Short Films in Focus: Don Hertzfeldt’s “ME”

Don Hertzfeldt’s “ME” is available on Vimeo On-Demand. 

Don Hertzfeldt’s “ME” will feel familiar to the filmmaker’s fans and admirers, with its expressive stick figures serving as our protagonists, its depiction of technological breakthroughs that cause societal disarray, and journeys through time and space that warrant repeated viewings just to take in all the ideas floating through the narrative. “ME” is definitely a Don Hertzfeldt film with all those elements at play. The biggest change-up is that this is an entirely musical piece of work, with no narration, character voices, or captions to give us any grounding. Much like the figures wandering through a disparate collection of wastelands, we are on our own to put it all together. 

I can only explain the film up to a certain point. First, picture every character in this having a potato-shaped outline, with two dots for eyes, Hertzfeldt’s trademark overbite, and stick-figure arms and legs. A couple has a baby during a time when crime has run rampant. The father starts building a machine in his garage, away from his wife and kid. He wins a prize for this machine that has changed how people communicate. He grows old, dies, and his body gets thrown in a mass grave, possibly during a pandemic. During his time in the garage, his wife had another baby in the form of just an eye (with arms and legs). The Eye floats, though he tries to remain tethered to his mother. It eventually floats into the heavens, never to be seen again, growing bigger and bigger, perhaps becoming a black hole the size of Sagittarius A*. This sets in motion a cataclysmic technological meltdown on Earth. 

The rest is up to you, though it should be noted that Hertzfeldt has insisted the film is “not about our phones.” It would be easy to make that connection, but “ME” is anything but easy. It starts with a frantic pace, with Brent Lewis’ pulsating, percussion-based “Dinner At the Sugarbrush” serving as the musical backdrop. As the story moves into more tragic territory, Hertzfeldt resorts to his trademark use of classical Mozart and Chopin. Later, the film achieves a kind of ethereal lift-off that just about tops anything Hertzfeldt has done before, using a recording of Dame Joan Sutherland singing “I Dreamt I Dwelt In Marble Halls,” a hypnotic sequence that will move and/or hypnotize anyone still along for the ride at this point, even if they’re not sure why. 

Late in the film, the music shifts to a seemingly improvised jazz piece by pianist Jelly Roll Morton, which he introduces as “A kind of jazz music. You can apply it to any type of tune. It depends on your ability to transform.” Morton seems to answer unheard questions throughout this piece, and this is the only spoken word in the film. While he may sound disconnected from what is happening on-screen, it also feels like a lost radio wave traveling through space, bringing us back to a simpler, more playful time before we destroyed ourselves. What he says there, I feel, is important (and “tune: could also be heard as “toon” if you like). Our ability to enjoy and make the most of “ME” depends on our willingness to absorb every symbol, metaphor, and turning point and try to explain it away or let the film wash over us and take it in as a dream to be figured out later. 

I initially had a hard time watching “ME” because I had become well aware of its origins before I saw it. This was originally commissioned by people I admired but who fell out of favor in the public eye. I found myself applying parallels between them and the characters in the film, but I have since let that assumption go and take the film on its own terms. The film is not about any particular person, place, or even thing. For me, it’s about the age of anxiety in which we live every single day and how we remain tethered to our devices until we allow ourselves to be removed from them and see the planet for what it really is: beautiful, scary, and volcanic. Okay, that interpretation might work for one aspect, “ME,” but what about the rest of the film? 

Whatever the case, Hertzfeldt’s film is a singular vision (his own), an astonishing and confounding one that could only come from the author of “World of Tomorrow” and “It’s Such A Beautiful Day.” Many will have their own interpretation of what the vision is about, and all will be fascinating to read. I feel I have barely scratched the surface here. 

The last time I interviewed you, you had a clean slate with no projects on the horizon. Then, this project came to you from an outside source, a band. That fell apart to the point where you had a fully animated film but no more music for it. What was that moment like, and how did you re-group?

