Bitter Films: A Don Hertzfeldt Odyssey

~Jim Healy, Assistant Curator, Exhibitions, Motion Picture Department

Can a bunch of goofy cartoons provide any sort of intellectual stimulation? It’s possible that the reams of paper that have been used for graduate school theses on Bugs Bunny and Betty Boop have come close to rivaling the amount needed to animate these characters in the first place, so let’s assume the answer to this question is yes. But as in any other artistic endeavor, the number of bad animated films throughout 100 years of film history has far surpassed the tally for those animations that have endured. These surviving gems were typically made by innovative artists like Walt Disney, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Max and Dave Fleischer, who understood not only how to bring a drawing to life, but also the true nature of cinema.

Don Hertzfeldt’s animated short films are inherently cinematic. This is not something that can be said for a lot of films, both live action and animated. Cinema, as projected on film anyway, is essentially an illusion: a series of still photographs that fool the human mind into thinking it’s seeing movement. In order to succeed, the art of cinema requires two things: the first is a good projector with enough light and the capability to run film through it 24 frames per second so that we don’t notice the black spaces in between the frames. The second thing that’s required is the will and imagination of the audience. Most mainstream movies today are satisfied to just provide the illusion of movement and action, while their pedestrian scripts and unimaginative direction never give audiences the opportunity to use their minds and their own personal experiences in order to fill in the other black spaces that a movie can figuratively offer, such as questions about narrative, characters, or even, heaven forbid, how what’s happening on the screen might relate to their own lives.

Whether you see them projected on film in a theatrical setting or on this DVD, Don Hertzfeldt’s films will certainly amuse you and make you laugh, but they will also provide you with the space to project your own possible universes. This generous notion will be apparent to you right away because Hertzfeldt’s hand-drawn characters are little more than non-descript stick figures or plain-looking bunnies – not much to look at. But Hertzfeldt understands that one small gesture such as the shifting of eyes or one careful step can suggest a limitless galaxy of feelings. He rarely uses dialogue and when he does, it’s often improvised after the animation is completed or spoken in alien (and probably non-existent) languages. Still, it’s never the lines that count, but the pauses in between them. These characteristics are something he shares in common with those great and influential filmmakers from the golden age of animation mentioned above.

While watching his entire output to date on this DVD, you will certainly be impressed by Don Hertzfeldt’s growth and maturity as a filmmaker. Only 2 years pass between the making of the very funny first film Ah L’amour – which derives much of its humor from a pervasive and somewhat exaggerated fear of women – and the making of his 3rd film, the sweet but equally funny Lily and Jim. The latter film suggests that there are a number of reasons why men and women have so much trouble getting together, but doesn’t really lay the blame on either sex.

Lily and Jim is also the film that first introduces what has become Don’s trademark existential sense of dread, which exists in those quiet spaces between lines of awkward dialogue. This sense that the worst is going to happen blooms to full fruition in Billy’s Baloon, which uses no dialogue at all but builds suspense between the sound effects of a harmless old balloon pummeling a small child. The result is truly unnerving and incredibly funny, so much more than just a sick and twisted cartoon parody of Albert Lamorisse’s classic short film The Red Balloon (1956).

In his most recent work, like the Oscar-nominated Rejected, and especially in The Meaning of Life, we see a movement away from simple dread towards explorations of what it means to be an artist and what it means to be simply alive. There are moments in both of these films that recall Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in the way that they boldly confound an audience’s expectations of where and how a film should begin and end. Like all great art, they are more interested in asking questions than answering them.

Some might think this is a lot to say about movies where characters rip their friends’ flesh off and wear it on their heads like a hat while declaring they are the Queen of France. In their ability to throw a viewer into convulsions of laughter, nothing can compete with the power of Don Hertzfeldt’s films. Be prepared to have lots of fun while watching these mini masterpieces, and if they make you think a little too, just consider that another of the great dvd bonus features in this first volume from Don Hertzfeldt’s Bitter Films.

Hertzfeldt on Hertzfeldt

The following comments were compiled from comments made by Don Hertzfeldt during a retrospective screening of his work and question-and-answer session at George Eastman House in Rochester, NY on September 24, 2005

Don Hertzfeldt: I hate it when people talk during movies, so, I’ll try to keep it brief and just throw something at me if I’m rambling or get boring.

