It's Such a Beautiful Day (Don Hertzfeldt, 2012) Review
When the brain decomposes before the heart.
I watched It’s Such a Beautiful Day for the first time in 2017 and was utterly devastated by it, leaving a lifelong emotional impact on me. It sparked a quest to find the key to unlock what it was that touched me so deeply, but I couldn’t pinpoint it at the time due to a lack of words and self-awareness. Since then, I’ve been afraid to watch it again, lest my memory of it be tainted in case it didn’t move me as much as it did. Seven years later, however, the film came up in a recent conversation with a friend, and I thought it would be an appropriate context to revisit it. To my surprise, not only was it even more moving than the first time, but after the first 30 minutes I couldn’t utter a word without sobbing like a baby.
It’s Such a Beautiful Day introduces us to Bill, a male stick figure with a generic name who suffers from a neurodegenerative disease. He is devoid of any voice, as his entire story is told by an omniscient narrator, a choice that proves highly effective. He acts as a proxy between the viewer and Bill, perfectly capturing Bill’s dissociation and helping to construct his character in a more rounded form, thanks to the meticulously detailed third-person account of his often intrusive thoughts. It is as though the monstrous fish head from his dream, feeding upon his skull, was literally sucking them all up.
His story is primarily illustrated with black and white hand-drawn animation, mostly depicting his mundane and anodyne life. At first, the visual style may seem deceptively simplistic, for beneath the seemingly plain and insipid style lies a much richer landscape. This includes bursts of color, experimental visual effects a la Stan Brakhage, and real-world imagery to intertwine the banality of Bill’s life with a shifting perception of reality as he succumbs to his illness.
Although the overarching narrative follows a linear structure with occasional flashbacks, it is split into painfully beautiful and heartbreaking fragments of his life that paint a fuller picture of his condition, past experiences, and ancestry. They often end abruptly in blackouts due to psychological malfunction or external conditions, such as the effects of anesthesia. The focus on his ancestry is especially latent in the second of the three shorts, I’m So Proud of You, which presents the messed up genetics Bill inherited due to the prevalence of mental illness and unfortunate deaths in his family tree, ultimately leading to the devastating revelation of what a doctor advised his mother not to do.
It would have been much easier for the mastermind behind this compilation, Don Hertzfeldt, to flood the story with the Appeal to Emotion fallacy and bolster it with cheap narrative tricks to make us fall for an emotionally fake story about such a dark and pitiful condition. Instead, he weaves in touches of black humor that accurately depict Bill’s eroding condition without ridiculing him. Hertzfeldt does this so gracefully that we forget what a Herculean feat it is to portray such a delicate subject in a way that feels as if it is being narrated through the innocence of a gifted child. This adds an exquisite contrast that heightens the emotional impact of the film, as we swiftly sympathize with Bill, whose endearing and charming aura makes us feel as if we’ve known him our whole lives.
The ontological philosophy of It’s Such a Beautiful Day gravitates toward a powerful reflection on the fragility of our physical existence, our deep-seated fear of death, and the constraints imposed by the deterministic nature of life. As noted above, genetics, which one character in the film describes as “pretty messed up”, plays a crucial role in shaping much of our psyche, along with our life experiences. We cannot control the former, and the latter is a direct result of our mental-physical state as dictated by the former and our upbringing. Together, they profoundly affect our mental health, personality, behavior, and overall outlook on life.
Over time, life’s events accumulate, leading to significant yet often unnoticed changes, reminiscent of a popular quote misattributed to C.S. Lewis1: “Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when we look back everything is different”. However, there is a point at which this no longer applies to Bill, and by extension to people suffering from a neurodegenerative disease. It’s a state akin to the removal of the self in life, as memory becomes more corrupted with each new iteration until it no longer stores information and begins to blur the constitution of one’s identity. It also shatters the notion of the future, since it is a concept constructed from the memories of the past, which become mere scattered fragments that, without the context of our entire being, are like pieces of a puzzle lost in the void.
Instead of depicting such a tragic event on a low note, Don Hertfeldt takes the ethereal and beautiful reading of it and transforms it into a realization of how much unrealized beauty there is around us. Now that Bill has no choice but to live in the present, with no past to remember, no future to construct, and no fears or concerns to worry about, his shifting perception replaces his colorless life with the aforementioned real-world imagery that allows him to see things as they really are. What seemed so daunting at first becomes a bridge that allows him to constantly reexperience everything for the first time, and even to forgive people without knowing why.
