Top 25 Favourite Films: #23 Rejected (Dir. Don Hertzfeldt, 2000)
Well. It's December, and with AFootAndAHalfASecond rapidly reaching three years of reviews every weekend, I thought I'd do something different for the 25 days leading up to Christmas. An advent calendar, if you will, of my favourite films of all time. Taste of course, is subjective, so don't be surprised if some oddities, and just-plain-bad films end up on this list alongside some titanic classics of the medium. With no further ado, let's open the first door on our cinematic calendar to reveal...
#23. Rejected. Directed by Don Hertzfeldt, 2000.
My spoon is too big. There are, unsurprisingly, going to be a lot of Oscar-nominated (and Oscar-winning) films on this list. Rejected, released by cult American animator Don Hertzfeldt in 2000, might well be one of the weirdest. It is, in short, a nine-minute long, hand-drawn, animated series of absurdist humour sketches, connected by a loose narrative of the various sequences being inter-titles for The Family Channel, and rejected adverts for the fictious Johnson and Mills, leading to the fictional Hertzfeldt suffering a nervous breakdown and the animated world essentially ending in a bizzarely beautiful sequence.
In places, there is a rough-hewn charm to the film-it's clearly made on a shoestring, with the credits naming just 5 crew, with Hertzfeldt its sole animator and a third of its voice act. The animation, for what it is, barely ever goes above various stickmen and roughly doodled humanoid figures, with the ending by far the most visually complex moment of the film, as the "set" collapses in on itself, and its "cast" are slowly whittled down by the encroaching animated apocalypse, before, with a scrunching crunch, the world folds in on itself, and credits roll.
The soundtrack, dominated by excerpts of Beethoven's 9th Symphony during the silent-movie-esque title cards, which connect the segments, occasionally give way to strange collages of sound only a few degrees removed from Lynch's own electronic horrorscape from Eraserhead, and for some reason, at one point a Swedish Christmas song. The voicework is solid, if occasionally muffled and-one can only assume deliberately-out of sync with the action, with Hertzfeldt admitting that much of its was recorded post animation, with the best take often used.
So why is Rejected, for a film that should be hamstrung, and consigned to the curio corner of the 50,000 hit part of the internet, by its technical limitations, lauded as one of the greatest films of the twenty-first century so far, not to mention winner of 27 awards across the world, and, of course, an Oscar nominee? Because it is, in its ten minute runtime, one of the funniest, weirdest, and most quotable films of all time. There are too many excellent moments of bizarre, brilliant absurdist humour to pick out just one, as the film throws every kind of curveball, from sudden turns into the grotesque and disturbing, to sight-gags, to slapstick, to, in the film's best known sequences, a combination of all three. Frankly, just...go watch it now. Here:
#23. Rejected. Directed by Don Hertzfeldt, 2000.
My spoon is too big. There are, unsurprisingly, going to be a lot of Oscar-nominated (and Oscar-winning) films on this list. Rejected, released by cult American animator Don Hertzfeldt in 2000, might well be one of the weirdest. It is, in short, a nine-minute long, hand-drawn, animated series of absurdist humour sketches, connected by a loose narrative of the various sequences being inter-titles for The Family Channel, and rejected adverts for the fictious Johnson and Mills, leading to the fictional Hertzfeldt suffering a nervous breakdown and the animated world essentially ending in a bizzarely beautiful sequence.
In places, there is a rough-hewn charm to the film-it's clearly made on a shoestring, with the credits naming just 5 crew, with Hertzfeldt its sole animator and a third of its voice act. The animation, for what it is, barely ever goes above various stickmen and roughly doodled humanoid figures, with the ending by far the most visually complex moment of the film, as the "set" collapses in on itself, and its "cast" are slowly whittled down by the encroaching animated apocalypse, before, with a scrunching crunch, the world folds in on itself, and credits roll.
The soundtrack, dominated by excerpts of Beethoven's 9th Symphony during the silent-movie-esque title cards, which connect the segments, occasionally give way to strange collages of sound only a few degrees removed from Lynch's own electronic horrorscape from Eraserhead, and for some reason, at one point a Swedish Christmas song. The voicework is solid, if occasionally muffled and-one can only assume deliberately-out of sync with the action, with Hertzfeldt admitting that much of its was recorded post animation, with the best take often used.
So why is Rejected, for a film that should be hamstrung, and consigned to the curio corner of the 50,000 hit part of the internet, by its technical limitations, lauded as one of the greatest films of the twenty-first century so far, not to mention winner of 27 awards across the world, and, of course, an Oscar nominee? Because it is, in its ten minute runtime, one of the funniest, weirdest, and most quotable films of all time. There are too many excellent moments of bizarre, brilliant absurdist humour to pick out just one, as the film throws every kind of curveball, from sudden turns into the grotesque and disturbing, to sight-gags, to slapstick, to, in the film's best known sequences, a combination of all three. Frankly, just...go watch it now. Here:
Certainly, Rejected does not exist in a vaccuum; there's everything from David Lynch and Japanese cyberpunk godfather, Shinya Tsukamoto, in that final, medium-interrupting moment of animation simply falling in on itself, and the organic, unsettling soundtrack throughout, whilst the absurdist, and often shockingly violent humour riffs off everything from the Pythons to Buster Keaton, with even the disparate influences of the art of the late Daniel Johnston and the then-imperial phase Matt Groening floating to the surface in Hertzfeldt's disturbing, if simplistic little cast.,
Rejected, more than anything, owes its success to the then nascent internet, passed around in these early days like a veritable gospel of oddness, but in its own way it feels like a blueprint for internet humour, its mucky fingerprints in its dealings of nonsequiter humour, violence, and surprisingly dark world view of capitalism at the turn of the millenium, can be seen everywhere, from dril, an anonmyous and profane master of the surrealist tweet, to TomSka's long-running ASDFmovie series, that less owes a debt, and more its existence to Rejected.
But more than this, and part of why I like it so much, is that it feels like the Big-Bang for internet humour, frankly ground zero for the dada-cum-situationalist-cum-sh*tpost sense of humour that millenials live in, recycling the commercial and the mundane into something new and fresh and weird. Nearly two decades on, this film made by a twenty-three year old guy with a shoestring budget, a pen, some paper, and a camera, feels less like a piece of throwaway ephemera, and more like a prophecy of the entire world view for the culturally cannibalistic, bitterly cynical generation that grew up with this film on the wild, rough, weird, but fun World Wide Web of the early 2000s.
I am a banana!
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