UC Santa Barbara is a school that’s tops in the country for things like theory and history and criticism and analysis, but there’s very little focus on production. So, by virtue of that, no one else was using the animation camera. And I was able to make four films while I was there

AH, L’AMOUR (1995)

I was eighteen years old and a freshman at UC Santa Barbara. The beginning production class was taught by a guy named Dana Driskel. His whole thing was if you can’t summarize your movie in one sentence, you’ve got no point. We all had to pitch a premise. I didn’t have a premise. I just wanted to do a cartoon like the stuff I did in high school, which was just stick figures attacking each other. Dana said, “no, no, no, no, you gotta have a premise. Where are you coming from with this?” So, I went home and thought about how I was going to justify stick figures killing each other? No doubt there was a girl somewhere in my life who was mean to me. So, the next day I come back in and I say, “my premise is: women are evil.” Dana says, “well, see now, that’s a premise.”

GENRE (1996)

The following year, I made Genre, which was probably the weakest thing I’ve ever done. But it owes a lot to the stuff I used to do in high school too.

LILY AND JIM (1997)

I was, up to this point, pretty naively clinging to, my written shooting scripts, basically because I didn’t know any other way to do it. I thought that’s what everyone did when they make a movie. But I didn’t really have to communicate any ideas to anybody else creatively because I was more-or-less doing everything. With Lily and Jim, we brought Robert May and Karen Anger to do the voices and they improvised about a quarter of the dialogue that ended up in the film. I gutted my script, included their stuff and blended it all together in the sound mix. Without Karen and Rob, I think it would be completely lost.

BILLY’S BALOON (1998)

Lily and Jim is basically all dialogue and gesticulations, which is just boring as all hell to animate. So I felt I just wanted to do something that was action again—no dialogue, just have a little fun. And I had a dream about a little boy who’s running in a field. He’s running and running and he slowly starts floating until he’s flying through the air. And then he gets hit by an airplane. Somehow that all came together in Billy’s Balloon.

REJECTED (1999)

Soon after Lily and Jim, I started to get approached to do commercials for television and interstitials for weird cable programs and things like that. I would never do a commercial. I never have and I never will. It’s just the sort of thing that goes against every bone in my body. But I was sitting around with Rob after receiving one offer and we were wondering what would happen if we just took their money and intentionally made the most horrible, inappropriate garbage we could? Just to see if it would get on air. Sort of like the guy who put the rake in the modern art museum, I guess. So we started riffing on that and I think it just sort of snowballed from there and I started to get more ideas and they started to get funnier. I realized I had another film here and we could do an Andy Kaufman kind of thing.

WELCOME TO THE SHOW (2003)
INTERMISSION IN THE THIRD DIMENSION (2003)
THE END OF THE SHOW (2003)

I co-curate a touring theatrical program called The Animation Show. For the first year out, I did three cartoons to kind of bookend the program and give it some sort of shape. I thought that middle one actually came out pretty good.

THE MEANING OF LIFE (2005)

The laughter ends here. The Meaning of Life is a movie that I wanted to make before Billy’s Balloon, but I wasn’t a good enough animator yet, and I didn’t know how to do it yet technically or without a computer. We don’t use computers for anything other than sound mix. Everything is hand-drawn and shot traditionally on two big old animation rigs. The Meaning of Life took about four years to make. It was a lot like writing a novel by etching into a rock one letter at a time with your fingernails. The story and the visuals are all in your head; but that’s the pace it takes to come out. That’s the density of this miserable project.

All arguments about digital and film aside, quality-wise, I’ve always felt the old-fashioned process helps me creatively. If there’s a shot I have to come up with, an outer space special effect for instance, I just use backlights and a camera. I’ve got to physically create that. I’ve gotta construct plastic sheets. I’ve got to get the lighting right. I’m gonna have to experiment and come up with things I might not have come up with before. Whereas when I work with a computer, a lot of the time, the first thing I try works out great or just ok and I’ll move on…I don’t feel like I’m really thinking about what I’m doing and experimenting. I really like real light and a real camera lens. If there’s a problem with the camera, I can fix it with my hands and it’s not like “file not found” or something.

