It's Such a Beautiful Day (2012)
★★★★½ — It's Such a Beautiful Day (2012)
Don Hertzfeldt is an independent animator who had spent the previous decade building a cult reputation through short films, most notably the absurdist Rejected (2000), which earned him an Academy Award nomination. It's Such a Beautiful Day began life as three separate short films (Everything Will Be OK in 2006, I Am So Proud of You in 2008, and the titular short in 2011), all produced under his own Bitter Films banner with no studio backing and essentially no budget beyond the cost of film stock and his own labour. Hertzfeldt shot on 35mm, working largely alone over several years, before compiling and re-editing all three parts into this single 62-minute feature. The completed film premiered on the festival circuit in 2012 and was later made available for free online, a distribution decision very much in keeping with his fiercely independent working method.
It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012) by Don Hertzfeldt is nothing short of a masterpiece. An animated film so deceptively simple in form yet staggering in emotional and philosophical depth that it lingers in your mind after viewing. Rendered in Hertzfeldt’s signature stick-figure aesthetic, with hand-drawn frames, lo-fi textures, and a haunting ambient score, the film follows Bill, an ordinary man grappling with memory, mortality, and the fragile beauty of everyday existence. What begins as a series of fragmented, dry comical vignettes gradually unfolds into a profound meditation on consciousness, loss, and what it means to be alive. Hertzfeldt blends absurdist humor with existential dread, cosmic wonder with domestic banality, crafting a narrative that feels both deeply personal and universally resonant. The animation (minimalist on the surface) becomes a canvas for surreal dream logic, neurological decay, and moments of transcendent clarity. Despite its modest visuals, the film achieves a level of emotional honesty and intellectual ambition rarely seen in any medium, let alone animation. It’s funny, heartbreaking, strange, and ultimately uplifting, not in a saccharine way, but in the quiet recognition that even in chaos, confusion, and impermanence, there is grace. Less a movie, more a mirror held up to the human condition. It’s Such a Beautiful Day doesn’t just tell a story; it alters your perception. A life-changing work of art, disguised as a doodle in the margins of a notebook.
Rating: ★★★★½ | Year: 2012 | Watched: 2026-03-02
Where to watch (US)
Rent: Vimeo
Buy: Vimeo
Physical: Amazon UK
Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More animation: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
