It’s Such a Beautiful Day is a film by American writer and director Don Hertzfeldt. Hertzfeldt is an award winning cult animator who combined three of his earlier short films, seamlessly into one longer film. It’s Such a Beautiful Day tells the discombobulating story of Bill, a stick figure man suffering from an unnamed illness. This film exhibits several postmodern qualities, including the disjunctive antiform, the diegetic levels of narration, the playful use of absurdity, and the visually schizophrenic dream world.
It’s Such a Beautiful Day uses a visually unique form of storytelling by blacking out sections of the screen, showing several stories at once and using a border around the screen with unexplained images. For most of the …show more content…
The idea that what we repeatedly do becomes our life is a major theme in It’s Such a Beautiful Day. This is shown through the repeated cartoon depictions of daily, seemingly insignificant, tasks. At one point, when Bill is having a breakdown, he sees these daily images repeated in quick succession while the narrator repeats “this is his life” in ominous tones. The repeated scenes also allow the audience to understand how Bill feels. He cannot remember anything by the end of the movie. When Bill inadvertently repeats the same scene, taking a walk, three times in a row the audience feels frustrated while Bill is content because he is experiencing everything for the first time. Bill no longer has to fear that his life is comprised of unimportant, repeated actions because he has naïve joy about every daily action. The way images are constantly moving in and out of the screen, often overlapping, seems to embody visually a mentally deteriorating mind. There is something medically wrong with Bill, although it is never explained. The most reasonable options are: a brain trauma followed by coma and mental dementia. Bill loses time, gets confused, and forgets what he is doing or why. The few things he can remember are called into question because they have fantastical elements. The narrator tells us that Bill has no way of knowing if his memories are real or imagined. Hertzfeldt does an amazing job confusing the viewer and allowing for multiple version of the story to exist. After I saw the movie again, I came away with a different story. There are so many stand-alone schizophrenic scenes that don’t directly connect to each other. The viewer is allowed to decide how the story fits together and what it if anything, it
It’s Such a Beautiful Day uses a visually unique form of storytelling by blacking out sections of the screen, showing several stories at once and using a border around the screen with unexplained images. For most of the …show more content…
The idea that what we repeatedly do becomes our life is a major theme in It’s Such a Beautiful Day. This is shown through the repeated cartoon depictions of daily, seemingly insignificant, tasks. At one point, when Bill is having a breakdown, he sees these daily images repeated in quick succession while the narrator repeats “this is his life” in ominous tones. The repeated scenes also allow the audience to understand how Bill feels. He cannot remember anything by the end of the movie. When Bill inadvertently repeats the same scene, taking a walk, three times in a row the audience feels frustrated while Bill is content because he is experiencing everything for the first time. Bill no longer has to fear that his life is comprised of unimportant, repeated actions because he has naïve joy about every daily action. The way images are constantly moving in and out of the screen, often overlapping, seems to embody visually a mentally deteriorating mind. There is something medically wrong with Bill, although it is never explained. The most reasonable options are: a brain trauma followed by coma and mental dementia. Bill loses time, gets confused, and forgets what he is doing or why. The few things he can remember are called into question because they have fantastical elements. The narrator tells us that Bill has no way of knowing if his memories are real or imagined. Hertzfeldt does an amazing job confusing the viewer and allowing for multiple version of the story to exist. After I saw the movie again, I came away with a different story. There are so many stand-alone schizophrenic scenes that don’t directly connect to each other. The viewer is allowed to decide how the story fits together and what it if anything, it