The film took a long time to make and the deadline for Sundance was coming up. It looked like we could probably get it done in time and that helped focus and get our act together and have a goal. Ironically, I’ve always felt that the film has always been about three to five percent unfinished. The DVD will feature a remastered version, which allows me to go back and flesh it out and finish it. I’m not pulling a George Lucas or anything. I’m not adding Jabba the Hut or Greedo shooting first.

The finished crowd scene was completed on an enormous stack of paper and I got a fireproof safe to put it in. At one point, I thought it was perfectly logical to get a bigger fireproof safe to put the fireproof safe into and every time I left the apartment, I thought, “someone’s breaking in, someone’s breaking into the apartment and they’re gonna steal the stack of stick figure drawings. I just know it.” It was pretty bad. I sunk into a pretty deep depression making the movie. It’s good to get it out of my head.

Question: What’s most interesting about The Meaning of Life is that it’s not played for laughs. Was there ever a point during its making where you thought about putting in something like a cloud with hemorrhoid problems again, or something like that?

Don: No. It’s a film I wanted to make for a long time. A lot of people have asked me, “Why didn’t you do another comedy? Why is it so different?” It’s not something I really think about. The film I’m working on now, it’s a comedy, but it’s got some sad bits, and some weird bits, um, but it’s, you know, it’s just what’s next. I wanted to make something beautiful. I’ve listened to a lot of artists talk and I know how pretentious it sounds, but it was just the one that had to come out of my head next.

Are there any other animators or particular filmmakers, writers or philosophers that have influenced your work?

Um, Monty Python. The philosophy of Monty Python. Honestly, I don’t watch a lot of animation and I don’t get a lot of inspiration from animation. I don’t feel like I’m a part of that community. I went to a very traditional film school. I’ve never taken a course of animation. Lots of times I just feel like an independent filmmaker who happens to animate and use trick photography and things. I like Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch and Edward Gorey. I don’t read fiction. I’m constantly reading non-fiction and science books. If you animate anything, you have to know a little bit about everything, so I’m constantly reading ten things at once. As a writer, you need constant input in order to have an output. I’m not talking about plagiarizing; you just need stuff going on.

There’s a short film called Tango and it’s an Academy Award winner from 1982. I’m embarrassed because I don’t know the name of the director [Zbigniew Rybczynski]. It’s a Polish film, and I think that if I had the name of the director in front of me, I couldn’t pronounce it. It is a film that I saw when I was very, very young. I wouldn’t even call it an inspiration so much as a benchmark for The Meaning of Life. I saw this film and it’s very early CGI. At the time, in the early ’80, it’s something that no one had ever seen done before. It’s basically an extended crowd scene, and this movie stuck with me when I was little and I always wondered, “can you do a crowd scene like that or bigger animated traditionally by hand?’’ So, when I did The Meaning of Life and I was working with all those people, all those crowds, I remembered Tango. I wondered if I could pull this off with traditional animation like they did with a computer. I think I did, but it just took four years.

Since you’re someone who grew up in the video age, I’m curious how you developed your appreciation for film. I’m sure that by the time you got to school you watched a lot of films on video as opposed to 16mm.

Yeah. When I graduated from film school the digital age had taken over and I just didn’t learn it. I learned traditional photography and my first four films were all completed on 16mm. I just like the organic quality of it. It’s much more difficult to make and maybe I’m masochistic. I feel like there’s a process you have to go through, you know where you’ll get better ideas as you go along. Rejected was something that there is no script for. I learned over the years, especially with comedy, that over the course of a year-and-a-half making something like Rejected, you get sick of your own jokes. It’s just not funny after the second week. So, we just started having more faith that I could just do all the animation and just have mouths moving and have Rob, who is funny, improvise voices over that. I think the long process of working with film, allows us to do that, allows us to come up with better stuff as we go along and really shape it organically. TheMeaning of Life is the first film we edited on a computer and it worked out great, but it was strange for me because when you work on a flat bed, you’ve got the film and a razor blade and, it’s easy to, for example, cut six frames from a scene. It takes about five minutes. I have time to walk around and think about the cut and think about what we’re doing. With computers, it’s just a key stroke and we’re ready to move on. And I’m not ready, you know, I need to take my time.

Do you think that kind of patient thinking is absent from filmmaking in general because of the move to digital cutting and editing?

