Genre

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!"

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.

This is the funniest short animation I've seen since "Bambi Meets Godzilla." The depictions of familiar genres ("romantic comedy," "the buddy film") are funny, but the combinations that follow are outstanding.

'Genre' is Don Hertzfeldt's second film, and, in my opinion, is much better than his first. 'Genre' is a simple film w/a simple premise that makes plenty of room for many gags of various kinds, ranging from meta humour to simple genre parody to pure absurdity to more dark and twisted black humour. It's a quick little work of animated comedy that is exceedingly fun to watch and foreshadows the brilliance and hilarity that would soon come to be in films like 'Rejection'.

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.