JC’s Faves: It’s Such a Beautiful Day
Entry #1
by Marc V. Calderaro
What a great movie to begin this mission.
It would be easy to wax about how you liked The Animation Show before it was cool, or how you were the one who showed your friends “Rejected,” or whatever. Those self-referential comic endeavors fuel in-crowd-style behavior, and make for great late-night, munchie-filled times. But Don Hertzfeldt — the mind behind those impressive displays of creativity and humor — asks something more from his audience in It’s Such a Beautiful Day.
The title is taken from the third of three short-film chapters that combine into one feature-ish-length film (“Everything will be OK”, “I Am So Proud of You”, and “It’s Such a Beautiful Day”). I was lucky enough to see each chapter as they premiered, and unlike the universal appeal of Hertzfeldt’s earlier, lighter shorts, these seemed to increasingly polarize the audiences.
Instead of a crudely drawn thing chanting “My spoon is too big,” or “I am the Queen of France” which lent itself to dorm-room-style quote-a-thons, we meet a crudely drawn thing named Bill, who leads a sad, miserable life; then he’s diagnosed with a brain tumor.
It’s all downhill from there. Kinda. Bill goes on adventures of intermittently epic and mundane proportions as his mind catalogs memories, emotions, and plenty of hallucinations trying to grapple with the news, and the neurons, being fired at him from all directions.
We learn about Bill’s difficult childhood that led him to such a mediocre adulthood. We watch him vacillate between fighting for his shitty life and not being able to get out of bed. We see his dreams and hopes become realized — never knowing what parts were ever real to begin with. We watch his mind fall apart, while opening up pathways he’s never accessed before.
In short, we watch Bill become a person — both to us, and to himself. If Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru were not a big inspiration for this film, I’d be quite surprised.
Using a unique combination of orchestra swells and scores, animated photography, experimental editing, experimental sound design, and his characteristic “crudely drawn dudes,” Hertzfeldt swings for the fences in It’s Such a Beautiful Day. And he fucking knocks it out of the park.
The word “genius” is thrown around when people talk about Hertzfeldt and this movie, and they are correct. This film is a singular, unique vision that succeeds at every place I expect it to fail — and by all logic, should fail.
Hertzfeldt asks many gigantic questions in this film, about spirituality, the nature of memory, the reason for life — he gives fellow Austin-ite, Terrence Malick a run for his philosophical money — but mostly he asks something simpler. How much can you care for a stick figure? How much empathy, sympathy, pity, joy, rejection, nostalgia, hope, love; how much feeling can you put into Bill? A character with no distinguishing features—just a stupid hat.
The answer is “a shit ton.” Some how, some way, Bill becomes a stand-in for everything we hope our lives never become — rote and uninteresting. We see all of Bill’s life: the big moments of diagnosis and family gatherings, but we also see him wait at a bus station, watching a feckless leaf-blower, for almost two full minutes. There is no pedestal of value placed on the experiences of our lives. They are all equal, and all combine to make one whole.
Through every aspect of his life, we root for Bill to get his act together and live, because that’s what we do to ourselves every day. When grappling for his life, Bill pulls thoughts and memories from all corners of his mind, and Bill becomes three-dimensional before our eyes. He becomes our uncle we don’t talk to enough; he becomes our friend.
I cry every time I watch this film, basically throughout the whole thing. But nothing gets me more than the moment from which the second act takes it name.
We are learning about Bill’s mother, who was fraught with chemical imbalances that apparently run in the family. She makes Bill do silly things as a child because of her crippling fears about anything happening to her little boy. We watch this poor woman try unendingly to keep the pieces on the table, and it’s a daily struggle.
She often must only care for herself, or she’ll collapse. And we wonder if she has the faculties to show Bill how much she truly cares for him — as it’s often lost under the psychosis.
But every day, she sends Bill off to school with a handwritten note containing this simple phrase:
Later, after her death, Bill finds a box of her old belongings. Among the silly knickknacks, the narrator (Hertzfeldt, himself) tells us:
“Near the bottom of the storage box, Bill found an old notebook he had never seen before. Filling the pages, his mother had repeatedly practiced her handwriting. So she could send him off to school with the best-looking notes.”
(I just began crying while looking for those frames to grab.)
In this moment, the movie takes the disparate representations of the epic and the mundane and smushes them into one. This small gesture becomes a transcendent message that brings comprehension to the meaningless babble of existence. Just five small words, written in perfect script, encapsulates eons of human experience. This is what Hertzfeldt is doing.
At the film’s end (spoiler alert), Bill dies. But instead of actually dying, Hertzfeldt the narrator re-writes Bill’s future to have him survive until the end of time. We watch him meet people, fall in love, watch them die, watch the world end, roam the empty caverns of a deserted Earth, and float through space until there’s no more space to float through.
Hertzfeldt comments here on the requirement of death — its necessity. Though mundane, death is just another piece that completes the puzzle of existence. And without it, the picture is unfinished. We enjoy seeing the false-happy ending of Bill living forever, but understand why that can never be. The insipid parts of a life must be there too — especially the ending.
This movie is a gargantuan effort of feeling.
This movie is a monument to how seamlessly the blasé and the beyond weave into our lives.
This movie is a towering work of passion and inventiveness — as Hertzfeldt continually finds new ways to explore the crevasses of Bill’s mind.
But mostly, It’s Such a Beautiful Day is about a stick figure.
And that’s pretty amazing.