It shouldn’t be. I don’t want to speculate what other guys are doing, but that’s the way I experience it. Maybe I’m just partially retarded and I take an extra long time to think, but I don’t know. I just like chewing on things.

Do you agree with your professors that you have to have a premise of one sentence when making a film?

I learned from that experience, that having it in your head, that one simple sentence, you’re forced to focus; and you’re forced to realize that this is the film you’re making, this is what you’re trying to say through this. I think that might work for any medium. If you’re painting a picture, what’s your point?

Can you talk about the reactions audiences have had to The Meaning of Life?

I’ve gone on tour with the Animation Show for about twelve cities now. We’ve gotten radically different reactions to The Meaning of Life and I really love it. I really love the awkward silences; I love tension in a movie house, like turning down the volume and making everyone sit quietly and hear the chairs squeaking. It’s like that shot in Billy’s Balloon where it drags on just a little too long…twisting the knife. I’m losing my train of thought but what I want to say is that most people love it or hate it. I’ve heard from girls who’ve said they cried and I’ve heard from people who say, “I just completely didn’t get it; I totally hated that movie.” I think everyone’s right; I think it’s all equally valid. I think that’s the point of art. My point is that I hate it when artists loom over their work too much and dictate and say, “this means this and you’re wrong and you’re right and you’ve got it.” Once it’s out there, it’s not yours anymore; it’s all equal. I just feel for thousands of years, people have argued and whined and killed each other over nothing. What’s the point of everything when what they do with themselves is usually a complete waste of time? The opening scene I don’t think of as abstract at all. I think you can go to any mall during the Christmas season and just sit down and you’ll see that exact parade of humanity playing out.

Your first two films were centered around women. Was that due to the fact that you were a freshman in college? And, do you still think women are evil because I noticed that the rest of the films pushed away from that concept?

No, I think women are superior to men in every possible way except maybe at killing people in certain video games. When the first film came out, yes, I was eighteen years old and I think every male goes through that in college. But at the first screenings of the film, women were cheering louder than the men. I also did my best to make the guy not so innocent himself by having him pass by the big fat woman. That’s my favorite part. He’s kind of a prick himself. It all evens out I think. I think the man and the woman are both equally inept in Lily and Jim.

How involved are you with the DVD production both with your Bitter Films, Vol. 1 coming up and with The Animation Show?

The Animation Show is very time consuming. And Mike and I curate the thing; we program every film. And the lineup for the DVDs of The Animation Show are always a little bit different than the theatrical versions. We program the leftovers that we feel are just as good but may not fit in the theatrical program. But the actual production of the DVDs we leave to our guys in the office to work with all the filmmakers and put together any extras they’d like to do—commentaries or whatever. For the Bitter Films DVD, I’m a little too involved. I’ve actually been obsessively looming over every aspect of that. It’s ten years worth of films and ten years worth of special features. I’ve been going through the closets and boxes and boxes of stuff. All of the films are being transferred to high definition for the first time from the original camera negatives. The negatives require some digital cleanup and restoration work because they’re really dirty and scratched up. I really do think that digital and film have a lot to gain from each other and that’s just one small example. Anyone who tells you that film is going to die or that digital’s going to die, they’re just trying to sell you something.

Can you talk about your creative process versus the technical aspect of your work?

Creating is a lot of waiting. Someone watching me on one of these projects would probably think I’m just a big slacker because I’ll pace the desk, I’ll watch a movie, I’ll check my e-mail. I have to be in the right mood. To put it really, really crudely – I think maybe Steve Martin said this and maybe he was paraphrasing someone else—but, he said, the creative process is a lot like going to the bathroom. You can sit down and you can force yourself and try and try and try and it’s not going to be very good. It’s not going to work out well. Which is damn true. But if you just wait, if you’re patient, it’ll happen. It’ll flow. Of all the philosophies and writings about the creative process I’ve ever read, that seems like it makes the most sense. It’s like being happy. You can’t force yourself to be happy. It’s just there one day. I feel like most of the time I’m waiting, then it’s off to the races. I’m pretty nocturnal. For The Meaning of Life, I was up until about six in the morning everyday and going to bed when the sun was coming up just because it was quiet and the phone didn’t ring and, if I checked my e-mail at five in the morning, I was fucked because no one was e-mailing me.

