Genre

Hertzfeldt is widely known because he is active in organizations and because he did some really sick and funny stuff that was rejected by the Family Channel. This has found an audience through file sharing (and festivals) and has built quite an audience.

Unfortunately, most of the other stuff he did was no good or unoriginal. Except this.

He just seems to have trouble finding a creative writer to match his vision and twisted views.

This IS a student film, and avowedly so. This IS almost certainly a response to a specific assignment. And it is crudely drawn in places. But it is clever and worth watching. If he never did anything else, this alone would place him above the "Shrek" crew in my book.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Although I shudder to think what this says about me, I love this short! In my own defense, let me also state that I loved The Man Who Planted Trees (what that apparent dichotomy says, who knows? Who cares?) and I'm a prince of a fellow currently in frog mode. But I digress.

A poor rabbit finds himself trapped in a situation that would reduce Franz Kafka to one gigantic twitch and takes the viewer down a rabbit hole that would send Lewis Carroll out of the room, screaming incoherently as he ran. Why this didn't get nominated for an Oscar (even a student nomination) I'll never understand. A must for any fan of films, particularly the demented ones (the films, I mean, not the fans) and well worth tracking down. I found it on a Spike and Mike's Festival of Animation and I believe it's to be released (tentatively, anyway) sometime next year by the animator as part of a compilation of all his animated shorts. Most highly recommended!

'Genre (1996)' was produced while Don Hertzfeldt was still in college, and it certainly looks like an amateur film, particularly the stop-motion sequences featuring the animator himself. However – as was the case with 'Billy's Balloon (1998)' and 'Rejected (2000)' – Hertzfeldt proves that even simple animation can be very entertaining. 'Genre' draws plenty of inspiration from Chuck Jones' self-reflexive 'Duck Amuck (1953),' in which Daffy Duck is consistently pestered by the animator who is drawing him. In 'Genre,' an unfortunate rabbit finds himself in a succession of compromising (and often bloody) situations, as his creator experiments with different movie genres. As the frustrated animator begins to run out of ideas, he starts splicing genres together, leaving the poor rabbit to fend for himself in a "porno disaster film," for example. The most enjoyable element of Hertzfeldt's film is the self-awareness of the animated rabbit, who knows that the animator (his "God") is purposefully screwing him around, and is forced to simply wear it.

What a marvelous film. The artist draws an animated bunny and then subjects him to one tortuous moment after another. In doing so, he runs through just about every movie genre that exists, and some that don't. It is in an incredibly simple style that works so well. My favorite was when the rabbit finally eats a carrot and then makes an amazing discovery.

Tummy-aching funny! The rabbit gets all of my sympathies, getting his ears ripped off, being fed Ebola carrots, abducted by little green aliens, etc... Don Hertzfeld's cartoons are so anarchistically (if there is such a word) funny that they can only be compared to someone like Tex Avery or Bill Plympton. There's a rabbit that has to go through a series of film genres, from romantic film to porno film etc.. and when the drawer runs out of imagination, he makes up his own genres, like sci-fi musical or porno disaster film... which the rabbit has to endure.

If you watch this one, you must also see his "Ah, L'Amour" (absolutely hilarious, a guy innocently asks women for a date or not even that, just how are they doing, and gets flayed, chainsawed, stabbed in the eyeballs,etc), "Lily and Jim", and "Rejected".

"Lily and Jim" is about a blind date gone horribly wrong... "Rejected" is supposed to contain some commercials that were commissioned by some companies from Don Hertzfeldt but rejected at sight..:D Which is not true, it's a fictional film, but very funny as such:D. "I live in a bucket!"