Bill’s stick figureness isn’t a novelty or an extended joke it is, in the most unexpected way, profound.įor most filmmakers, shorts are a means to an end, a calling card or audition tape for something bigger and more profitable. The result is as transcendent and moving as it is absurd and intimate, and all of it’s centered on a character whose devastating humanity contrasts the fact that he’s rendered with just a few simple lines - dots for eyes, a slash for a mouth, an ovaloid body, and a rectangular hat. And while he is confronted with some of the major questions of existence, the mundane details of everyday life are there as well, suddenly looming large - the awkward encounter on the street with someone he isn’t sure if he knows, the play of dust in a sunbeam, the kid in the park trying to sell magazine subscriptions. A soaring classical score and dispassionate voice-over provide the inroads to his sometimes tragic, sometimes dryly funny inner life.Īs Bill grapples with his impending mortality, his memories and experiences occasionally get warped by his condition, his mind and body no longer reliable (“The guy next to him at the bus stop had the head of a cow, but Bill pretended not to notice,” the narrator notes). It is, forewarning, a real heartrender, about a character named Bill who suffers from a terminal illness that’s never identified, but that seems to be both genetic and brain-related.

The Citizen Kane of stick figure art is a 62-minute movie called It’s Such a Beautiful Day, which screened in scattered theaters nationwide in 2012.

Best stick figure animator