Technically, it’s all pen and paper. If there’s a wrinkle or a tear in the paper, I’ll leave it. There’s not much more to it than that. Everything is what you see. For The Meaning of Life, there are three hundred human characters in the opening sequence and every one of them was individually animated. Everyone has a distinct walk and a line they’re repeating. The first problem I faced making that film was figuring out if animation paper, which is very thin, could withstand the punishment of all of these characters going on at once. The paper turned into a kind of cottony mush towards the end, but it held up. Sometimes there are special tricks like the shot where the sun flies away from the camera, which requires special lights and special materials other than pen and paper.

What special tricks were required for combining live action with animation in Genre?

It’s just what it looks like. I had my camera operator up on a ladder looking down and on every piece of paper I just put my hand in and just held it real still and she would direct my hand one millimeter this way or that way. It looks really cool, but it’s really easy to do. The same process was done with the Intermission film with shaking the lollipop. I just put a lollipop on the artwork and adjusted it with the worst stop motion animation known to man.

Given the arduousness of your process, are there any films that you come up with that you feel you can’t make just because of the limits of your natural life?

I have feature projects and live action projects. Live action projects are just too expensive for me. I still live like I did in college. When I was in film school, during freshman year everyone was making live action because they want to be the next Steven Spielberg, but they’ve all got thirty thousand dollars of a rich uncle’s money to spend on it. I just didn’t have that sort of funding. Ah, L’Amour was made for four hundred dollars in two weeks or so. I didn’t have to cast my friend to play a forty year-old and I had complete control over everything with animation. Certainly there’s some live action stuff that I’ve always wanted to try, but there’s just no money for it. I did the feature dance in Hollywood around 1999. There was actually a feature script of Lily and Jim written. And I met with every studio that was doing animation at the time. Now, of course, no one is doing 2-D animation anymore. And everyone told me, “we really want to do this. We really want to take on Disney.” But they didn’t want to do anything that Disney wouldn’t want to do. They all wanted to see it, but they didn’t want to pay for it and risk it. It was a lot of commuting to Los Angeles and I realized that I’m still really young and I can still do whatever I want to on this level and there’s still a pretty cool audience out there waiting for a new film every now and then. So, I just kind of put it on the shelf and said, “I’ll worry about that later.” I don’t have kids and I don’t have to eat well. I don’t have to wear a tie or go to the office or anything. I can just keep making cartoons with my friends and grow up a little later, I guess.

In making live action films, you can, if you don’t like a scene, have the actors do it again. I know you don’t have that luxury in animation. Have you ever found yourself re-doing a scene? How much of a perfectionist are you?

I am a true perfectionist and I’m probably my worst critic. The hardest thing is to cut out the stuff that you spent the most time on. For Lily and Jim, I’ve got hours and hours of Rob and Karen improvising because as soon as I realized that my script wasn’t as funny as anything they could come up with, I started to roll tape. So, we had a lot of material to pick and choose from and splice in there. For the dvd, we were able to recreate an alternate movie from all their other dialogue and it’s just as good. The one good thing about animation is that you can get the timing down perfectly and I firmly believe that one or two frames can make the difference of a scene being funny or not. There’s something about timing that you can really get at microscopically when you animate.

What would you have done if the commercials and interstitials in Rejected had actually been accepted for broadcast?

Well, it is fictional. When the film was finished, there were a lot of people who actually thought it was a non-fiction film. They though it was a documentary. I don’t understand that because all the characters die at the end. I don’t really know how they could see that. The rumor that it was real sort of grew and it was fueled by a lot of film critics who review your film without watching it. They’ll read the synopsis. Our synopsis said that these commercials were rejected just to set up the joke. So, a lot of reviews went to press saying that it was a non-fiction film and things like, “Wow, Don made lemons out of lemonade here. He got rejected, but he made a really neat short out of it.” For the longest time, we just let it go. I’d do Q&As and I’d get asked and I’d just say, “I can’t legally discuss…” It grew weird, it grew into this Andy Kaufmann sort of thing. So, I wondered what would happen if we really did get these on air now and just confuse everyone even more by taking out The Family Learning Channel and just say you’re watching MTV or the Cartoon Network or something. Then, to put another spin on the whole thing, Rejected was supposed to air on the Cartoon Network a few years ago. We got it on the air in Cartoon Network Spain and all these European offshoots of the Cartoon Network. In America, they were all excited. They ran ads for it, you know, “This weekend, Rejected, uncut, commercial free. We’ve got the balls to show it!”

