You’ll be seeing a lot more of us from now on… we’re gearing up to bringing you LIAF screenings throughout the year and we’re beginning our year-round adventures in animation, with a UK premiere…
We’re very proud to be bringing you festival favourite Don Hertzfeldt’s debut feature film ‘It’s Such a Beautiful Day’ on Friday 14th December at the Horse Hospital. Plus a special support programme of short films by five maverick American animators and a Canadian scratch master.
You can take a look at the full programme and book your tickets here.
Cult animator and Academy Award nominee Don Hertzfeldt has combined his three short films about a troubled man named Bill ‘Everything will be OK’ (2006), ‘I Am So Proud of You’ (2008) and ‘It’s Such a Beautiful Day’ (2011) – into one seamless, beautiful, darkly comedic new feature film.
Upon its original release ‘Everything will be OK’ won the Sundance Film Festival’s Jury Award for Short Filmmaking and was named by many critics as one of the “Best films of 2007.” ‘I Am So Proud of You’ received 27 awards and was described by the San Francisco International Film Festival as “[his] best yet… even the Hertzfeldt faithful may be too stunned to laugh.”
Nearly two years in the making, the newly released ‘It’s Such a Beautiful Day’ is Don’s longest and most ambitious short film to date: blending traditional animation, experimental optical effects, trick photography, and new digital hybrids printed out one frame at a time. All three films were captured entirely in-camera on an antique 35mm animation stand. Built in the 1940s, it is one of the last surviving cameras of its kind still operating in America, and was indispensable in the creation of the story’s unique visual effects and experimental images. Here’s a flavour of the first minute of ‘I’m So Proud of You’ (Don narrates throughout).
Since 1995 Don’s films have collectively received over 200 awards. Some notable honours include a Short Film Palm D’or nomination at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival for ‘Billy’s Balloon’, a 2001 Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short ‘Rejected’, the Lawrence Kasdan Award for Best Narrative Film for ‘Everything will be OK‘, and Best Picture and Best Screenplay from the Fargo Film Festival for ‘I Am So Proud of You‘. In 2010 Don received the San Francisco International Film Festival’s ‘Persistence of Vision’ Lifetime Achievement Award at the age of 33.
Steven Pate of the Chicagoist has this to say about Don’s latest offering:
“There is a moment in each installment of Don Hertzfeldt’s masterful trilogy of animated shorts where you feel something in your chest. It’s an unmistakably cardiac event, the kind that great art can elicit when something profound and undeniably true is conveyed about the human condition. That’s when you say to yourself: are stick figures supposed to make me feel this way? In the hands of a master, yes. And Hertzfeldt is to stick figures what Franz Liszt was to planks of ebony and ivory and what Ted Williams was to a stick of white ash: someone so transcendentally expert that to describe what they do in literal terms is borderline demeaning.”
Quite an act to follow…
Find out the films we’ll be screening in the supporting programme by five maverick American animators and a Canadian scratch master here!
