Random film of the day — "Everything Will Be OK," seventeen minutes, 2006, directed by Don Hertzfeldt. I latched onto not the film itself, but a line in its credits. Camera, script, animation, sound, producing, and direction — Don Hertzfeldt. Editing — Brian Hamblin. That's where the list of people involved in the picture — which The Boston Globe called a masterpiece and which Variety critic Robert Koehler included in his list of best films of 2007 — ends.
Animation is the most assembly-line area of cinema that exists. A feature-length cartoon in a normal studio means hundreds of people divided into departments: some invent characters, others draw backgrounds, a third group sets lights, a fourth composites layers. Hertzfeldt managed with one person plus an editor. And repeated this for thirty years straight.
Next I dove in to calculate how such economics even add up.
He bought his first animation stand right after graduating from film school. It's a 35mm Richardson camera, assembled in the late 1940s — presumably the very one used to shoot the televised "Peanuts" adaptations of Charles Schulz in the 1960s and 1970s. Don believes it's the only working apparatus of this class he knows about; in 2008 a journalist who visited his workshop wrote about "one of fewer than a hundred working in the world." The workshop — two cluttered rooms in a rented building whose address he keeps secret. Dusty, stuffy, chaotic, but "organized."
It's curious how he arrived at this. In film school he wanted to shoot live action, but shooting live on 16mm cost ten to thirty thousand dollars for a decent short. Animation was cheaper — and there was a camera on campus nobody used. They gave him keys to the building so he could shoot at night. Everything rolled from there: his student work found international distribution, and he started earning before graduation. He says he's never in his life had another job besides his own cartoons.
From the outside it looks like a loner's luck. Inside — a fairly rigid production discipline. In 2006 he said he never has days off: "no holidays, no Sundays, there's always something to do." During heavy production weeks he wears the same clothes to avoid wasting decisions on choosing a shirt and slips into zombie routine. Once, in the deepest days of work on "The Meaning of Life," he went to a store at three in the morning, the cashier asked "how are you," he answered "hello," and on his way out discovered he'd forgotten the words "thank you" and "goodbye," and said "hello" a second time.
Technically his films from 1999–2011 were made entirely in-camera, without digital compositing. That famous split-screen effect — the trilogy's signature device — was done like this: pieces of black paper with tiny holes were placed under the lens, and each element of the future frame was exposed separately. The windows through which Bill sees his memories are physically cut from paper and slipped under the glass.
It's clear what this turns into. In-camera you can't set a keyframe and redo it the next day — the extras, lights, equipment, and the author himself cost nothing there. Hertzfeldt explains this as an advantage: he can work standing up and improvise, "grab a scene all at once or in a couple hours throw together something wild, running film through flashlights and whatever props are lying around, and accidentally look like a genius." In 2014 he finally switched to a digital tablet — and discovered that twenty years of shooting on a rigidly fixed camera had trained him not to move it at all. He describes it like this: "I worked for twenty years like a guitarist who plays five strings out of six and long ago forgot there's a sixth."
This loyalty to the technology cost him most dearly on the third part of the trilogy. Near the end of production the old camera's motor started glitching and stopped pulling film properly — the last meters shot came out with unintentional light leaks. They left them in the film. This is perhaps the best illustration of what you pay for handmade work: a breakdown has no undo function.
"Everything Will Be OK" grew into a three-part story about a little man in a hat named Bill who has something wrong with his health. The second part, "I Am So Proud of You," came out in 2008, the third, "It's Such a Beautiful Day," in 2011. Each took about a year and a half. Separately they collected more than ninety festival awards: the first — the Sundance 2007 Grand Jury Prize for short film, the Lawrence Kasdan Award in Ann Arbor, the London International Animation Festival Grand Prize and thirty-four more; the second — twenty-seven, including the Florida Film Festival Grand Jury Prize.
Combining three shorts into one 62-minute film is a separate story, and it's almost comic. He assembled them with no plan at all: he was making a DVD, needed to put something on the disc. In a 2013 interview he admits outright: "I have to confess, it wasn't really thought out at all, it was more of an afterthought." He removed the credits from the first and second parts, shot a new prologue in his home's yard, re-leveled the sound — and released it.