Can you comment on other television commercials that have ripped-off your style?

It’s a bummer only because I don’t want people thinking that I actually did it. You know, you can’t copyright a stick figure. Maybe we popularized it. Rejected is so anti-corporate and so hateful about that sort of thing. And it just flies over the heads of ad agencies. They just see it as something else that they can poison and rip off. My only gripe is that people actually think that I do commercials and I’ll never do a commercial. As long as everybody knows that, and tells their friends, we’ll never have to worry about it. It’s annoying, and I can maybe get a lawyer, but it seems like such a square thing to do and everyone’s suing each other and I’d probably lose anyway. I don’t think you can copyright something like stick figures, so…c’est la vie. There were some cell phone commercials a few years ago that did something off of Lily and Jim—the same sort of squiggly stick figure thing—and, before they were made, they actually e-mailed me and they said, “Can we just pay you a lot of money to do these commercials?” And I said, “No, I don’t really want to do commercials.” And they said, “Ok, what if we just paid you a lot of money and we just used your style? You don’t have to do anything.” And I said, “well, it’s just as bad because people are going to think I did it and I’m just not interested.” They wrote back and said, “what if we just sent you our art and you just tell us when it’s far away enough from your stuff so you won’t sue us.” In hindsight, I should have just told them to fuck off. So they start sending me these weird mutant stick figures…it’s like something that maybe a girl in high school would draw on her binder, you know that kind of looks like my stuff, but it’s got ears? Or big shoes? They would just throw in artifacts that I wouldn’t draw. I thought that maybe it looked like I would have drawn it if I was drunk or if I had a brain problem. They’re refining it more and more and it’s getting weirder and weirder. Finally they just come up with this terrible drawing and, I tell them, “I think you nailed it. I don’t think anyone would ever think I drew a piece of shit like that.” They said, “great, great, thanks.” It was a national ad. I think it was Cingular Wireless or something. And, you know, about a week later I got an e-mail from someone saying, “Did you make those horrible cell phone commercials?” So, you can’t win.

Your stick figures are actually very identifiable as yours. There seems to be two varieties. It’s mostly the eyes that separate one type from the other.

That’s actually a good point. The film I’m doing now, the characters have black eyes like in L Ámour. The first thing I learned in photography – and this is very basic – was to keep the eyes in focus. If you’re taking someone’s portrait, that’s the only thing that matters. I think it kind of carried over subconsciously when I animated. The eyes are always very big and the eyes probably emote more than the rest of the characters because that’s always where the audience is going to look in any photo.

What else can you tell us about your new film?

It’s called Everything Will Be OK, which is my favorite title. It’s going to be done in a few months and it’s going along at rocket speed. It’s all done in pencils and I think I shaved about a year by not having to go back and ink everything. Parts of The Meaning of Life are in pencils, and I don’t think you can tell the difference between lead and ink. I did a really bad comic strip for an even worse web site called “Temporary Anesthetics” and there’s a character in there named Bill. Bill was actually something that was good that came out of these weird little strips. So, the whole film is Bill’s story. It’s very sad, strange, ironic and funny. But he’s a character that I didn’t want people to get to know very well. So, he’s got the black eyes.

And it will be in the next animation show, I assume?

Yeah. It looks like the next Animation Show theatrical will probably be in sneak previews next August. It’s a little further out than I want, but it’s always difficult to get funding. The Animation Show, to Mike Judge’s credit, is completely independent. It’s all funded by Mike personally; he puts in all of his own money to put on this show that’s kind of a passion project for the both of us. My side of it is putting in the time and the creative stuff because I have no money.

I’m amazed at how much expression you capture with so few lines. I’m wondering what you would draw when you were a kid?

