Don Hertzfeldt
Don Hertzfeldt is an American animator, writer, and independent filmmaker. He is a two-time Academy Award nominee who is best known for the animated films It's Such a Beautiful Day, the World of Tomorrow series, ME, and Rejected. In 2014, his work appeared on The Simpsons. Nine of his short films have competed at the Sundance Film Festival, a festival record. He is also the only filmmaker to have won the Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize for Short Film twice.
Hertzfeldt's work has been described as "some of the most influential animation ever created", "some of the most vital and expressive animation of the millennium", "some of the most essential short films of the last 20 years", and "films of a sort that never really existed before." In 2020, GQ described his work as "simultaneously tragic and hilarious and philosophical and crude and deeply sad and fatalist and yet stubbornly, resolutely hopeful."
Hertzfeldt's It's Such a Beautiful Day and World of Tomorrow have been regarded by critics as two of the best animated films of all time.
In his book The World History of Animation, author Stephen Cavalier writes "Hertzfeldt is either a unique phenomenon or perhaps an example of a new way forward for individual animators surviving independently on their own terms... he attracts the kind of fanatical support from the student and alternative crowds usually associated with indie rock bands".
Hertzfeldt's latest animated film, Paper Trail, premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival and won the Special Jury Award for Creative Vision.
Personal life
Hertzfeldt was born on August 1, 1976, in Fremont, California, the son of an airline pilot and a county library clerk. Some publications have his place of birth as Fremont while others name Castro Valley, California. He is of half Swedish descent. Hertzfeldt attended Mission San Jose High School in Fremont. In his childhood, Hertzfeldt drew homemade comic books and, at the age of 15, he began to teach himself animation with a VHS video camera. Two of Hertzfeldt's teenage VHS cartoons can be seen on the "Bitter Films: Volume 1" DVD collection.While at film school, Hertzfeldt was drawn to animation as it was a less expensive form to work in. He could not afford to buy the numerous rolls of 16 mm film required to shoot live-action. He has stated, "I think I've always approached animation from a strange angle, a bit like a live-action filmmaker who just happens to draw. Editing, writing, sound—those are the things that usually come first in my head. Animation is often just the busy work I need to get through to connect the dots and tell the story."
Hertzfeldt has never held a job other than creating his animated films. His earliest teenage video animations found film festival exposure, and in film school at the University of California, Santa Barbara he was able to find international distribution for each of his 16mm student films. He is a 1998 graduate with a B.A. in Film Studies.
Hertzfeldt primarily supports his work through self-distribution such as ticket sales from theatrical tours, DVDs, VOD, and television broadcasts. He has refused all advertising work.
Hertzfeldt's influences include Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Edward Gorey, Monty Python, Stan Brakhage, silent films, and the animated shorts he saw at numerous animation festivals at a young age, including the early works of Aardman Animation and Bill Plympton.
In 2022, for the BFI Sight and Sound "Greatest Films of All Time" poll, Hertzfeldt listed the following ten films as important titles that had "knocked me over the head at some point in life and continue to do so": The Act of Killing, Citizen Kane, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Gates of Heaven, The Godfather, Goodfellas, Harold and Maude, Monty Python's Life of Brian, The Pianist, and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Technique
Hertzfeldt's work commonly features hand-drawn stick figures, in stories of black humor, surrealism, and tragicomedy. Some films contain existential and philosophical themes while others are more straightforwardly slapstick and absurdist. His animation was first created traditionally, with pen and paper, before transitioning to digital animation for his World of Tomorrow short film series. Hertzfeldt initially used antique 16 mm or 35 mm–film cameras to photograph his drawings and often employs old-fashioned special effect techniques such as multiple exposures, in-camera mattes, and experimental photography. While some of these techniques are as established as an occasional stop-motion animation sequence or a universe of moving stars created by back-lit pin holes, other effects are innovations on classical methods, as seen with the in-camera compositing of multiple, split-screen windows of action in It's Such a Beautiful Day.Hertzfeldt's student films in the 1990s were photographed on 16mm. From 1999 to 2011, Hertzfeldt photographed his films on a 35mm Richardson animation camera stand, believed to be the same camera that photographed many of the Peanuts cartoons in the 1960s and 1970s. Built in the late 1940s, it was one of the last remaining functioning cameras of its kind left in the world, and Hertzfeldt found it to be a crucial element in the creation of his films and their visuals.
