Parental Advisory

Some parents think South Park is really, really bad. Some even think SpongeBob is an unhealthy influence on their kids. While they might have a point when it comes to the ADD content in some of the cartoons out there (those Nicktoons just seem wrong somehow), these parents have obviously never seen any of Don Hertzfeldt’s work. Most of it isn’t blatantly disgusting — some of it is — but it just isn’t anything a little kid should be expected to understand.
Imagine this on a bright Saturday morning: A stick figure holding a giant spoon is standing next to a small bowl of cereal, saying “my spoon is too big” like it’s the answer to the meaning of life. He repeats himself over and over, until you’re questioning where this is going. Finally, a banana walks into the scene and announces matter-of-factly, “I am a banana.” Then a severed pig’s head rockets across the top of the screen. That’s it. Your kid now starts crying uncontrollably.
“I get the drugs question a lot,” animator Hertzfeldt admitted, being used to people questioning his rather unorthodox ideas. Most of his “storylines” are wacky stream-of-consciousness — spontaneous images and thoughts acted out by simple, animated characters just for the sake of a laugh. And they are funny, for some strange reason. In his cartoons, which tend to run about three minutes or less, balloons beat children mercilessly over the head; eyeballs pop out in red cannons of blood; the sky falls in chunks, crushing people as they run for cover; and 3-D glasses create wild effects produced only by…hardcore drugs.
But these creations, short and whimsical as they are, actually do take a lot of work, making it impossible for Hertzfeldt to even think about dabbling into the recreational chemicals while at the drawing board.
“I totally wish I could, because it would make it a lot easier to get through the long hours,” he said.
A typical, two-or-three-minute cartoon takes around nine months to create, Hertzfeldt said, animating the old-fashioned way — with pens and paper. His current project, he said, is pushing the three-year mark. Because of the long production time, Hertzfeldt makes a point never to use a script, in order to keep ideas fresh.
“When you’re working on something for that long, you get really sick of your own jokes after a while,” he said. “So I make it up as I go along, ‘cause you know you’re going to come up with something funnier nine months in.”
The best part of the process, Hertzfeldt said, is doing the sound effects. While animating itself is a long, meticulous process, doing sound effects usually takes about a day, and a lot of it is just goofing off. For instance, in “Billy’s Balloon,” a short film involving balloons viciously attacking small children, the sound of the balloon repeatedly pounding on Billy is actually Hertzfeldt hitting himself in the head with a balloon.
“Most of it is me and my buddy Rob doing horrible voices,” he said. One cartoon simply shows two stick-figure-like people with very aggravated expressions howling intensely at each other like a pair of Bruce Lees. The moment culminates when one guy’s eyeball pops out, gushing red, cartoon blood onto the other’s face. The howling continues.
“I get the drugs question a lot,” Hertzfeldt is quoted a second time.
What Hertzfeldt is working toward is called The Animation Show — a collection of oddball cartoons gathered from similarly oddball animators across the globe. Together with Beavis and Butthead creator Mike Judge, Hertzfeldt sifts through stacks of submitted tapes from student and professional animators in the US, Canada, Germany, Japan, Poland, Ireland and other countries, throwing in some from Judge’s and his own archives. The pieces are woven together into an hour-and-a-half program, which Hertsfeldt and Judge bring on tour to show audiences across the country. Last year’s tour was a huge success, and this year’s is almost ready to go.
“All of those movies are really just intense passion projects from these artists,” he said. “We’ve already got mountains of tapes and submissions.”
One submission from last year’s Animation Show, a Polish student film titled “Cathedral,” was a computer-animated masterpiece involving a cloaked wanderer entering a strange cathedral at night. Done with stunning intricacy, the piece depicts the wanderer walking slowly through rows upon rows of cathedral spires, each bearing a statuesque human face that moves, as if alive. At the end of the film, daylight washes through the cathedral, stunning the man with blindness. The cathedral absorbs him, transforming him into another spire and leaving only his statuesque face showing.
“I’ve seen that one over 400 times, and I’m still trying to figure out what it means,” Hertzfeldt said.
Some of the cartoons on Hertzfeldt and Judge’s show, including “Cathedral,” have won Oscars, and The Animation Show has already blown through national records for the most theaters hit on one tour. With its simple drawings and low-tech production, hopefully the show will emphasize the value of writing and comedy in animation, Hertzfeldt said.
“All of that usually gets overlooked,” he said. “A lot of people think animation should all be this beautiful eye candy.”
Cartoons that use super life-like computer animation have taken the focus away from the writing and placed it on the picture, he said, attempting to wow audiences with high-definition, computer-generated bugs and monsters instead of with the actual characters and the comedy.
“Something like Finding Nemo would have been just as funny and cool if it was done in crayons,” he said.
And then maybe, when they found Nemo, if his eyeball popped out…

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