EVERYTHING WILL BE OK ★★★★>
WHERE Music Box, 3733 N. Southport
Since the 1920s, the sheer amount of labor required to do animation well has shaped the genre, pushing it toward family-friendly material that can sell tickets and cover payrolls. But when you like to draw pictures of people being sawed in half vertically, you have to rely on your own resources. Hertzfeldt’s earliest films have all the delight of a schoolboy’s doodle, with heavy dollops of black humor and extreme violence rendered in simple black lines and judiciously applied spot color. His two-minute debut, Ah, l’Amour (1995), made when he was a freshman at UCSB, shows the hero approaching a series of women, each of whom punishes him severely. (One rips his heart from his body and breathes fire to cook it, then kicks his head off.) Hertzfeldt followed it with another gross-out exercise, Genre (1997), and the two films won a devoted cult audience.
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Judging from his new short, Hertzfeldt has pulled back from the brink. Everything Will Be OK has a more reasonable scale than its predecessor, and the story, music, figures, and optical effects have been brought into perfect alignment. For the first time he uses an omniscient narrator to carry the story, beautifully articulating the anxious ponderings of his quotidian hero: “Bill daydreamed about all the brains in jars he used to see at school. . . . He began to think of people in a new light, how everyone’s just little more than that frightened, fragile brainstem, surrounded by meat and physics, too terrified to recognize the sum of their parts, insulated in the shells of their skulls in lower-middle-class houses, afraid of change, afraid of decisions, afraid of pain, stuck in traffic, listening to terrible music.”
