When The Wind Blows and How Nostalgia Lies to Us

|Wil McMillen| Everyone is scared. Everyone is broke. Unemployment is skyrocketing. There’s a madman in the White House who is threatening to blow up anyone who looks at him wrong.  It’s 1983, and I’m eight years old. Nostalgia for the 1980s is amusing to me. The 80s, at least the early 80s… Continue reading

Don Hertzfeldt Has Something to, um, Tell You

|J.R Jones| Don Hertzfeldt’s characters have always struggled for words. In the opening scene of his hourlong animation It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012), the everyman protagonist, Bill, recognizes someone walking toward him on the street and prepares a greeting. But when they pass… Continue reading

Hertzfeldt to Miyazaki to Life: How Negative Space in Animation Gave Me the Time to Live

|Zach Staads| I first saw Don Hertzfeldt’s Everything Will Be OK in my friend’s living room, a cavernous Victorian echo chamber carved from oak and smothered in pink-beige plaster, where we watched on a chunky, green Dell laptop from 2006. Those 17 minutes changed my life. Continue reading