| Billy's Balloon | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Directed by | Don Hertzfeldt |
| Written by | Don Hertzfeldt |
| Produced by | Don Hertzfeldt |
| Cinematography | Rebecca Moline |
| Edited by | Rebecca Moline |
Production company | Bitter Films |
Release date |
|
Running time | 6 minutes |
| Country | United States |
Billy's Balloon is a 16 mm animated short by Don Hertzfeldt. It was his fourth and final student film at UC Santa Barbara. Similar to his other cartoons, he uses a minimalist stick-figure technique.
The film was invited into Official Competition at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival (where Hertzfeldt was the youngest director involved), and it won the Grand Jury Award at the 1999 Slamdance Film Festival.[1]
On top of its film festival runs (and subsequent popularity online), the short has also appeared on Adult Swim and MTV in the US and on a number of international TV broadcasts around the world. Hertzfeldt has noted that the short's international popularity is likely because it has no dialogue and plays like a silent film.[2]
- ^ "Billy's Balloon". Slamdance Film Festival. 1999.
- ^ Plante, Mike (February 1, 2008). "An Interview with Don Hertzfeldt". The Believer. McSweeney's. Retrieved June 11, 2024.
BLVR: How do your films work across language barriers? / DH: Billy's Balloon always played well because it's basically silent—that's the one that played Cannes— whereas Rejected doesn't even make sense in English. I can't imagine what subtitles would do for it. I've always wanted to find a copy dubbed in Japanese and then subtitled back to English. It would probably improve it.