It’s a pretty good time for animation. Though it’s fallen from the heady days of Walt Disney and Looney Tunes that enraptured the world, it’s become a serious medium with a startling variety of forms. From Wallace & Gromit’s clay-mation to Pixar’s computer animation to South Park’s construction paper-inspired figures, cartoons aren’t just for kids on Saturday morning anymore.
One of the finest examples of animation’s thriving scene is the The Animation Show, a traveling roster of animation short films presented biennially by Mike Judge, the creator of Beavis and Butt-Head, and Don Hertzfeldt, the creator of Rejected. The show rolled into Chicago over the weekend at The Music Box, a few blocks from Wrigley Field.
Almost all of the films in this year’s circuit were smart flicks with snappy visuals. The computer-generated 9 was a masterfully suspensful hunt between a robotic monster and a tiny, frail rag doll. Dreams and Desires, with the delirious colored-pencil style of Joanna Quinn (who did those Charmin bear ads too) was a nauseating and delicious look at a wedding gone wrong. But as good as they were, in comparison to Hertzfeldt’s latest short, Everything will be OK, those other films feel insubstantial — or, at least trite for letting the rules of cinema hem them in.
Everything will be OK throws a lot of those rules out the window. Much of the dialogue is unintelligible, and the narrator often can’t be heard. There’s no plot either. And most of the screen is black. All the time. Combined with Hertzfeldt’s stick figures and sporadic video of power lines and beaches throughout, it’s potent. Where most of the other short films repacked truths we already knew in cute ways, Hertzfeldt was the rare director willing to call you out and say, “Everything that you think is wrong.”
The 17-minute short follows Bill, a sympathetic everyman, as he goes through various moments in his life that are explained by an unseen narrator. Bill goes to the supermarket. He watches TV. He eats crackers. The short snippets don’t really connect to each other: There’s no story, just scenes. Each of the scenes is presented in a white bubble on a pitch-black screen. Together though, they do reveal a man who doesn’t really know what he’s doing in life:
• In one segment, the narrator says, “Bill put on a sweater, but it only made him sleepy,” as we watch Bill sit with a sweater on. Then the bubble closes, the screen blacks out, and we move on.
• In another, we see a stick figure and the narrator says, “Bill’s neighbor said sup.” The letters “S-U-P-.” are spelled out over the figure’s head before that bubble closes too.
Other moments show Bill hanging out with his ex-girlfriend, eating crackers and, in the longest sequence, being diagnosed by his doctor and ending up in the hospital. These moments’ only connection to each other is that they come one after the other, but there is no sense of cause and effect. And that seems to be one of Hertzfeldt’s themes: Though we look for plot lines and resolutions and beginnings and endings in our lives, things seem to make sense because they all happen, not because one causes another. The black background alternately feels nightmarish or reflective, depending on what happens in the bubbles within. But Hertzfeldt never uses the whole screen at any given moment, and we sense there’s more to Bill’s life, and our own, than we can possibly reach.
Seinfeld’s over-the-top analysis of social norms was the beginning of the obsessive self-awareness that infects culture today. Everything will be OK takes that meta-thinking to its logical conclusion, though it’s a different one than Family Guy’s. Social satire is still played for laughs. The opening sequence shows Bill and a stranger approaching each other, and perfectly dissects, in rapid-fire statements, what goes through someone’s head when they have to greet someone they don’t know (the narrator ends the scene with a statement like “They never saw each other again, but that feeling of unease stayed with them the rest of the day”). But Hertzfeldt goes on to reduce social interaction to more base levels, so much that it becomes inherently meaningless. The film suggests life is a series of acts and thoughts unfinished, each with dubious value.
That’s not to say the film suggests life is meaningless. Actually, Hertzfeldt suggests life’s pinpricks and heartbeats are so vivid and real that that film itself, and art in general, can’t come close to capturing it. During several extended sequences, he puts two, three, sometimes even nine bubbles, each with a different scene, on the screen all playing at once. It’s impossible to keep up with any of them, and soon we lose track of all of them. On top of that the sounds of each scene clash with the voice of the narrator and random other sounds, like radio static. The crush of sound makes the film incomprehensible, but Hertzfeldt’s meaning is clear: Traditional narratives can no longer contain the emotions he’s trying to evoke.
From what I could tell, Hertzfeldt himself voices the omnipresent narrator, which adds a nice twist to the proceedings. The narrator serves as Bill’s sarcastic friend, empathizing with his struggles while mocking them at the same time. The narration is so strong and effective that only long after I left the theater did I realize I had never heard Bill’s own voice. Which begs the question: Through this intimate, epic journey through Bill’s life, how much does the narrator really know Bill? And how much does Bill know himself?
Everything will be OK is just the first part of a series of three films on Bill’s life, Hertzfeldt has written on his Web site. Though not as dramatic and soul-searching as his previous work, The Meaning of Life, it’s a clear response to it. In Meaning, Hertzfeldt asks what the meaning of life is. In Everything he asks why people keep looking for it.
Patrick St. Michel and I talked more about the film over cheese sticks and a hamburger at 1835 Hinman one night. Feel free to take a listen:
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