In fact, there is a turning point where Bill transcends the confines of our one-directional space-time to which we are physically bound and reaches eternity. There, we are no longer limited by our physical form or the passage of time, which can lead us to resonate with Rust Cohle’s words: “Death created time to grow the things that it would kill”. Although death is so certain of its triumph that it gives us a lifelong advantage, Hertzfeldt doesn’t see it as an ominous end to our lives, as we commonly and fearfully perceive. All the people, experiences, and things we leave behind in life are a gateway for us to tune into the infinite, to reconnect with people long gone, and to endlessly explore all that life has to offer until all the lights go out.
And as the sun continues to set, he finally comes to realize the dumb irony in how he’d been waiting for this moment his entire life, this stupid, awkward moment of death that had invaded and distracted so many days with stress and wasted time. If only he could travel back and impart some wisdom to his younger self; if only he could at least tell the young people in this room. He lifts an arm to speak but inexplicably says, “It smells like dust and moonlight.”
The eternal ending, paired with the breathtaking classical music soundtrack, results in one of the most powerful emotional climaxes I’ve ever experienced in my entire life. Such an overwhelming mix of sensory and profound messages, which I couldn’t decipher at the time, now had a tangible meaning for me that I could articulate through further life experiences that have developed my personality, my knowledge, my goals, and my fears. I found in Bill’s story a representation of virtually all my existential dreads, and Hertzfeldt embraces them all to show that we all have similar concerns, are sick in some way, and will eventually die. I realized a long time ago that I can’t do everything I want to do in life because of time constraints. I’d love to know everything there is to know and explore everything life has to offer. I’m so afraid of knowing that I’ll have to deal with the loss of loved ones. I’m fearful of not living up to my potential. I get sad thinking about how time is slipping away like water through my hands. Through it all, Hertzfeldt makes me feel like a mother cradling her baby, gently kissing his forehead and reassuring him that everything will be OK.
When we think of life-affirming experiences, we are prone to think of happy stories that lead us to conclude that the world is not such a screwed-up place after all. However, It’s Such a Beautiful Day shatters this concept to show that it is flawed at its core, because life is made of contrasts. To see the rainbow, one must endure the rain, which can be inferred to mean that without death, life would make no sense. Unfortunately, we tend to focus on the negative aspects of life, which are often caused by unavoidable external forces that make us forget such special privileges as having enough health to be alive or being able to talk to a loved one. In fact, we are inclined to dwell so much on the past and feel so nostalgic about it that we tend to ignore what the present has to offer. What we don’t know is that we will be nostalgic for this present moment in the future, that it will soon be over, and that we will eventually die mourning the time we didn’t fully appreciate while it was ours. In return, Hertzfeldt calls on viewers to taste all that life has to offer, to forgive, to embrace the beauty in impermanence, to cherish every fleeting moment with openness and love, and to come to terms with the universe.
It’s too bad people don’t say how they feel until it’s already too late
With this new definition of “life-affirming”, I can firmly state that It’s Such a Beautiful Day is not only the epitome of all the media I’ve consumed in my entire life, regardless of the medium, but also one of the best things I’ve ever experienced. I’m not hyperbolic when I say it’s one of the finest human achievements in art. It is an ode to life that excels at delivering the most moving depiction of the concept tempus fugit. It is the process of coming to terms with death. It is the representation of when the past and the future become the present, and how everything is part of the same dream we call life.
He’d been terrified of dying his entire life, and as much as he tried not to think about it, death was always in the back of his head, around every corner, and hovering on each horizon. He’d brushed shoulders with death on a few occasions, but in his carefree youth, it had almost seemed like an abstract, impossible thing to ever happen to him. But with each passing decade, he began to gauge the time he probably had left, and by his 40s, what he considered his halfway point, at best, he had come to know just one thing: you will only get older.
I can’t remember the last time I cried this much. The tears were both of joy and sadness. It makes me profoundly content to be able to live in the same space-time as Don Hertzfeldt and to have come across this film in my relatively short life. Yet, it also leaves me with a sense of emptiness, knowing that nothing else can bring back such strong feelings, except watching it again. But perhaps that’s where the beauty lies—the contrast between these emotions is what makes me feel truly alive.
Thanks from the bottom of my heart for the most life-affirming work of art I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing, Don Hertzfedlt.
Hello! I just wanted to stop by and mention that I recently watched the film, and I was absolutely enchanted by it. However, I am even more captivated by this review. It’s always appreciated when someone takes the time to write so meticulously and with such detail about films that rarely have analyses available online.
I fully agree with all the points mentioned, and I particularly resonate with these lines: "In fact, we are inclined to dwell so much on the past and feel so nostalgic about it that we tend to ignore what the present has to offer."
This is a film that delivers profound messages like the above-mentioned one, using a unique and simple visual style. Every day is an opportunity to see the world with new eyes, and the mere fact of existing should bring us great happiness.
Thank you, Enosiophobia, for sharing your words: It's such a beautiful review!!!!!!!!!!!!!