It's Such a Beautiful Day (2012)

It's such a Beautiful Day is one of the most beautiful, and nontraditional stories in film. It captures not only the important moments of a story, which any movie should but also the moments which don't usually make it into a film, due to their regularity in our every day lives. My only complaint about the film is how slow it starts out as. Every single one of my friends which could get through the whole thing ended up loving it, but many of my friends dismissed it around twenty minutes in due to the speed of the performance.If you find you can sit down for the first twenty minutes and allow yourself to understand everything will have a point, you will for sure enjoy this film, However, if you are like my brother or mother, you will quickly put this one down.

This film is a great one worth many viewings. Each time I watch it I either walk away with a new perspective of it or life. It is fairly experimental especially in scene setup and framing. However the director still manages to get his point across each time. All in all it was a really great film that will take many hours and many pages to write about. I will not attempt some of it. The framing of this film is a very interesting one, I have yet to really view a film with the framing to this extent. It was a risk doing this kind of framing-as very rarely is the entire screen "filled". Most of the time it is small blurbs of images and animation. However don't take this as bad, as you will get the "point" each time. Hertzfeldt definitely took a risk, and it definitely paid off. As for the story, I have nothing but praise. You will be taken into the mind of Bill, without spoiling too much, Bill's mind is failing him. While the exact diagnosis is never told, Bill has a life threatening and certainly reality distorting disease/ailment in his life. It slowly but surely affects every aspect of Bill's life, as a result he is left scrambling picking up the fragments of his life be it a past memory that is filled with delusions or even "hallucinations" and delusions in his every day life. I won't spoil the ending, but Hertzfeldt interestingly mocks the audience at the end. The ending itself can be taken in many ways, philosophically and even the way Hertzfeldt mocks traditional endings. Overall the story is nothing short of a masterpiece, one that can be viewed many times with many more revelations the more you watch.

This movie is a natural progression from Hertzfield's earlier works, like Rejected. While Rejected experimented with the very form of the animation paper, this movie experiments with film itself. Exposure and lights and mixing images together. It's still animation, but it's experimenting on a different level. His visual style is still very recognizable, and despite all the visual experimentation, Hertzfield manages to put it together in a way that serves the not only the purpose of communicating the story to the audience, but also reflects what is going on with the story.The story told is about Bill, who has some health problems that affect his memories. It's a journey through (parts of) his life and his memories, seen through him. In some ways it is similar to Kurt Vonnegut's book Slaughterhouse Five, as it explores the same nonlinear storytelling as you find in it. It turns out that animation is a great way to explore corrupt/altered memories, and it's also a good outlet for Hertzfield's "silly" imagery.I wish Hertzfeld had spent more time on the ideas behind the short, and less on silly memories. While the are interwoven, it ultimately felt like he did not get as far under the surface as you would have hoped for a movie this length.

What I can tell you is that "It's Such a Beautiful Life" will resonate with you in such a deep way. It had been sitting in my Netflix queue for some time and I'm not exactly sure why I watched it when I did. It was random, middle of the day on a Saturday. Five minutes into it, I had to pause to prepare for what I knew this was going to be: a beautiful tapestry of thoughts and philosophies charged with meaning. There were instances where certain things were said and words appeared on screen with timing that was just perfect and my breath was literally stolen from me. By the end of the short, I had to just bury my head in my hands and just cry. Not because it was overly sad or anything, but because it was reverberating with me so much. It was as though you've known this all along but had long forgotten - like it was from a past life. You WILL enjoy this film whether you are seeking some sort of existential comfort; if you are a fan of Don's work; or you're just curious about it. It's very much like previous shorts of his. You will find yourself laughing, crying, relating. And some of you might find yourselves changed forever.