Genre

'Genre'is another fine animated comedy short from the brilliant and twisted mind of animator Don Hertzfeldt. Here he draws a rabbit on a piece of paper and puts the poor thing through all kind of movie genres. The rabbit plays a part in a romantic film, the science fiction film, the porno film. Then the animator slowly loses his ideas and he starts combining genres and create new ones, so suddenly the rabbit stars in a disaster porno film, just to name one.

After 'Ah, L'Amour', already a fine comedy, Hertzfeldt improves his animation and his comedy with 'Genre'. The short is inventive, perfectly animated, twisted and therefore probably not that great for everybody, and brilliant in how it uses such a simple idea in the most effective way possible. For the follow ups including 'Billy's Ballon' and 'Rejected' can be said the same. You should not miss any of them.

'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'.

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!"

While I doubt if I'll ever give a Don Hertzfeldt cartoon a 10 (since his animation style is so simple), this short film shows that you don't need a lot of fancy colors of computer generated animation in order to make a good film. It's extremely simple yet makes people laugh--and most of the time, that's why you watch a cartoon.

Apparently this was a student film made while Hertzfeldt was in college. It consists of a cute animated animal that is manipulated by the hand of the artist. As the artist announces genre after genre, the creature is shoved into the genre--and usually results in him getting beaten up or bludgeoned or worse! In many ways, it's like the old Daffy Duck cartoon where the same sort of thing occurs, though Hertzfeldt's is more senselessly violence---which I like! Overall, super-simple but very funny. Just be sure to watch the credits.

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.