A while ago I was poking around Netflix and I found this short, 17 minute animation called
World of Tomorrow, which I watched and then felt depressed and horrified for the next
two days.
I highly recommend it but because that film is newer and hard to get a hold of, instead
we are going to take a look at another cartoon by the same animator, Don Hertzfeldt.
It’s called Rejected.
The only official upload has text descriptions on top of it, so if you’d like to experience
the movie without that you can easily find a clean one by searching.
It’s nine minutes long.
Bear in mind as you watch this that it won 27 awards when it came out in the year 2000.
This is going to be my first time seeing it as well.
Even though I’ve seen plenty of parodies I never watched the original, so here we go.
Well, there you have it.
The source of all the internet memes for the past 17 years.
The point of the film doesn’t become evident until 7 minutes in, where the text introduces
creative burnout, and the whole imagined reality suffers from the artist’s mental breakdown.
The text on screen about Don Hertzfeldt producing commercial work is not true (it’s just a
tool for the purposes of the animation) but he has had plenty of companies ask him to
do commercials.
Rejected is the result of his temptation to say yes to those companies, produce the worst
commercials possible, take the money and run, and see if the commercials ever became public.
That’s the story of what is going on inside the animation.
It came at a time when nobody was making these kinds of senseless short clips.
The whole idea was revolutionary and inspired things you may be a little more familiar with,
like asdfmovie.
So let’s talk about how Rejected is animated.
It would be extremely easy to make on a computer these days, at least up until the end which
would require some more planning and thought.
Hertzfeldt drew Rejected by hand on hole punched animation paper, which you can fit onto a
peg bar like this.
If you shine a light underneath you can see the previous drawings, which lets you trace
it to create the next frame.
That is how you achieve this wobbly look - redraw the first drawing three or four times and
loop it.
The few places where color exists in the animation are also colored by hand.
Hertzfeldt left the imperfections caused by sloppily coloring with a red marker in.
It gives the blood more texture than the clean and solid banana yellow.
The parts with wrinkled paper and turning pages are also made by hand.
This is an actual piece of wrinkled paper.
This is a drawing that is wrinkled.
Now for the interesting part.
If you aren’t scanning these drawings into a computer, how do you get them into a movie?
Well, you take pictures with a camera.
The camera is mounted on a post that can move up and down for zooming, and it’s pointed
at a platform where each animation cel goes.
The platform can also move for panning.
The setup is called an animation camera stand, or sometimes a rostrum camera or animation
rostrum.
The camera itself must have a frame counter so the camera operator knows which animation
frame they are working with, even if they move back or forward in the project.
The camera shutter has to work independently from recording.
This way you can take very long exposures to make blurs, transitions, and other effects.
All of the effects at the end of Rejected are the result of messing with the camera
setup.
Take this folded paper and expose it for more than one frame, sliding the paper around.
It becomes blurry and multiplied.
A shot like this rabbit guy could be drawn on wrinkled paper, or drawn on a transparent
sheet stacked on top of wrinkled paper.
In a couple of places you can see the bottom of the piece of paper, and the hole punch
for the peg bar.
Camera stands are complex and scary looking to artists who’ve only ever dealt with digital
mediums, but this sort of loony setup was key to most animations for almost 100 years.
What you had to do to animate something in the 1800s and 1900s is a future episode.
Or a few.
Heh.
Hm.
I just noticed you can get World of Tomorrow on Vimeo.
Well.
Shoot.