Film
It's Such a Beautiful Day
- Drama
- Strange
Don Hertzfeldt's hand-drawn masterpiece about a man named Bill whose grip on reality dissolves. It's spare, abstract, sometimes unbearably tender—mostly stick figures, mostly silence. A film that treats mental illness and mortality with genuine gravity, funny in the darkest way possible. For anyone who thinks animation can break your heart.
Should you watch it?
Watch it if you love animation that uses crude, stripped-back drawings to carry fragmented memory and absurd jokes side by side, and you don't mind a story that refuses to sit still.
Skip it if you need plot momentum or polished visuals; the rough, deliberately flat drawings and a single voice carrying most of it can wear thin over an hour.
What it asks of you: Sixty-two minutes of full attention, since its jokes arrive quietly and its tone shifts without warning, moving from deadpan to sudden tenderness.
Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.
If you liked this
Requiem for a Dream2000
Darren Aronofsky's descent into addiction across four lives. Visually ravishing and structurally inventive, with one of cinema's most devastating final acts. It earns every scream.
But Relentlessly bleak. The last thirty minutes are almost unbearably hard to watch, and the film offers no comfort.
BoJack Horseman2014
A show about a washed-up actor that becomes a profound meditation on depression, regret, and the stories we tell ourselves. Hilarious and gutting in the same breath, with real stakes and genuine growth.
But Slow burn. The first season feels scattered, and it takes commitment to reach where it's going. Some episodes are harder to sit through than others.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind2004
Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry's dream logic about erasure, love, and memory. Visually inventive, emotionally devastating, structured like a mind unraveling and reforming. A masterpiece.
But Abstract and deliberately disorienting. The non-linear narrative demands your attention, and it resists easy answers about whether forgetting is mercy or tragedy.
Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from It's Such a Beautiful Day
The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
The Congress2013
Both track the collapse of a coherent self through fragmentary, increasingly abstract visual language. Both use sparse dialogue and long silences. Both ask what remains of a person when their mind comes apart.
Ari Folman's sci-fi fantasia about an actress who sells her image and enters a synthetic dream-world of 2D animation. Visually hallucinogenic, about the erosion of self in the attention economy. A formal companion to Bill's dissolution.
But Divided into live-action and wildly experimental animation sections. The second half is genuinely difficult to parse, and some will find it pretentious or exhausting rather than transcendent.
More like this (8)
Anomalisa2015
Charlie Kaufman's stop-motion chamber piece about a man's breakdown during a business trip. Intimate, claustrophobic, and achingly human. A film about the terror of numbness and disconnection.
But Deeply strange. The puppet intimacy is jarring, and it's a very small story with no dramatic resolution. Many will find it alienating rather than moving.
The Sopranos1999
Tony Soprano in weekly therapy, his empire and psyche both cracking. It redefined what television could do—prose-like, digressive, willing to sit in characters' damage without explaining it away.
But Long commitment and paced for patience. Early seasons are slower than you'd expect, and it's fundamentally about the impossibility of change, which frustrates many viewers.
Synecdoche, New York2008
Philip Seymour Hoffman as a theater director whose life and art collapse into each other. Kaufman's most ambitious fever dream: nested realities, baroque ambition, genuine pain underneath the formal play.
But Willfully obscure and three hours long. It rewards active interpretation but never confirms you've got it right. For some, that's infuriating rather than intriguing.
Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica2011
A magical girl anime that deconstructs the genre by making its hope and brightness come at an actual cost. Visually stunning, narratively ingenious, and more moving than you'd expect from the premise.
But Animation style is deliberately uneven, and the tonal whiplash early on may feel cheap. Also inherently anime, which isn't for everyone.
Mulholland Drive2001
David Lynch's Los Angeles dream-vision. Betty and Diane, stardom and delusion, narrative fragmentation that mirrors psychological break. Gorgeous, seductive, and fundamentally unknowable in the right way.
But Notoriously cryptic and very long. Lynch has no interest in clarity, and some will leave frustrated by ambiguity rather than haunted by it.
Waking Life2001
Rotoscoped dreamscape of a man interrogating consciousness, meaning, and whether he's awake. Visually hypnotic and packed with genuine philosophical fervor, almost utopian in its curiosity.
But Essentially a series of monologues about abstract ideas. If you're watching for plot, you'll be disappointed. The animation is also deliberately flat.
A Ghost Story2017
Both use radical formal simplicity—minimal animation, vast silence—to excavate emotional depths. Both are about the difficulty of existing in linear time when your mind won't cooperate. Both find profound beauty in emptiness.
David Lowery's sixteen-minute scene of a ghost in a white sheet watching a house across time. Monumentally patient, almost wordless, transmuting grief into something philosophical. A small film about everything.
But Glacially slow and built around an absurdly simple visual premise. The centerpiece is genuinely testing. If you're impatient with ambition in place of plot, it'll feel like watching paint dry.
Paprika2006
Both depict consciousness as something that can fracture into competing states. Both use visual abstraction as a language for psychological disintegration. Both are formally inventive precisely because the subject demands it.
Satoshi Kon's kaleidoscopic anime about a dream-stealing device that destroys the boundary between reality and fantasy. Visually intoxicating and structurally dizzying. A film that feels like a mind losing coherence in real time.
But Frenetically paced and visually overwhelming. The narrative deliberately mirrors psychic fragmentation, which some will find thrilling and others simply exhausting. Also requires comfort with anime.
People
Cast
Don HertzfeldtNarrator (voice)- Sara CushmanDoctor (voice)
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