Don Hertzfeldt

[sir_luke]

Yeah, I have no difficulties or bubbles to report either.

[zedz]

So I got my copy today and...it might have spent too long in the Blu-ray ovens. It's difficult to navigate anywhere on the menu screen, and then when I do get somewhere it doesn't play what it says it's going to. I wouldn't rule out this all being part of an elaborate joke, but something tells me these tiny bubbles on the bottom of the disc are more to blame. Anyone else experiencing the same thing?

You are the lucky recipient of the Champagne Micro-Edition, with Drunk Girl Randomized Interactivity.

[Yakushima]

Swo17, I also had some trouble navigating the menu screen, I'll check for the bubbles when I'm back home tonight... Now I'm worried my Bluray was overcooked too

[D50]

Now all I need is a blu-ray player.

[Luke M]

I received mine today and I can't navigate it. None of the options highlight when I click the directional buttons. The play and skip buttons are prohibited. This is a big bummer.

Also, my disc appears normal. It loads normally and the menu screen plays fine. It's just missing that function to select the choices to play.

[Max von Mayerling]

I received mine today and I did not have any problems navigating the menus.

[Astroman]

Got mine today, too. Everything seems to work fine. (In fact, my only disappointment is the lack of Ah, L'amour.)

[Luke M]

I emailed the Kickstarter campaign and received a response almost immediately with a PO Box to return the disc. Apparently it's a known issue.

I'm a bit envious of those with working discs. I was super excited to dig through it but now I'm going to have to wait longer.

[Yakushima]

On a close inspection the edge of my Blu-ray appears to be slightly warped. The menu navigation lag was pretty bad, but it did not freeze and I managed to navigate my way to the World of Tomorrow and had a blast. Emailed Kickstarter about the issue.

[Yakushima]

A response was posted on the Kickstarter page:

Hi guys,
We've heard from a couple people who are having issues navigating the main menu. All of the Blu-rays were created with the same disc image, which means it's not possible for any of them to be different. So unless your copy is visibly cracked or totally blank, it's going to be exactly the same Blu-ray that everyone else has.
There seems to be an odd compatibility issue a few people are having with certain Blu-ray players. If you're having trouble navigating the menu, please first try updating your firmware or giving it a try on a different player. If you continue to have issues, please contact me directly with the make and model of your player.
We cannot replace copies because, again, they are all the same, but we hope to get to the bottom of why some systems are having menu trouble.
best wishes,
Andrew

[swo17]

My protection copy arrived today, and I can now confirm the following:

1. Neither disc plays right in my Sony.
2. Both play fine in other players.

So no point in seeking replacement copies, apparently.

[zedz]

My protection copy arrived today, and I can now confirm the following:

1. Neither disc plays right in my Sony.
2. Both play fine in other players.

So no point in seeking replacement copies, apparently.

This sound suspiciously like the situation with the most recent XTC 'box set in a BluRay release', Oranges and Lemons. All authored and produced according to official specs, but some Sony players won't load and play them properly. I believe it might be related to the fact that they were authored to be 'all region' or 'no region' (which I imagine is probably also the case with the Hertzfeldt disc), and Sony is for some reason incensed by the very idea of discs not being region locked, so their machines won't cooperate, even though region-free discs are supposed to be perfectly legitimate and officially sanctioned (and indeed they're accepted by almost every other player). If this is the case, it's Sony's error / problem, but they seem to be exceedingly reluctant to resolve it.

At any rate, my disc loads and plays perfectly and is a thing of beauty.

[PfR73]

This also sounds like a problem some people have reported (and I myself have had) with some Twilight Time discs on my parents' Insignia player. When the disc gets to the main menu, there is no ability to select any options from the menu screen.

[colinr0380]

My copy turned up today, so I'll give it a spin and try it out. I also chose the reward tier with the old DVD releases of the films just for completeness and they've already paid for themselves with the wonderful blocks of smallprint disclaimers on their back covers:

watching pelicans crash into the ocean, they twist a certain way just before they hit the water

...there is a large green plant at the bottom of the stairs and as he comes down, it is gyrating around and flopping its fronds together in the wind, in a sort of plant applause.

Now playing in MOVING-FRAME-O-VISION, at NO ADDITONAL CHARGE. Girls! See if your boyfriend can take it! Boys! See if your girlfriend will instinctively cling to you during the scary bits, using her her subconscious need for fathering protection as your AWKWARD CUE for clumsy, ultimately humiliating sexual fumblings! DEPRESS your friends! DISAPPOINT your parents! WARNING: We cannot be held responsible if you NEVER SLEEP AGAIN!

And of course the new blu-ray has:

the struggling independent animated short films you grew up with - PROUDLY MAKING THEIR FIRST APPEARANCE ON BLU-RAY JUST IN TIME FOR THE FORMAT TO GO SLOWLY OBSOLETE

onward onward towards the unknowable

[PfR73]

I haven't seen it pointed out yet: from what I checked on my disc, all the films have lossless DTS-HD Master Audio tracks!

