Like all of Don Hertzfeldt's films, I am so proud of you was photographed and animated without the use of digital effects or computers. The movie was shot on an antique 35mm animation stand, one of the last remaining cameras of its kind left in America. Though sixty years old, the camera was pivotal in composing images that would have otherwise been impossible to create. The movie's special effects were also created directly on film, using traditional double exposures, in-camera mattes, and new experimental techniques. The 22 minute short took just under two years to complete.
Chapter One, Everything will be OK, received the 2007 Jury Award for Best Short Film from the Sundance Film Festival and was named by many critics as one of the "best films of 2007." A third and final chapter in this series is planned.
I am so proud of you was recently awarded the Grand Jury Award at the Florida Film Festival, Best Picture and Best Screenplay from the Fargo Film Festival, the Yoram Gross Award for Animation from Flickerfest in Australia, and the Golden Starfish from the Hamptons International Film Festival.
Don Hertzfeldt is an Academy Award nominee whose popular animated films have been featured in over a thousand film festivals and venues around the world.
Don was born in 1976 in California's Bay Area. He received a B.A. in Film Studies from UC Santa Barbara in 1998, where he produced his first four animated films:
Ah L'Amour, Genre, Lily and Jim, and Billy's Balloon, the latter receiving a nomination for the Short Film Palm D'Or at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. His following film, Rejected, was nominated for an Oscar in 2001. In 2003, Don co-created The Animation Show, a touring theatrical program of international animation, which he programmed with Mike Judge for its first three seasons. A retrospective anthology of Don's work, Bitter Films: Volume One, was released on DVD in 2006. Since 1995, his cartoons have collectively received over 130 international awards.
Don is currently on a sold-out 20 city theatrical tour in support of I am so proud of you. An Evening with Don Hertzfeldt presents a selection of his films, culminating in the regional premiere of I am so proud of you and a rare onstage interview.
===========================================================
REVIEWS
"A stunning gut-punch of a short film that recalls Shel Silverstein’s The Missing Piece with its stick-figure profundity, Proud is the latest mortality play from Oscar-nominated director Don Hertzfeldt, and it lives up to its pedigree, boldly taking on concepts like family, pain and loss. An intermission might be necessary after this program so audiences can step outside and catch their breath. It’s that effective." - Orlando Weekly
"[Everything will be OK and I am so proud of you] tell the story of Bill, a stick figure everyman who stoically endures the pain, uncertainty, and excruciating beauty of life. Hertzfeldt's work is sometimes elusive in its simplicity, but it can be profound as well; with his humor, darkness, philosophical yearning, and insistence on drawing every line himself, he may be the only legitimate successor to Charles M Schulz. Except for all the money, of course."- J.R. Jones, Chicago Reader
"....a fucking masterpiece. I can't even begin to articulate my thoughts about the film but it just gave me shivers and I wasn't able to attend the party after the screening. Just had to be alone. It had this effect on a number of other people here too.... stunning, beautiful, tragic, absurd work." - Chris Robinson, artistic director Ottawa International Animation Festival
"So here's the thing about Don Hertzfeldt: the guy is a certifiable genius. Anyone who has watched his glorious and hilarious hand-drawn animated shorts Billy's Balloon, Ah, L'Amour, or Rejected knows this already, and you've more than likely watched these shorts more times than you can count, especially the truly inspired Rejected. But beginning with The Meaning of Life and continuing on to the 2006-07 exercise in mental gymnastics Everything will be OK, the Oscar-nominated Hertzfeldt has gone from being a gifted writer and animator of comic shorts into a more existential realm that faithfully examines the way the human mind works and doesn't work. He's showing us the mental movie that runs inside a fractured mind, while maintaining a level of humor, but adding a blanket of melancholy and despair. One could see these recent works as a portrait of a man trying to fend off a psychological meltdown, or perhaps this is said meltdown in its earliest incarnation. Most importantly, Hertzfeldt has transformed himself from animator and storyteller into a true artist. And his latest work, I am so proud of you is heartfelt proof of this. His longest short to date, this new piece is something of a follow-up to Everything will be OK, and much like that work, it's impossible to summarize or explain. You just need to see it.... This is the first of his films that got a genuinely deep emotional response from me, and I think it's accurate to say I was fairly devastated after watching it, which of course forced me to watch it again." - Aint it Cool News