I ran across Don Hertzfeldt’s work in about 10 years ago. He has an offbeat simple method of animation that is very funny despite the stark nature of his work. He is perhaps most famous for Rejected which was nominated for an Oscar – warning not safe for work & children:
The story behind rejected is simple (from Wikipedia):
The film presents itself as a reel of rejected commercial work by a fictional version of Don Hertzfeldt. The commissioned animated vignettes grow more and more abstract and inappropriate as the animator suffers a mental breakdown, until they literally fall apart.
Although the film is of course fictional and Hertzfeldt has never done any commercial work, he did receive many offers to do television commercials after Billy’s Balloon garnered international attention and acclaim. Hertzfeldt is an artist with anti-corporate leanings and in appearances has often told the humorous story of how he was tempted to produce the worst possible cartoons he could come up with for the companies, make off with their money, and see if they would actually make it to air. Eventually this became the germ for Rejected’s theme of a collection of cartoons so bad they were rejected by advertising agencies, leading to their creator’s breakdown.
Despite his desire to stay away from commercial success I was surprised a while ago to see what clearly (in my mind at least) looked like his work for Pop Tarts?
I can’t be the only person to see the similarities. I wonder how Don feels about this. Anyone interested in supporting his work can purchase his films here. While Hertzfeldt won’t go after people posting his work to the net he does feel that you don’t get the full feel for his work unless you see a high quality version of it.