In 2015, Hertzfeldt released his first digitally animated short film, World of Tomorrow, which was created at the same time as another digital piece, an animated guest appearance on The Simpsons. Both pieces were still hand-drawn by Hertzfeldt, but he used a Cintiq tablet instead of paper.
Discussing film and digital technology with The New York Times in 2008, Hertzfeldt noted:
It's not unusual for Hertzfeldt to write, direct, produce, animate, photograph, edit, perform voices, record and mix sound, and/or compose music for one of his films, at times requiring years to complete a single short by working alone. The animation for one of his films may often require tens of thousands of drawings.
Hertzfeldt frequently scores his pictures with classical music and opera. The music of Tchaikovsky, Bizet, Smetana, Beethoven, Richard Strauss, and Wagner have all appeared in his films. On occasion, Hertzfeldt has also scored portions of his films himself, with a guitar or keyboard.
Approach to writing
Hertzfeldt described his relaxed writing process in a 2015 Reddit "AMA" session:In another Reddit "AMA", on the subject of creativity, Hertzfeldt suggested the following:
Student films, 1995–1998
Hertzfeldt made four 16mm animated student films while studying film at the University of California, Santa Barbara.Ah, L'Amour and Genre were produced at the ages of 18 and 19. Ah, L'Amour won the HBO Comedy Arts Festival Grand Prize for "World's Funniest Cartoon".
His first dialogue short, Lily and Jim, was released in 1997, and tells the story of a disastrous blind date. Its partially improvised vocal performances helped the short win twenty-five awards, including the Grand Prize at the New Orleans Film Festival.
His final student cartoon, Billy's Balloon, is about an inexplicable attack on small children by malevolent balloons. It was nominated for the Short Film Palme d'Or at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, and won the Grand Jury Award at the 1999 Slamdance Film Festival. In total, it won 33 awards.
The popularity of each student short at film and animation festivals—and eventually around the world from screening on MTV and other networks—helped fund the next one, and eventually financed the production of his first film after college.
Independent animation, 2000–present
''Rejected''
Soon after graduating from film school, Hertzfeldt purchased his own 35mm rostrum camera and made his next animated short, Rejected.Released nationwide in theaters through the Spike and Mike's Festival of Animation in 2000, the short won 27 film festival awards and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Short Film the following year.
Rejected is now considered a cult classic and one of the most influential animated films ever made. In the early 2000s, pirated copies of Rejected turned the film into a viral video, where it has been credited with shaping the surreal sense of humor of the early Internet. In 2018 New York Magazine wrote, "If there is a single piece of media that inspired what we nebulously refer to as "internet humor," it's probably Rejected.
In 2009, Rejected was the only short film named as one of the "Films of the Decade" by Salon. In 2010, it was noted as one of the five "most innovative animated films of the past ten years" by The Huffington Post. Indiewire film critic Eric Kohn named Rejected one of the "10 best films of the 21st century" on his list for the BBC Culture poll in 2016.
The film presents itself as a reel of rejected commercial work by a fictional version of Don Hertzfeldt. The commissioned animated vignettes grow more and more abstract and inappropriate as the animator suffers a mental breakdown until they fall apart.
Although the film is fictional and Hertzfeldt has never done advertising work, he received many offers to do television commercials after Billy's Balloon drew international attention. In appearances, Hertzfeldt has told the humorous story of how he was tempted to produce the worst possible cartoons he could come up with for the companies, run off with their money, and see if they would make it to air. Eventually, this became the germ for Rejected theme of a collection of cartoons so bad they were rejected by advertising agencies, leading to their creator's breakdown and ultimately the cartoons' metaphysical crisis.