My work didn’t look too different. I think it’s kind of evolved into this sort of stick figure, but it was very similar. I’ve always gone back to a Chuck Jones quote. He said that animation isn’t about how well you can draw. It’s got nothing to do with drawing, That’s a technical craft that you can learn and shape and train. Animation is about movement. It’s about telling a story through movement. I should just have that written on my forehead. It’s a brilliant quote. It reminds me of all the CG stuff that’s going around now, how photorealism has turned into the holy grail of animation all of a sudden. I don’t really care how beautiful the forest is rendered in Shrek because I’ve seen a forest before. I want to see something I haven’t seen before and to me, the point of animation is to get away from photorealism—to let the artist do whatever is in his head and express it in ways that you can’t with live action. It just seems that animation is turning into live action now in a way that I really don’t like. When photography first appeared, all of the realist painters were kind of out of luck. The painting world responded with surrealism and dada and crazy expressionist stuff—stuff you can’t capture in a camera. I’m just really hoping that there’re some adventurous artists out there who are working with computers because we need a movement of something experimental, something crazy.

Can you tell us about your use of classical music in your films?

I used Tchaikovsky in The Meaning of Life and I chose Tchaikovsky because of his piano concerto that’s in the human scenes and the later creature scenes. It’s Liberace’s signature tune. I feel that he sort of wrecked a piece of music that was originally very beautiful, and he turned it into this opulent, pretentious, arrogant sort of theme song for himself. So using it sort of gave it that touch of irony, I felt. When the humans are coming out, it’s this beautiful piece, but it’s got that Liberace problem with it now. I hate it when filmmakers use classical music as if it’s filler, as if all classical music’s the same, so they cherry pick a little Beethoven, and a little Mozart, a little of this and that, because it’s all the same to them. I wanted to make sure that the whole thing had the same voice and the same artist behind it, so I used Tchaikovsky for everything. The Nutcracker is one of my favorite pieces of music and I use it during the sequence through space and returning to Earth. That was the only moment in the film where I knew exactly what the music would be and I timed the animation to it. Honesty, I use classical music because it’s cheap. You can get the rights to it very easily and it’s the best music ever written, anyway. I’m trying to get a couple of popular songs for the next film and it’s a nightmare. None of these corporations really know who has the rights to what anymore. Most of them aren’t even getting back to me. The film has some opera and some polish classical music, but, I do need a couple of rock songs in there that I’m really crossing my fingers for.

The use of Tchaikovsky in The Meaning of Life recalls Disney’s Fantasia. Do you have any special regard for Fantasia? Your depiction of evolution also makes me think of that film’s Rite of Spring sequence.

The Meaning of Life owes a terrible lot to Fantasia, of course. I think it’s probably one of the best animated films ever made, easily.

Is it still possible for an animator to “make it” without doing commercial work.

Well, it’s easier if you do commercials. I don’t want to sound like I’m all high and mighty. All of my friends who are doing this sort of thing do commercials. It puts the food on the table and it helps to pay for the films they really want to make. My friend Bill Plympton does commercials all the time. He thinks I’m crazy for not taking all that money. It’s possible not to do them, but it’s difficult. The generic question I get the most when I’m talking to students, which I’m glad you didn’t ask, is “How do I break in?” I’ve always hated the phrase “break in” – like you don’t belong there, you’re not invited. The answer is…just…be invited, deserve it, be there. Everyone I know who’s doing anything interesting in animation worked harder than anyone else. I don’t feel like I’m brilliant or special or anything. I just worked harder than everyone I know. I don’t believe in the theory that there’s a lot of struggling undiscovered geniuses out there, you know. Going through the submissions we get at The Animation Show, the cream really rises to the top and you can tell when a piece is honest and it’s not just trying to impress you, it’s something that came from somebody personally. You can also tell when these submissions are really just calling cards to make a really cool feature and get an agent. Filmmakers just have to make up their own rules to a degree, because there is not an industry for short films in this country. There’s a lot of money to be made overseas, for example, on European television. It’s government run, so there are no commercials and they show short films before their programs. There’s also government funding for shorts, like up in Canada where they’ve got the National Film Board. But it’s unheard of here in the States to support the arts. So, you just have to scrape by and make up your own rules. Mike Judge and I wanted short films back in theatres, so we created our own company. I think if you just do the work and your films are honest, success will come to you eventually.

~Comments edited by Jim Healy. Transcription assistance provided by Joseph Cameron.