Oscar Shortlist Interviews: Director Don Hertzfeldt Shares His Favorite Shot From ‘ME’ (Exclusive)

Cartoon Brew invited the filmmakers behind each of this year’s 15 Oscar-shortlisted animated shorts to share their favorite shot from their film and explain why it’s special to them. The pieces are being published in the order that materials were received.

In this piece, we’re looking at ME from two-time Academy Award-nominated director Don Hertzfeldt.

ME is a musical fable about the retreat of humanity into itself, where life and technology clash around the birth of a child in a seemingly happy family.

Below, Hertzfeldt shares his favorite shot from the short and shares its significance to him:

Though I wouldn’t call this my favorite shot from ME, I remember it being a really important one for my morale. A year into animating ME, which is sort of a musical, all the music that was going to be in it suddenly had to be removed. So I’d completed a musical that no longer had any music in it. There was a period where things felt a bit directionless as I began the slow process of reconstructing everything while figuring out a new soundtrack.

This shot appears pretty early in the short. With the original music playing, those big black ink splotches that fly across the frame would sync up to big drum beats. When the original music went out the window, the obvious solution was to just remove the ink splotches too, but I felt like they’d really grown into the image and what was going on with this character. So I left them in there. And the first time i tried playing new music over the scene, this Mozart requiem, the ink splotches now just sort of appeared on their own accord… and it doesn’t sound like much, but it was a huge relief to realize the world hadn’t come to an end, the film might actually still work in this new form, and it might even be better.

ME was ultimately re-edited from front to back, to match the shape of all the new music, but I left certain things, like this shot, alone. You might notice a few other little moments throughout the film that might also appear to be responding to invisible cues. At times, ME feels sort of haunted by the original music that’s missing… and for a story that’s at least partially about characters who are haunted by things that are missing, that felt right.

Read the other entries in the series:

• Florian Maurice on Au Revoir mon Monde
• Nicolas Keppens on Beautiful Men
• Dice Tsutsumi on Bottle George
• Nina Gantz on Wander to Wonder
• Kei Kanamori on Origami
• Loïc Espuche on Yuck!
• Torill Kove on Maybe Elephants
• Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani on In the Shadow of the Cypress
• Anna Samo on The Wild-Tempered Clavier
• Iain Gardner on A Bear Named Wojtek
• Laura Gonçalves and Alexandra Ramires on Percebes
• Tod Polson on The 21
• Alexandra Myotte & Jean-Sébastien Hamel on A Crab In The Pool