Then something happened he didn't expect. The film with no advertising at all went to several theaters, suddenly received an award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, made it onto every year-end list, and became in demand at festivals. And immediately it became clear the moment was lost: the DVD was already on sale, there was no publicist, he hadn't done a proper theatrical release timed for awards. "Knowing what I know now, I obviously should have done a more traditional release for this version, held back the DVD, positioned it better for that whole awards season, hired a publicist." The only major strategic mistake in his career — one where he did too little, not too much.
For completeness: Rotten Tomatoes — 100% on 33 reviews, Metacritic — 90. IndieWire at year's end put Hertzfeldt as the ninth best director (alongside Wes Anderson), Vulture placed the film at number 12 on its list of best films of the decade, and IGN/CineFix in 2021 — first place among animated films of all time.
The entire economy rests on one decision: he owns all rights to everything he's made and sells it himself, under the banner Bitter Films. Retail chains, he says, demanded 40–55% of sales, "and acted like they were doing you a favor." He stayed with a small shop of his own: "It's easier when you own ten years of work — then it's not such a big step."
First came the DVD "single" with "Rejected" (2001), then "Don Hertzfeldt Volume One: 1995–2005" (2006), where ten years of work were restored from original negatives in high resolution. The restoration turned out to be a separate production feat: the films were shot on 16mm with white backgrounds, where any speck of dust shows doubly, so the team cleaned frames by hand, sometimes placing thousands of "strokes" removing dirt and scratches on a single frame. Additionally on the disc lay more than 140 pages of archive: storyboards, tests, abandoned sketches found in grocery bags in boxes. The first 750 pre-order customers received a "mystery gift" — either a cut piece of 35mm film from "Rejected" with an autograph, or a drawing on a sticky note.
The DVD of "Everything Will Be OK" (2007) had an Easter egg: a version of the film without narration so you could hear the sound design. Pre-order customers received a unique 35mm cut from theatrical prints. "I Am So Proud of You" (2009) — 148 pages of archive. Critics called these discs "works of art in themselves," and this is a separate irony: a person whose work circulated the internet in pirated copies and with his name misspelled put more effort into physical packaging than studios put into their releases.
In 2015 he tried crowdfunding — not to beg for money, but to solve a production problem. By that point he'd just closed his online store and was "trying to slowly get out of physical media": the warehouse, retail, and eternal guessing of how many copies to print exhausted him. Crowdfunding offered a way out: print exactly as many discs as people sign up for, ship one batch, and close the matter. He started the campaign with the phrase "not a pre-order: if the disc doesn't meet the minimum, we simply won't make it."
It collected $215,512 against a goal of $30,000, from 4,478 people, average check — $48. Tiers stretched out the disc set: at $50k they added "The Meaning of Life," at $75 — "Rejected," at $125 — "Billy's Balloon," at $150 — "Wisdom Teeth," at $175 — the student film "Lily and Jim." In the campaign text he honestly explains the second part of the deal: the money goes not only to the disc but to future films, "with no distributors or third parties between us."
Six years later the same scheme repeated for "World of Tomorrow": $455,400 at the same goal of $30,000 — 1518% — and 5,620 backers. In the campaign description he explains he considers this a way to measure interest in physical media "from a safe distance." Disc price — $26 in the US, $39 abroad. Now both editions on the site are marked sold out.
He never discloses production volume. I specifically searched for the budget of at least one of his films — not a single number in interviews or reference books. Estimates in such cases are meaningless, so leave it as is: he doesn't publish budgets.
Working alone gives him what no studio structure provides: the right to change a film until it's finished. He says he never starts a project with a locked script — "you shouldn't be too proud of your script." He rewrote substantial chunks of "Rejected" and "Everything Will Be OK" during final sound mixing, and found the ending of "The Meaning of Life" a couple years after starting work. The second part of "World of Tomorrow" is built entirely on improvisation: lines from his four-year-old niece were recorded while she drew and played, then built into the script.