After “World of Tomorrow 3” and “On Memory,” I wasn’t sure when I’d be ready to work on something again. I always imagine taking these long breaks that never actually seem to happen. In 2021 I was asked to make a 20-something minute music film. They were cool with letting me do whatever I wanted with it, and I liked the idea of telling a story without any dialogue. A year later, all the music had to be removed. There was a period of mourning and a lot of conflicted feelings for sure, but I think if something like that happened when I was in my 20s, I probably would have had more of a meltdown over it.

When you’re young, you get married to your initial idea, and there’s a sort of panic if it doesn’t work out. Later, you learn that a really important part of filmmaking is having the ability to pivot. You can’t be walking into the room with just one fragile idea. Things are going to go wrong. Every day in any production, you’re mostly just solving problems. Maybe not a problem quite as big as this one was, but I can talk myself more off the ledge now. Experience brings a little confidence, being able to tell yourself, “OK, maybe I don’t have an answer for this problem today or tomorrow, but I know me, and I know I’m not going to allow this to suck.” I wasn’t going to let all the work go to waste. I also still had to get out of bed every day, and at a certain point, it’s just no longer helpful to always feel lousy.

Can you talk about the process of selecting new music to go with this newly shaped project? 

Losing all the music to a musical after it’s animated is a big blow. but you could also think of it as, “well, i guess the project is thrown wide open now to be kind of anything else it wants to be.” I wasn’t tied to the original running time anymore, so I think the first thing I did was edit it pretty severely. There’s very little fat left in the picture. I think I cut about two minutes, which is a long time in animation. Scenes were arranged in a different order and I felt more free to take everything further into experimental areas.

When figuring out what the new music should be, I just slopped different tracks over the picture to see what connected and if any sparks happened without having to do major surgery. It’s amazing how powerful any change in music can be. I was sort of considering “Christmastime Is Here” from the Charlie Brown cartoon at one point, it worked! It all reminded me of when I was learning animation as a teenager. I shot everything silent on VHS back then and afterwards would use an audio cable to just dub over an Indiana Jones soundtrack or something. I couldn’t edit anything in those days so it just came down to dumb luck if any of the music seemed like it synced up. and sometimes it would, like, unusually well. It was an uncanny thing. I think the brain really wants to seek out connections between sound and pictures, like when an old movie somehow lines up to a random record.

The lyrics of the original music for “ME” felt irreplaceable, it was originally wall to wall lyrics, so instead I leaned further in the other direction. There are only lyrics now in the opera piece. my mind started drifting to drums. I couldn’t stop thinking about really intense drums and beats. When I discovered Brent Lewis, I thought, “holy shit, yes.” So two of Brent’s tracks are in “ME” and transformed everything. They have this incredible urgency. The music for the story about the little eye had originally been beat-driven, but when I tried putting a gentle chopin piece there instead, it transformed that scene the opposite way. so the whole movie just began to turn upside down from moment to moment. I don’t think any of the new music I found had the same vibe as what was originally in there. 

It eventually took an extra year of animating and restructuring to shape “ME” into what it is now. It was a really tough way to make a movie, but I hope all the drama doesn’t end up overshadowing what it actually is today. Nobody should go into it feeling sorry for it, second-guessing it, or assuming it’s somehow been compromised. It’s kind of the opposite. Sometimes hardship can define a person, and sometimes, I guess it can define an animated short film.

You have gone on the record by saying this film “is not about your cell phone.” Are there any other misinterpretations you want to clear up? Or any other interpretation of the film that caught your attention?

I sure don’t want to tell people what to think, but if anyone reaches out for clues, I can say that “ME” has no opinion about your phone or the internet. it would be pretty boring if i put all of that up on the screen just to say, “your phone sucks”. “technology is bad” is not interesting. “Why did someone create this technology?” is more interesting. “ME” is about human beings and the selfish things that always hold us back. It’s about the pain we cause.

I’ve always thought pain to be like a game of tag. If someone drives like an angry maniac and tries to run me off the road, I’ll be hurt and angry about it. I’ll carry that gross energy around with me, and I’ll be more likely, whether I intend to or not, to hurt somebody else. and that person might feel gross and yell at their waitress and then ruin her day. Pain is contagious. In many parts of the world, you see a white-hot ball of pain being passed between populations for generations. Pain only makes more pain. It takes a strong, mindful individual to receive pain from somebody and defuse it. to absorb it and kill it in its tracks. To take the ideas a step further, “ME” can also be read as a story about enlightenment. 

