The Meaning of Life
2005 · 12m · USA
Directed by Don Hertzfeldt
Genres: animation, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal
Hand-drawn animation traces the evolution of the human race from prehistoric blob forms, through the teeming, fighting crowds of today, to hundreds of millions of years into the future when humanity has splintered into countless new species — all still asking the same questions. The film closes with two strange descendants on a colorful shore, speaking an unknown language about the meaning of life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Hertzfeldt's refusal to use computers while animating tens of thousands of drawings feels almost aggressively analog in 2005—not retro-fetishism, but a genuine middle finger to the digital turn, and the surreal evolutionary jump-cuts prove the constraint itself becomes the subversion.
Four years of hand-photographed 35mm animation places this firmly in the lineage of painstaking cel masters, yet Hertzfeldt's conceptual sweep—tracing meaning across deep time and fractured species—elevates craft into philosophical inquiry with the rigor of Tarkovsky.
The single decision to photograph rather than scan each hand-drawn frame onto 35mm stock creates a tactile grain and temporal weight that no digital pipeline could replicate; it's the constraint that makes the cosmic scope feel genuinely earned rather than virtuosic.
Reviews
Hertzfeldt's hand-drawn animation takes its viewers on a transcendent journey through space and time as we witness mankind transform from the simple beings of the past to the simple beings of the present.
The closest thing on film yet to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Festivals
- Sundance Film Festival 2005