Don Hertzfeldt (born August 1, 1976) is the creator of many short animated films, including the Academy-Award nominated "Rejected" and Everything Will Be OK. He has an odd style, stick figures on paper with very little use of digital processing. You can get his films at his website, Bitter Films, and read up on some Word Of God in this Reddit thread.His animated shorts include:
Adaptation Expansion: Bill was originally from Hertzfeldt's webcomic Temporary Anesthetics and in it led a relatively normal, if depressing in a banal way, life, free of mental disorder (if you're willing to forget about some strange recurring dreams).
Brick Joke: Near the start of the film, the narrator remarks on how Bill always picked fruit from the back of the pile at the grocer's, because the fruit at the front was at "crotch-level" with the other customers. Later on, he starts hallucinating that, in addition to having smokey demon heads, everyone he saw had "gigantic, bacteria-riddled crotches all over the goddamn produce."
Dysfunction Junction: Most everyone Bill knows and meets was odd in one way or another, such as his unhelpful neighbor who talked about nanomachines could preserve his brain in a failed effort to comfort Bill, and quickly changed the subject to a dream he had where his toes fell off.
Hallucinations: Bill suffers these multiple times throughout the film.
Public Domain Soundtrack: Excerpts from Bizet's "Au fond du temple saint" and Smetana's "Vitava (Moldau)" are featured.
Sanity Slippage: "THE PIPE IS LEAKING. THE PIPE IS LEAKING. THE PIPE IS LEAKING."
Title Drop: Very nearly; the exactly line is, "...as if everything were OK."
I am so proud of you
Crazy Cat Lady: Bill's schizophrenic grandmother, who kept severed cat heads in her dresser and would rub them across her scalp when she "felt the fish smothering her brain".
To a lesser extent, Bill's mother. She only had one cat, but she would shave it on the weekends.
Public Domain Soundtrack: Excerpts from Strauss's "Vier letzte Lieder", Wagner's "Das Rheingold" and "Im Treibhaus", and Bremner's "Old Sir Symon the King" are used.
Railroad Tracks of Doom: three of Bill's relatives, including his mother, were killed by trains.
Title Drop: Bill's mother would pack notes saying, "I am so proud of you!" with his school lunches. As noted in Hope Spot above, the previous film's title is very nearly dropped.
Wild Child: "A wild man wandered into town that summer and beat the church organist with a shovel." He was really Bill's great-great-uncle, whose parents had drugged and abandoned in the woods as a child.
Wisdom Teeth
Braces of Orthodontic Overkill: A variant. We can see three stitches from Nigel's wisdom teeth operation sticking out of his mouth, whenever he talks.
Breaking the Fourth Wall: There is at least one reference to the audience in all three segments.
Brick Joke: The beginning segment starts out with the two characters talking about the lobby of the theater, and by the ending there are a slice of pie, a hot dog, and a soda cup walking towards the right of the screen, with music in the background singing about, whaddaya know, the Lobby.
Call Back: Both the characters are based on the "Fluffy Guys" in Rejected, down to the Swedish christmas carols playing in the background.
Captain Obvious: The second half of the beginning of The Animation Show.
"The Animation Show is the greatest animation show ever created by human beings. Only the most animated animation film animations make it into the Animation Show."
Funny Background Event: in the ending song to the beginning segment, the erudite character (who has long legs and one hand bigger than the other) is running back and forth, on fire.
Go Mad from the Revelation: The result of wearing 3-D glasses: some horrifying hallucinations followed by screaming, "IT'S LIKE I CAN TOUCH YOU!"
Left Fluffy Guy: An animated film is not just a random series of mindless, self-indulgent violent cartoon images meant only to be enjoyed by young children and people with mental handicaps, but as a serious, valid art media all unto itself, in which the artist is free to explore the purity of the film medium down to each and every single frame! The animated arts are- Right Fluffy Guy: ROBOTS! (over a minute of Fluffy Guys getting mauled by robots)
Mushroom Samba/Nightmare Fuel: The third dimension. At the end of the sequence, one of the characters is holding a giant lollipop shouting nonsense as Swedish Christmas music plays in the background. Then the lollipop becomes a swarm of spiders which begin to eat the character.
Techno Babble: In the second segment, one of the characters asks the other about 'the third dimension', prompting a verbose response that ends with "The very face of god!"
and Everything Will Be OK. He has an odd style, stick figures on paper with very little use of digital processing. You can get his films at his website, Bitter Films,
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