It's Such a Beautiful Day (2012)
★★★★½ — It's Such a Beautiful Day (2012)
There is a particular corner of independent animation that operates almost entirely outside the commercial studio system, made by individuals working alone, over long periods, with limited resources and no safety net. Don Hertzfeldt has occupied that corner for the best part of three decades. A filmmaker and animator based in the United States, Hertzfeldt first attracted widespread attention with his 2000 short Rejected, a piece of surreal, self-destructing absurdism that became something of a cult phenomenon in the early internet era. He has continued to work through his own production company, Bitter Films, retaining complete creative control over everything he produces. It's Such a Beautiful Day, released in 2012, is the feature-length culmination of a trilogy of shorts he made between 2006 and 2011, compiled and completed into a single 62-minute film. It arrived with considerable word of mouth from festival audiences and a devoted following online, though it never received anything approaching mainstream theatrical distribution. For a film of this ambition, that relative obscurity says more about the state of the industry than it does about the work itself.
The film centres on a character called Bill, an ordinary, unremarkable man whose grip on his own mind begins to loosen in ways that are at once comic and quietly devastating. Hertzfeldt wrote, directed, animated and narrated the film himself, with Sara Cushman providing additional voice work. The production is, by any conventional measure, a one-man operation, drawn on 35mm film stock using hand-crafted techniques that deliberately resist the polished fluency of mainstream animation. If you have seen work such as Josep or No Dogs or Italians Allowed, both of which sit at the more personal, artisanal end of the animated form, you will have some sense of how much can be communicated through deliberately constrained visuals. Hertzfeldt takes that principle considerably further. His stick-figure drawings would look at home on a school exercise book, and that is, in part, exactly the point. The simplicity of the line is not a limitation but a kind of openness, an invitation to project something of yourself onto the screen.
What makes the film formally interesting is how Hertzfeldt layers that rudimentary draughtsmanship against photographic backgrounds, archival footage and experimental optical effects, creating a visual grammar that feels unlike anything else in animation or, for that matter, in film more broadly. It sits somewhere between experimental short film, philosophical essay and observational comedy, a combination that makes it genuinely awkward to categorise. Audiences used to the rhythms of conventional storytelling, even unconventional animated storytelling as in something like Trolls or The Hunchback of Notre Dame, may find the pace and structure initially disorienting. The film is in no hurry, and it does not explain itself. Whether that is a virtue or a frustration will depend very much on the viewer.
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.
I'll be honest: films like this do not come along very often, and when they do, I find myself slightly at a loss for what to say to someone who has not yet seen them, because almost any description undersells it. My advice is simply to give it the hour it asks for and resist the urge to have your phone in your hand. It rewards attention in ways that sneak up on you, sometimes days later, when a mundane moment in your own day suddenly carries a strange extra weight and you realise where that feeling came from. That is a rare thing for any film to pull off. Rarer still for one drawn in stick figures on a kitchen table.
Rating: ★★★★½ | Year: 2012 | Watched: 2026-03-02
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for It's Such a Beautiful Day (2012) on YouTube
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