[colinr0380]

With World of Tomorrow in 5.1 or Stereo as well!

This is such a beautifully upsetting series of films, unafraid to reach for the profound but knowing the value of humour to undercut that, or perhaps even to emphasise through its naivete. To undercut the possible pretension and leaven the tougher moments whilst a fragile human element is caught in the middle.

I remember reading the synopsis of the film version of It's Such A Beautiful Day in Sight & Sound a number of years ago, which made the film sound like one of the most depressing 'medical drama' films about illness and deterioration ever made! And indeed if just looked at in plot terms it is a piece about entropy in many ways, as people live their lives in fear of inevitable death, along the journey losing parts of themselves (the skin replacing itself constantly turning you into a whole new person through simple aging is a beautiful metaphor, especially when scenes later focus on the dust motes in a sunbeam) and eventually their memories until they aren't who they thought they were. All those extended family members lost to time, lives of suffering briefly captured in ephemeral memento moris.

Yet without softening or mitigating that harsh 'real world' inevitability in any way, It's Such A Beautiful Day does show the world simultaneously becoming strange and estranged from Bill, but also the deterioration in some ways becomes a liberation too. The world turns into something wonderous and strange, full of new places to visit (even if it is the same endlessly repeated walk around the block - but even we in the audience start seeing the way ostensibly the same places can have different things going on in them, even if its just different passers-by) and experiences are never dulled by their repetition. The smallest, most miniscule aspects of the world surrounding Bill become strange and unique again. That could simply be shown as a horrible, frightening loss of control, and it feels a lot like that at first (especially in the hospital scenes of being talked to, then let loose in the world none the wiser), but it is perhaps the gentle first stage of saying goodbyes to the world, of the mind moving on while the body stays behind for a while.

The world is given shape and meaning by his perception and that way of looking at the world is unique to him, the one being at the one point in space who is privileged to exist, witness and interpret the moment of time that he is travelling through. His perceptions are unique to himself, and that continues despite the illness and perhaps is even heightened by it into seeing different aspects of the world around him. There's even what seems to be a beautful homage to La Jetée in a brief live action moment!

The final section pushing back against that inevitable death, while it has obviously already occurred, feels so powerful because it begins like a fightback, a refusal to countenance death at all (if just for a chance to have the time to read all the books in the library), yet even in an immortal existence Bill is still a witness to the inevitability of the cycle of life and death as he loves and loses an endless string of lovers, discovers everything and visits every place on the Earth and yet still goes on, off into the death of the Earth around him, then the galaxy, then the universe itself as the twinkling synaptic flashes of stars burn out one by one.

Perhaps immortality is the same thing as death when the world itself dies around you. The world is bounded by the physical body and mind and when that interior space falls apart, so does the outside world. So it makes sense that the same is true vice versa! It makes it feel perfect that these animations use stick figures for their characters. This would make a good companion piece to a film like Enter The Void, and in some ways illustrates a point of view more accepting of non-existence than the character in Enter The Void, trapped in a frustrated cycle of reincarnation! (Though speaking personally I'd love it if reincarnation were real! Then I could be sure to get a chance to read all the books and watch all the films over a couple of lifetimes!)

Just the stick figure outlines to define a kind of 'inner' and 'outer' space allow these bodies to reveal surprising new elements from within themselves (as say in Wisdom Teeth!) as well as seeming just empty space waiting to be filled, or projected upon, or like top heavy bubbles waiting to float away like balloons!

As much as I like It's Such A Beautiful Day, I love The Meaning of Life maybe more, because that goes into amazing territory of language getting reduced to non-sequitur lines, then phrases, then hoots, hollers and even just incoherent screams of bustling passers-by (I think I've met the person who huffily shouts "No!" at everything!) until we reach an entirely new alien world and see communication, companionship and love expressed through their own bizarre verbal communications! As much as the stick figure characters are simple and projectable onto, there is also the sense that the stick figures are like cells of a body, an inner nucleus bounded by a pencil-thin line membrane that both isolates and shields from the outside world, but also defines the body to the outside world. A film like The Meaning of Life sort of equates the stick figure with alien blobs and cell-like structures, as if to show that every living being needs that kind of definition. That dermarcation that protects and also projects an identity out at the wider world.

World of Tomorrow is such a beautiful piece of work. The sci-fi premise of the young girl being visited by her third generation grown up clone to extract a childhood memory is a great conceit in itself, and I love all the slight political comments casually thrown in that raise all sorts of questions about the world - the recession on the Moon and the class system basis for who gets the (wonderfully imperfect, deteriorating with every generation!) clone treatment or whether they get the little black cube! Even in such an abstract future it all comes down to money!

