It's Such a Beautiful Day (film)



It's Such a Beautiful Day is a 2012 experimental black comedy-drama animated film directed, written, animated, and produced by Don Hertzfeldt as his first feature film, originally made as three animated short films (2006, 2008, 2011).

The film is divided into three chapters (Everything Will Be OK, I Am So Proud of You and It's Such a Beautiful Day) and follows the story of a stick-figure man named Bill, who struggles with his failing memory and absurdist visions, among other symptoms of an unknown illness. The film employs both offbeat humor and serious philosophical musings.

Everything Will Be OK

 * Adaptation Expansion: Bill was originally from Hertzfeldt's webcomic Temporary Anesthetics and in it led a relatively normal, if depressing in a banal way, life, free of mental disorder (if you're willing to forget about some strange recurring dreams).
 * Brick Joke: Near the start of the film, the narrator remarks on how Bill always picked fruit from the back of the pile at the grocer's, because the fruit at the front was at "crotch-level" with the other customers. Later on, he starts hallucinating that, in addition to having smokey demon heads, everyone he saw had "gigantic, bacteria-riddled crotches all over the goddamn produce."
 * Dysfunction Junction: Most everyone Bill knows and meets was odd in one way or another, such as his unhelpful neighbor who talked about nanomachines could preserve his brain in a failed effort to comfort Bill, and quickly changed the subject to a dream he had where his toes fell off.
 * Hallucinations: Bill suffers these multiple times throughout the film.
 * Public Domain Soundtrack: Excerpts from Bizet's "Au fond du temple saint" and Smetana's "Vitava (Moldau)" are featured.
 * Sanity Slippage: "THE PIPE IS LEAKING. THE PIPE IS LEAKING. THE PIPE IS LEAKING."
 * Soundtrack Dissonance: The narration of the relatively mundane segments of Bill's life in the first part are set to the aforementioned Crowning Music of Awesome.
 * Through the Eyes of Madness: The entire film is done through Bill's perspective.
 * Title Drop: Very nearly; the exactly line is, "...as if everything were OK."

I Am So Proud of You
"On his way to lunch, Bill smiles, and thinks for the first time that maybe everything will be o--"
 * Crazy Cat Lady: Bill's schizophrenic grandmother, who kept severed cat heads in her dresser and would rub them across her scalp when she "felt the fish smothering her brain".
 * To a lesser extent, Bill's mother. She only had one cat, but she would shave it on the weekends.
 * Hope Spot:


 * Public Domain Soundtrack: Excerpts from Strauss's "Vier letzte Lieder", Wagner's "Das Rheingold" and "Im Treibhaus", and Bremner's "Old Sir Symon the King" are used.
 * Railroad Tracks of Doom:
 * Title Drop: Bill's mother would pack notes saying, "I am so proud of you!" with his school lunches. As noted in Hope Spot above, the previous film's title is very nearly dropped.
 * Wild Child: "A wild man wandered into town that summer and beat the church organist with a shovel."
 * Wild Child: "A wild man wandered into town that summer and beat the church organist with a shovel."