It's Such a Beautiful Day (2012) on Netflix
Bill goes through his daily routines and meets his ex-girlfriend, while an illness he cannot name keeps intruding. His doctor tells him the condition is getting worse.
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- Netflix4.6/5
- IMDb8.2/103,404 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
Bill is a stick figure who moves through ordinary days, and his routines, his dreams and his perceptions are shown in split-screen windows while a narrator describes them. He meets his ex-girlfriend from time to time, and an illness he cannot name keeps interfering with his everyday life, troubling his memory and bringing him visions he cannot explain. As the days pass, his thoughts and hallucinations grow worse. When he visits his doctor, he is told that the illness is getting worse. Bill and the people around him are drawn as stick figures, with photographed real-life images appearing beside them in the split-screen frames.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about It's Such a Beautiful Day (2012)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Towards the end of production on the final chapter, the camera shooting It's Such a Beautiful Day began to fail and could no longer advance the film properly, leaving unintentional light leaks in the final footage.
- The film's signature split-screen effect was created by framing the drawn animation through tiny holes placed beneath the camera lens, with each element in the frame composited separately through multiple exposures.
- It's Such a Beautiful Day took six years to make and was captured entirely in-camera on a 35 mm rostrum animation stand built in the 1940s, one of the last surviving cameras of its kind, which Don Hertzfeldt had used on every project since 1999.
- The three short films that make up It's Such a Beautiful Day collected more than 90 film festival awards on their original releases, among them the Sundance Film Festival's Grand Prize for Everything Will Be OK.
- In 2025, filmmaker Clint Bentley named It's Such a Beautiful Day as one of the influences on his own film, Train Dreams.