I also love the contrast between the inquisitive and happy young girl and her more unemotional, detatched younger/older clone of herself. I love the "They're OK","No, they're all dead" blunt exchange! Up there with "You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead","OK" at least! Perhaps you can only have true beauty by making a sacrifice. Or perhaps part of what makes beauty so special is its ephemerality, like a shooting star or a rainbow!

In quite a Terry Gilliam-style way, this wonderous future world is falling apart around the edges (never trust anyone to teleport you to the right place in this universe!), with seeming flaws in the cloning resulting in weird stroke-like blinks and lost memories, as the younger 'vessels' for older consciousnesses fall apart. This (and the bit about watching memories on TV, with most now watching others watching TV in their memories) seems to be getting at the errors (wear and tear?) inevitably introduced by dubbing something over and over and the contrast between the 'original, perfect' and the 'flawed, copy' of Emily. Yet this all gets wonderfully complicated by the older Emily relating her 'future memories' of significant loves and memories of interstellar travel that have made her life unique and special, and presumably different to any other Emily that has existed. And its all bounded in an event in the older Emily's future that is about to destroy the Earth and everyone on it.

Does at least something more existing beyond our lifespan make sense as a goal to achieve? Even if things are imperfectly made in our own image and not 'truly' who the original was when alive they can at least have an existence of their own. And what about the act of creation of building objects that we then give a consciousness? At least they might be left to write letters or depressing poetry in our stead, even if it is left up in the air whether doing that is a gift or a curse! ("Oh. Oh God. Holy Mother Of God. Oh. Oh. Oh God") Is it better or worse to be left as an aging empty shell or given some kind of consciousness to work and create your own memories with, if only for a brief time?

World of Tomorrow is both cute and tough, gorgeous looking and naively drawn, hilarious and awfully serious. And another film about memory loss and deterioration. And I can't help but thinking of the E.T. phone home sequence in 2001 whenever I watch it!

Rejected is a hilarious piece of work (my favourite is the "Silly Hat Convention" sketch! Though are the figures singing the Swedish New Year song from Fanny & Alexander during the "my anus is bleeding" skit?!?), about what happens when unwanted animations get brutally disposed of. Its up there with Duck Amuck at least! And it seems to suggest where the asdf shorts are getting their inspiration from!

Wisdom Teeth feels very Monty Python (in its two shot sketch comedy framing and the Holy Grail-style foreign subtitles!), while The Meaning of Life goes rather Douglas Adams, with its wonderful discussion of the meaning of life in an alien language, but with strangely understandable inflections and gestures by the alien blobs! And the "Popular animated TV show intro" works wonderfully in context with the rest of the shorts on the disc, being about imperfect replication, the devolution of figures into almost cancerous alien blobs, and an existence that seems to be being artificially prolonged long beyond its natural end, into an almost incomprehendable future! But the ability to buy the merchandise is still in place!

The student films are great too: Billy's Balloon is sort of hilarious but then disturbing then hilarious again in its story of what would happen if all the balloons in the world (literally!) rose up against their human oppressors! Lily and Jim is perhaps the least wacky and most 'accessible' piece on the whole disc, but I love the really well observed interactions between the awkward blind date couple, especially their little eye movements! Though there is that turn at the end into Total Recall-style bulging eyes, only getting even bigger and more horrific every time it cuts back to Jim, and of course its tragically hilarious that there is no way in that social situation to not say no to one more painful sip of coffee!

[Emak-Bakia]

To anyone still looking for a copy of the blu-ray, it's currently available for purchase directly from Bitter Films for $30 with shipping included.

[kuzine]

Any other backers in mainland Europe still waiting to receive this?
Hasn't turned up in my mailbox yet.

EDIT: [arrived this week...]

[Dr Amicus]

Mine arrived in Guernsey on Friday.

[kuzine]

Opened the blu-ray tonight and having a problem during It's such a beautiful day. Around the 25:30 mark it hangs and skips for about 10 sec. Have only watched the two main titles so far and no other issues. Anybody else experience this? Tried it on my Oppo + my external drive connected to my laptop, same issue on both.

[gfxtwin]

Works fine for me. Kinda bummed about the lack of Ah, L'amour and Genre, which were my favorites after World of Tomorrow and Rejected, but maybe they'll be special features on a Vol 2 Bluray in the future, which I'll probably also buy.

[colinr0380]

Austin Film Society's trailer for their theatrical screening of Rejected!

[DarkImbecile]

Hertzfeldt is making It’s Such a Beautiful Day available for free streaming

[DarkImbecile]

"Will Animators Inherit the Post-Pandemic Earth?', Don Hertzfeldt's article on pandemic life for Vulture

[lzx]

Per Hertzfeldt's Twitter, the print of It's Such a Beautiful Day that premiered on the Criterion Channel yesterday is a "newly color corrected version"; the Blu-ray reprint (!) will also feature this version.