and the simplicity of the drawing puts some viewers off.