The price of this — speed. His own formulation: "It's like a snail that crawls ten miles on wet glass instead of dry concrete. Whew, we're just flying now!" In 2021 he was still manually coloring every frame with characters in Photoshop and admitted he envies actors who manage to shoot several projects in a year and still take a vacation. With the fourth episode of "World of Tomorrow" he planned to assemble a team of animators, but with a caveat: "animators are expensive, and I never wanted to be someone who makes interns work for free." Separately he said if he continues alone, he fears "dying of old age before getting to everything I want to make."
He doesn't do advertising at all — not once in his career, though after "Billy's Balloon" offers to shoot TV commercials came in. In the late 1990s he was invited to write and direct a feature animated film for 20th Century Fox; the project didn't go forward, then he was offered a live-action teen comedy, and he refused. A separate detail: in the mid-2000s a series of Pop-Tarts ads copied his style and humor, he didn't get a cent from it and is still unhappy about it. His formulation about others profiting from his style: "I don't mind making money, but it was never the reason to do this."
The topic of free distribution also has his precise formulation, and it's harsher than you'd expect from someone who lives off fans. Publishing shorts for free, in his opinion, "basically teaches a whole generation of artists that their work is worth nothing." The analogy is simple: "Imagine you call a plumber to fix the pipes but you're not going to pay — you'll just give him exposure and a good review. You'd get punched in the face." And right where he says this, he explains why his entire model worked at all: "The only reason I've survived this long is this audience. I never had studio backing or even a big grant."
In 2025 he assembled "Animation Mixtape" — an 85-minute program of twelve shorts where he's curator, author of intro and outro (brought back "Fluffy Guys" from "Rejected") and poster artist. Distribution — theatrical only, won't be on streaming at all, and all net proceeds from the run go to the authors of the included films. First screening — August 29, 2025 at IFC Center in New York, then more than fifteen cities. The picture never hit the weekly box office top 10, so there's no public box office for this venture.
In August 2026 Hertzfeldt's entire collection — twelve films, including the Bill trilogy and all three "World of Tomorrow" episodes — gathered for the first time in one place, on the streaming service Dropout, and "Paper Trail" got its streaming premiere there September 1. A man who for thirty years cut out middlemen and didn't take studio money gave everything to one middleman — and explained it like this: "I don't know what Dropout is, but I heard they have game shows on there, and who doesn't love a good game show."
One more line that closes the story. In 2026 at Sundance his new film "Paper Trail" came out — fourteen minutes, "life seen through paper," a mix of 2D computer animation and drawn objects. It took the Special Jury Award for creative vision there, and in June — the Cristal for best short at Annecy, making it the first American film in 22 years to receive the festival's top short award. The previous one, if you're counting, was Disney's "Lorenzo" in 2004 — meaning technically the comparison is accurate, but in spirit it's funny: a solo animator continued a series where before him stood a studio major.
At the ceremony he said from the stage the award felt undeserved: "I started animating as a kid, thirty years ago. It was just fun, I wanted to make friends laugh. I always thought of myself as a director who draws. I'd never been to Annecy before. Maybe now I can finally call myself an animator." Meanwhile Annecy reported a historic record: 19,100 accredited participants.
The author of "The World History of Animation," Stephen Cavalier, formulates this carefully: "Hertzfeldt is either a unique phenomenon or an example of a new path for animators surviving independently on their own terms." The second half of the sentence he apparently added out of politeness.
Hertzfeldt has an answer about exactly this, and it's the least optimistic in the whole story. He says for his path there's no reproducible route. In the States, he says, he doesn't know a single animator who's received a major grant: to make a film, you either pay yourself or go work for a studio. The model "give everything away free and live on donations" he considers a dead end, and the model "do everything yourself" — something that requires not only talent but the ability to read a theatrical contract at nineteen and say "no." He calls the ability to refuse one of the most valuable things he learned: "When you're young, instinct tells you to agree to anything because you're grateful anyone's paying attention to you at all."
So there's a model, but it consists of one detail you can't copy: thirty years of not giving away rights to your own films and each time finding people who'll pay for them. Everything else is secondary.