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We take Gromit's eyebrows for granted. The trusty pooch of dithering inventor Wallace projects a vast spectrum of emotions via that small wad of clay that sits above his eyeballs. Manipulating that segment of the model just a millimetre too far in either direction could be the difference between intense elation and unalloyed gloom. In exactly the same way, the sublime output of Austin-based stop-motion animator Don Hertzfeldt projects the complex psychologies of his characters through minute enhancements of facial features. Yet he hasn't given himself much creative wriggle room, as the stars of his movies are all near-featureless stickmen with dots for eyes and a single line for a mouth.
Take Bill, for example, the star of his extraordinary debut feature film, It's Such a Beautiful Day. Bill's only discernable feature is a hat that is permanently fixed to his head, even when he's laid up in hospital and experiencing night terrors following a course of anti-psychotic drugs. Over the course of 60 minutes, Bill experiences a series of psychological implosions while the possibility of untimely death looms large. And yet with those two ink-dot eyes, his trauma, loss and general dissatisfaction with the world are made to feel unbearably humane and resonant. Our advice: do not watch this movie without a hankie tucked up your sleeve.
It's Such a Beautiful Day premiered in the US in 2012, and has been described as a no-fi companion piece to Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life – it is similarly structured as a catalogue of apparently banal vignettes and observations that, when stitched together, form an exhilarating tapestry of life's unnoticed but vital minutiae. Bill's journey is bittersweet and occasionally terribly sad: he relays a memory of his youth where a lonely boy with hooks for hands perishes while chasing a seagull into the horizon. The narration, by Hertzfeldt himself, helps the emotions to swell, particularly due to his breathy, ethereal intonation. Classical music is employed to attain the kind of full-on sensory bombast usually reserved for a Douglas Sirk weepie.
Hertzfeldt's method of making grand existential statements with almost recklessly modest means has made his cinematic oeuvre one of the most fascinating and enjoyable of all contemporary American directors. The last short film he made, entitled The Meaning of Life, tackled nothing less than the nature of organic life in the known universe, addressing the painstaking development of the human form through a series of (often highly amusing) Darwinian transmutations. The wry kicker: were we really worth all that effort?
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It's Such a Beautiful Day presents a film-maker very much in touch with his feelings, though Hertzfeldt hasn't always been known for such bruising empathy. His first short from 1996, ironically titled Ah! L'Amour, presents a guy trying out corny chat-up lines on a number of women who proceed to physically abuse him for his efforts. He then decides to cynically change his tack, and all of a sudden, he has managed to score a date. Aside from the tone, all the Hertzfeldt motifs are present and correct, from the grinning stickman, the acerbic, violent humour, the Keaton-esque deadpan and the fourth-wall-breaking use of the drawing paper as a part of the film's 3D visual schema.
Perhaps Hertzfeldt's most widely known work is Rejected (sometimes known as Rejected Cartoons). The story goes that following the popular success of his early stick-figure shorts, various corporations and advertising agencies attempted to commission Hertzfeldt to produce advertisements for their products. Aside from telling them to go to hell (Hertzfeldt is rigorously anti-commercial), he produced this snarky retort in which we're given the apocryphal TV commercials he made for these companies, but – for obvious reasons – were instantly rejected. It's perhaps the only ever Oscar-nominated film to feature a dancing popcorn kernel who suffers from a bout of cascading rectal bleeding.
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Prior to Rejected, Hertzfeldt made his first and only incursion into genre film-making, though only in the loosest sense of the term. Billy's Balloon is a film that should perhaps be avoided by expectant parents, as it opens with a shot of a stick-figure baby propped cheerfully in a field, clutching a large red balloon. For reasons that are left to the viewers' imagination, the balloon springs to life like something out of Disney's Fantasia and attempts to kill the baby. First it just knocks it about, then drags it up into the clouds. It's a silent what-if? horror movie with homicidal balloons.
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Aside from a scattering of festival screenings, Hertzfeldt remains largely an unknown quantity. This may be down to the labour-intensive production and exhibition process of his films, which he writes, directs, animates and narrates himself. But the fact that you can watch his short work on YouTube means there's a large digital repository of Hertzfeldt-iana for those wanting to explore things futher.
Still, the ideal home for these movies is in the cinema and on the biggest screen you can find. The larger the stick figures appear, the easier it is to gauge the rich nuances in those tiny peepers.
• The Don Hertzfeldt Experience is at the ICA cinema in London at 8pm on Friday 3 May. It's Such a Beautiful Day opens at the ICA on the same day.