But, and this is really important, I also don’t think it’s something you necessarily need to logic out or come to the same conclusion about. When I was writing “ME”, I was primarily thinking about music: what is it about our favorite songs in life that makes us return to them over and over? So many of our favorite songs have lyrics that are sort of slippery, like a great poem that, for some reason, we keep wanting to revisit. there’s a mystery to them. i’m not sure i could even explain to you with confidence what most of my favorite songs are actually “about”. music usually gives us feelings instead of answers, feelings that you maybe can’t really put into words. you sort of just have to experience them. so i was thinking, how do you get that feeling of a great song in a picture, in visual storytelling?

That made the writing for “ME” feel more like a fable and less linear. It’s OK if you don’t follow some of it in a literal way on the first watch. It’s not something you need to actively decode as you go. Making “World of Tomorrow 3” felt similar. It’s not an abstract story like “ME”, but that plot gets so convoluted with confusing timelines and clones that it turns into this giant farce. and you could work it all out on a napkin if you wanted to see how everything connects, it’s all in there, but it’s unnecessary. The feeling is the most important thing, and if nothing else, “ME” is trying to make you feel something you might not have otherwise been able to put into words.

In the “WOT” films and here, there exists a machine that changes the world, but ends up malfunctioning or having bad side effects. Is this something you often deal with in your own life? Are you a technophobe in any way? 

No, I don’t think so. It’s all just a set of tools and tools are neutral. What you do with the tool is what matters. a hammer can build a house or a hammer can whack someone to death. in “ME” and “World of Tomorrow,” it’s not the technology’s fault that it exists. It didn’t all just come up from nothing. It’s an extension of us. I’m more afraid of people than I am of technology.

I even like a lot of the AI stuff I’ve seen, which may not be a popular opinion. There’s something beautifully horrible about these AI videos, like watching something dream in real-time. But AI will only become much less interesting visually as it improves and grows more seamless. If they fix away the dreaminess, it will start to get boring and look like everything else.

You expand your visual palette with each film. Here, your camera travels more than ever (particularly the volcano sequence). What tools did you learn to work with this time around? 

I think what’s been expanding has been my sense of space. Before I started animating on a tablet, I spent twenty years directing things with these old 35mm cameras on giant cranes that couldn’t move. And I never really thought about what a weird limitation it was to direct a movie without really being able to move your camera. You could zoom in a little or pan around with some effort, but it warped my sense of space and depth. I got trained to direct things in a particular way and my older films are very static. By the time I made “it’s such a beautiful day”, I finally just broke up the film frame so I could move those little windows around instead.

When I moved to digital, it still took a couple of films for me to break out of my old habits. I could move the camera wherever I wanted, but now it seemed weird. “World of Tomorrow 3” felt like the first time I really got the camera involved in the story, and it was the best thing I’ve directed. In “ME”, before the strange character heads to the volcano, they’re hanging in this space singing. For the entire song, they’re unable to really move or even turn around. so I knew I’d have to try and direct the hell out of that sequence by only moving the camera instead.

I wanted the rest of the film to look like a panic attack. Everything on the screen was drawn over and over again, often in ones, so nothing ever felt safe or stable. The entire frame is also shaking. But that’s all just old-school animation. My friend Taylor would sometimes help with a bit of after-effects over the years, but all my software has been the same since 2013.

Is it true that you’re currently working on your first feature-length film? Can you tell us anything about that? 

I still think of “It’s Such A Beautiful Day” as a feature-length, but since I had to animate that one alone and release it in parts, I guess it might not earn full marks. This one’s called “Antarctica,” and for the first time in 30 years, I’ll have a crew of artists to work with. We’re not sure where in the world it will be made yet. I’ve suggested having all the animators work in a bunker in Antarctica. I think they’d be really productive there, but I’ve been talked out of this. It’s a very big undertaking, and right now, it feels like the first day of building a skyscraper. I know where I want the elevators to go and what the wallpaper should look like, but I guess we have to dig a big hole in the ground first.