Sunday, August 30th, 2009 (Short Film Sunday: Rejected)

Next week Mike Judge's latest live action film Extract makes its theatrical debut. I began my post for Short Film Sunday by looking up Judge in hopes to find a good animated short, possibly from his Milton series that ran as segments on Saturday Night Live, and would eventually go on to inspire 1999's cult comedy Office Space, or possibly something he done for The Animation Show, a traveling animation festival that tours the country, co-created with Don Hertzfeldt. Of course, after reading Hertzfeldt's name, I knew where this blog had to go, and that is his wonderful short from 2000, Rejected.

The hand-drawn, stick-figure-esque animated flick came slightly before the YouTube boom or Cartoon Network's alternative programming night-time block Adult Swim, but became a huge influence on both popular mediums. The film was released, debuting at the 2000 San Diego Comic Con before showing at the Sundance Film Festival and going on tour with Spike and Mike's Twisted Festival of Animation and Bill Plympton's travelling The Don and Bill Show and currently on Hertzfeldt and Judge's The Animation Show. The short would air uncut and commercial free on Adult Swim two years after its initial release. After a successful release, which gained a cult audience due to the lack of similar humor at the time, with Something Awful even being quoted as saying that the short was causing a miniature Rocky Horror Picture Show effect with fan quotes and celebrations during screenings, came the ultimate honor for an offbeat sensation that would come to embody the web cartoon, a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, losing out to the eight minute Dutch drama toon, Father and Daughter, directed by Michael Dudok De Wit. The little film is still quoted a bit, and featured on a few comedy blogs here and there, see the above snowman recreation of a Rejected scene I found on Google Image, but it seems that most people don't have a clue on how much impact the little animated gem had on YouTube and Adult Swim.

Other than Rejected, Hertzfeldt has had a number of other popular shorts, including Billy's Balloon, created before Rejected during his time as a film student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. After the success of Rejected, Hertzfeldt would follow it up with the short The Meaning of Life, which debuted at Sundance and was lovingly compared to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey by Bob Longino of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Following that, Hertzfeldt's current project is a three part series on a character named Bill, with 2006's Everything Will Be OK, 2008's I Am So Proud of You and a yet-untitled upcoming short.

According to Hertzfeldt's Wikipedia page, the director has approximately 130 awards at film and animation festivals. He is also continuously mentioned on blogs by the current adult animation elite. Also, if you want to check out any of the other shorts I mentioned in the above introduction, you can check out Bitter Films' official page. Now, without further adieu, here is Rejected... Enjoy.