Everything will be OK, I Am So Proud of You, and It’s Such a Beautiful Day, shorts.
Everything will be OK is the first chapter of a three-part story about Bill, a young man whose daily routines, perceptions, and dreams are illustrated onscreen through multiple split-screen windows. We join him on a bittersweet existential odyssey which takes in dead birds, big onions, lunchbox messages, trains, manatees, leaf-blowers and the eventual death and rebirth of the known universe. The film is a pocket-sized epic, incorporating the blistering deadpan of Buster Keaton, the narrative back-flipping of Charlie Kaufman, the blissful Zen contemplation of Yazujiro Ozu and the grand philosophical investigations of Terrence Malick. Scenes throughout the trilogy are often divided into multiple windows of action on the screen at once, against a background of pure black. Animated still photographs are also incorporated inside certain windows, as well as a handful of the colorful special effects and experimental film techniques that Hertzfeldt first utilized in The Meaning of Life.
It’s Such a Beautiful Day, the feature film.
In 2012, Hertzfeldt edited together all three chapters of his short film trilogy to create a seamless new feature film out of the story. His first feature film, the movie shares the same title as the third chapter of the story.