KD^3C^3 - 20260531 New Jersey Has Its Malls
Don Hertzfeldt, in addition to having a difficult name to spell right on the first time, is a singular talent in the world of animation. By which I mean there is nobody in animation quite like him.
I know when I first saw Rejected, the best known Don Hertzfeldt short film. I was in a large canvas army tent a a scout camp. We called the tent The Moose. I don’t know why we called it that. But if you were part of the youth staff at this camp (I was) you spent what precious little downtime you had in The Moose. The Moose was our refuge, it was one of the few places with electricity, which we siphoned off from the meeting hall and kitchen (which it was behind) and we the staff were allowed to have all the sorts of contraband that wasn’t allowed in the rest of the camp, things like cokes and a DVD player.
Interestingly, The Moose was the first place I ever saw the movie Bring it On, as well. But that’s unsupervised teenagers for you. We were still boy scouts, so the most risqué thing we could make ourselves watch was a PG-13 cheerleading movie, but it still felt transgressive. That’s why I still say “there must be some clovers in the atmosphere” anytime someone else says “It’s cold in here.”
Where was I? The Moose. In the year 2002 (or maybe 3) youtube did not exist. The internet was around, and maybe you would hang around on AIM in the evenings, but it wasn’t the sort of thing that always lived in your pocket like it is now. Search engines didn’t exist or were terrible for actually finding things (we’ve gotten back to that for some reason). So most of the cool things that were on the internet were passed around from person to person “You’ve got to see this!” If you had a fancy enough computer you could burn a CD with some of the cool stuff ou downloaded and a friend could play it on their computer. Mostly this was music we downloaded off napster, but there were other things too.
I know we didn’t have wifi in The Moose, so somebody probably had a low res burned CD or DVD that contained a bootleg of Rejected, Don Hertzfedlt’s movie on it.
Rejected is a very good short film, i think that needs to be said up from (or 6 paragraphs in, whatever). Honestly, if you haven’t seen it, you probably should. It’s on YouTube now in glorious 1080p. The short film presents to us as a collection of rejected animated ads for The Family Learning Channel and then Johnson & Mills products, neither of which exist. The ads, such as they are, are nonsensical, and there’s not any question as to why they were rejected in this fictional situation.
The shorts became more surreal and violent as the creator has a complete breakdown, with the cartoons completely breaking their own reality as the paper they are animated on crumples and fills with holes and eventually is completely destroyed with a silent scream.
The first, and probably best known(?) clip in the short film is a character standing and holding a very large spoon next to a much smaller bowl of something. He complains that his spoon is too big, repeatedly. Then an anthropomorphic banana walks in and declares that it is a banana. It’s a funny bit of lol-random humor. And its the only thing it feels like the early internet remembered from the whole film. The two characters juxtaposed became one of the earliest memes, or shibboleths, of internet culture. Arguably a lot of the whole early internet humor landscape was birthed from the proliferation of that image. If you wanted to be edgy you also included the little fluffy creature screaming about a bleeding anus.
But the short film isn’t about being funny, it’s about failure. it’s right there in the title. Of course the rejected ads aren’t very good at what they’re supposed to be doing, but that’s because they’re meant to show the tension between creativity and commerce. This animator can only get work shilling for corporations, and any attempt to express themselves honestly or try new things, is stamped down or rejected until the artist is completely destroyed.
I like to think that if the early internet had paid more attention to the anti-capitalist message that the movie was actually trying to convey the first two decades of the 21st century might have gone at least a little differently.
I think there’s a reason Don Hertzfeldt’s later works didn’t get nearly as popular, despite being better in most ways than Rejected. And that reason is that he leaned more into the darkness of the stories he was telling than the “random” humor. It’s not that his animated films stopped being funny, but the humor becomes more inextricable from the story he’s telling. The problem (not that it’s really a problem) is that the little clips in Rejected were to easy to divorce from the context in which they originally appeared. It wasn’t a funny joke, it was a funny joke meant to reflect the larger situation.
Hertzfeld is still out there making cartoons. He has created a few feature-length productions, all still animated one frame at a time by one single animator, Don Hertzfeldt. I personally think It’s Such a Beautiful Day is his masterpiece, but World of Tomorrow Parts 1-3 are an impressive trilogy of shorts exploring identity and purpose, all through the lens of science fiction and it’s very clear that Hertzfeldt is continuing to push himself creatively. If you liked rejected, please seek out one of his later works if only to see where he’s gone since then. You could do a lot worse than The Meaning of Life or World of Tomorrow Part 1, both of which he's put on youtube for free. Or you can turn into a real sicko like me and buy all of his films on blu-ray from his website.
