Two-time Academy Award nominee and Sundance grand jury prize winner Don Hertzfeldt has long been recognized as one of the most influential voices in independent animation. His iconic early-internet short, Rejected, just turned 25 earlier this month.
The filmmaker’s latest project, Animation Mixtape, brings together an inspired collection of 12 animated shorts from around the world, spanning emerging artists, underground legends, and classic works that first inspired Hertzfeldt to pick up a camera over 30 years ago. Ink Films is handling the film’s distribution.
At a time when most short films are seen only at festivals or online, often covered by like and subscribe buttons, Animation Mixtape reclaims the theatrical stage for animation. The program runs 85 minutes and features both brand-new works and rediscovered gems, including a never-before-seen piece by famed underground animator Bruce Bickford.
‘Martyr’s Guidebook,’ Dir: Maks Rzontkowski
With Hertzfeldt’s own introduction framing the anthology, Animation Mixtape offers audiences a rare, one-time chance to experience these films in a communal setting and on the big screen.
Animation Mixtape will get its world premiere today at the IFC Center in New York before traveling to specialty theaters across the country over the coming months. Like a concert, it is designed as a live, theatrical-only event, created to celebrate the artistry of animation and the joy of seeing it in a shared cinema space.
You’ve described short films as “a vital part of our cinematic ecosystem.” In an age where most people encounter shorts online, what role do you see theatrical exhibition playing for animated shorts today?
I was a teenager when I started animating in the ‘90s, and it was really difficult, just technically, to make anything. You had to buy a bunch of film, have access to a giant animation camera, wait around for your footage to go through telecine, edit with razor blades, and on and on. And what happened was, all of that ended up acting like a big filter. If you weren’t really serious and stubborn enough to finish your short, you’d give up. A lot of students would just quit. But if you could complete the gauntlet and actually end up with a 16mm print to send out, there were lots of places back then to sell an animated short. I was able to make a living at it while still in college. There always seemed to be animation festivals touring theaters, weird indie cartoons on MTV and PBS, and underground videotapes for sale. And because of all those technical hurdles, there were only maybe a few dozen remarkable animated shorts released around the world every year. So if you could finish your film, there wasn’t a lot of competition to try and go make a name for yourself.
Today, it seems like everything’s sort of weirdly reversed. It’s never been easier to make a short film; the tools are all miracles now, but that means a festival like Sundance gets 12,000 short films submitted to it every year. They only ever have the space to program about 50 shorts, and only about 10 of those will be animated shorts. Meanwhile, all the old animation festivals are gone, and there’s no more old-school TV to license a film to. So it’s harder to get noticed these days and even harder to get paid. Most of today’s short films will usually end up online, where they sort of fade away against the white noise of everything else. Even major expensive studio films are struggling for attention. There are just too many things being made.
So it seems like the problem isn’t one of access anymore, but of curation. Great films are harder to find because they’re being drowned out. Mixtape is just one baby step, and I tried to make it really uncomplicated. These animators are brilliant, they deserve to be noticed, and their films were meant to be seen on the big screen. So Mixtape will only ever screen in theaters, and the net box office we get will all go to the artists. And if it all works out, maybe we can try and do it again.
‘Zoon,’ Dir: Jonatan Schwenk
Animation Mixtape blends both emerging artists and cult classics. What were your guiding principles in choosing which films/filmmakers made the cut, and how did you balance nostalgia and showcasing new voices?
Only about half of Mixtape are brand new shorts that nobody’s really seen yet. The others are recent ones that I thought everybody missed the boat on, or older titles that deserved rediscovery. If I had a guiding principle, it was, “Why isn’t this incredibly popular?” One of the older ones is, for my money, one of the funniest animated shorts ever made, yet I’m constantly weirded out by how nobody seems to have even heard of it. So now I get to point to a 4K restoration.
‘Jesus 2,’ Dir: Jesse Moynihan
The only other programming thing that surfaced was I seemed to have a lean towards making the program kind of light. My last animated short was over twenty minutes long and was about a genocide that was happening while people were too busy staring at their own reflections. A film like that is not in this program. Maybe I was just in a mood, but I wanted to keep Mixtape brisk. It seems like people could use some cheering up this year.
Your own animated introduction frames the anthology. Can you share any details about the contribution?
It’s really stupid! Like really, really stupid. I’m excited by how stupid it is. It’s not at all worth the price of admission. As you can imagine, it was a lot of fun to animate. It took me a whole month.