I know when I first saw Rejected, the best known Don Hertzfeldt short film. I was in a large canvas army tent a a scout camp. We called the tent The Moose. I don’t know why we called it that. But if you were part of the youth staff at this camp (I was) you spent what precious little downtime you had in The Moose. The Moose was our refuge, it was one of the few places with electricity, which we siphoned off from the meeting hall and kitchen (which it was behind) and we the staff were allowed to have all the sorts of contraband that wasn’t allowed in the rest of the camp, things like cokes and a DVD player.
Interestingly, The Moose was the first place I ever saw the movie Bring it On, as well. But that’s unsupervised teenagers for you. We were still boy scouts, so the most risqué thing we could make ourselves watch was a PG-13 cheerleading movie, but it still felt transgressive. That’s why I still say “there must be some clovers in the atmosphere” anytime someone else says “It’s cold in here.”
Where was I? The Moose. In the year 2002 (or maybe 3) youtube did not exist. The internet was around, and maybe you would hang around on AIM in the evenings, but it wasn’t the sort of thing that always lived in your pocket like it is now. Search engines didn’t exist or were terrible for actually finding things (we’ve gotten back to that for some reason). So most of the cool things that were on the internet were passed around from person to person “You’ve got to see this!” If you had a fancy enough computer you could burn a CD with some of the cool stuff ou downloaded and a friend could play it on their computer. Mostly this was music we downloaded off napster, but there were other things too.
I know we didn’t have wifi in The Moose, so somebody probably had a low res burned CD or DVD that contained a bootleg of Rejected, Don Hertzfedlt’s movie on it.
Rejected is a very good short film, i think that needs to be said up from (or 6 paragraphs in, whatever). Honestly, if you haven’t seen it, you probably should. It’s on YouTube now in glorious 1080p. The short film presents to us as a collection of rejected animated ads for The Family Learning Channel and then Johnson & Mills products, neither of which exist. The ads, such as they are, are nonsensical, and there’s not any question as to why they were rejected in this fictional situation.
The shorts became more surreal and violent as the creator has a complete breakdown, with the cartoons completely breaking their own reality as the paper they are animated on crumples and fills with holes and eventually is completely destroyed with a silent scream.
The first, and probably best known(?) clip in the short film is a character standing and holding a very large spoon next to a much smaller bowl of something. He complains that his spoon is too big, repeatedly. Then an anthropomorphic banana walks in and declares that it is a banana. It’s a funny bit of lol-random humor. And its the only thing it feels like the early internet remembered from the whole film. The two characters juxtaposed became one of the earliest memes, or shibboleths, of internet culture. Arguably a lot of the whole early internet humor landscape was birthed from the proliferation of that image. If you wanted to be edgy you also included the little fluffy creature screaming about a bleeding anus.
But the short film isn’t about being funny, it’s about failure. it’s right there in the title. Of course the rejected ads aren’t very good at what they’re supposed to be doing, but that’s because they’re meant to show the tension between creativity and commerce. This animator can only get work shilling for corporations, and any attempt to express themselves honestly or try new things, is stamped down or rejected until the artist is completely destroyed.
I like to think that if the early internet had paid more attention to the anti-capitalist message that the movie was actually trying to convey the first two decades of the 21st century might have gone at least a little differently.
I think there’s a reason Don Hertzfeldt’s later works didn’t get nearly as popular, despite being better in most ways than Rejected. And that reason is that he leaned more into the darkness of the stories he was telling than the “random” humor. It’s not that his animated films stopped being funny, but the humor becomes more inextricable from the story he’s telling. The problem (not that it’s really a problem) is that the little clips in Rejected were to easy to divorce from the context in which they originally appeared. It wasn’t a funny joke, it was a funny joke meant to reflect the larger situation.
Hertzfeld is still out there making cartoons. He has created a few feature-length productions, all still animated one frame at a time by one single animator, Don Hertzfeldt. I personally think It’s Such a Beautiful Day is his masterpiece, but World of Tomorrow Parts 1-3 are an impressive trilogy of shorts exploring identity and purpose, all through the lens of science fiction and it’s very clear that Hertzfeldt is continuing to push himself creatively. If you liked rejected, please seek out one of his later works if only to see where he’s gone since then. You could do a lot worse than The Meaning of Life or World of Tomorrow Part 1, both of which he's put on youtube for free. Or you can turn into a real sicko like me and buy all of his films on blu-ray from his website.