001 Billy's Balloon by Don Hertzfeldt

Welcome to The Perfect Show! Let host Scot Maupin introduce the show and himself and then tell you about today’s perfect thing - Billy’s Balloon, an animated film by Don Hertzfeldt.

 

Find Don Hertzfeldt at http://www.bitterfilms.com

 

Thanks to Aandy Valentine for intro and outro music. You can find Aandy at fiverr.com/aandyvalentine

 

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AI Generated Transcript:

Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I'm your host, scott Moppin, and this is a podcast where I will be trying to catalog some of the perfect little pieces of life, so join me each episode as I examine one thing or experience that I or someone else claims as perfect. Like I said, my name is Scott and I'm actually with you today. While family members of mine are out having fun at a water park, I am grounding myself from being out with them because I lost a fight with the sun and now I must cower in shame. Earlier this week, I sat outside for hours and hours after being asked if I wanted sunscreen for my exposed skin and foolishly turned that offer down because it was cloudy, even though I know that you can still get sunburned on cloudy days. I was promptly given my bright pink comeuppance as my entire head and neck area developed a giant sunburn, which I am sporting now. So I sit here humbled, hiding and recording the first episode of this show while others slide down large wet plastic tubes and do other awesome, fun summer things. I'm recording here in Oakland, california, and maybe I should get some first episode house cleaning things out of the way. Until plans change, I'll be the solo host for the show, but I'm also open to expanding, experimenting, adapting. What that might look like is me trying out things like interviews, one or more co-hosts, sponsored ads. I like the challenge of maybe making an ad that people would want to hear, and also segments or bits, I don't know. I gotta warn you I have quite a silly boy comedy streak in me and I like the idea of adding something random or unrelated from time to time. It's all going to be very much a work in progress as I figure out how to make this what I want it to be, or even what it is I do want it to be. I'll be learning a lot as I go. This is also not going to be some super research heavy podcast. It's going to be more experience based. I think the context of how you experience something has a lot to do with whether or not you consider it to be perfect. Also, it's a lot less work to do a lot less research. I'll do some Googling and reading, sure, but don't expect, like regular research, deep dives. I'll leave that to other podcasts. Before I get going with today's episode topic, you can connect online a few different ways. First, of course, we have the Perfect Show site, which is PerfectShowsite. It's pretty empty right now so don't go there. But again, the Perfect Show site is at wwwperfectshowsite. That's S-I-T. Connect on Twitter, instagram and YouTube to the handle at PerfectShowShow or by emailing PerfectShowShowcom. Today's topic to talk about the very first Perfect Show topic is a cartoon called Billy's Balloon, or more specifically, my experience first seeing Billy's Balloon. So the year is 2000 and I am but a young lad at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, kansas, and my friends invite me to go along with them to an animation festival on some weekend afternoon. I love movies but usually I saw them in cineplexes or mega plexes. The Glenwood four plex, the Oak Park Mall four plex, which is not actually in the mall but in a complex next to the mall, the Olathe landing 8. Then the South Glen 12 opened up and it was like 12 screens in one place. This is crazy. I Actually worked there for a summer. That was my first like non self-employed job. It ruled. Then the West Glen opened up, a bit more of a drive, but usually less crowded, a little better facilities, a little newer. Then the mothership opened up and started eating every other Cineplexes lunch the AMC 24 there, one 19th Street and I 35, two dozen screens, Mine blowing to a young me. At the time there were smaller art house theaters I would go do from time to time not a lot, probably the most often in college and Liberty Hall, but for this animation festival we went to the Rio theater in Overland Park, kansas. That's a suburb of Kansas City, right near where I grew up, about a half hour south of the city. This is my first time going to this theater. The Rio is an independent theater hosting Spike and Mike's animation festival, volume six at that time. So we each paid for one ticket and we got to go watch a lineup of nine short animated films. I think there may have been an introduction in outro, but I knew nothing about any of these. This is a. I was going in cold, which I love to do the rare times I am able to. Sometimes I hear a recommendation about a movie or or a TV show and just like don't find out anything else More about it, just go and see it, and I, on the times that I'm successfully able to do that, it's usually pretty fantastic. So this is one of those times. Not on purpose, this was just from lack of knowing anything about these movies. So Some of them were comedic, some of them were dramatic, some of them were silent. There were dialogue ones and dialogue free ones. Billy's balloon is one without dialogue, but there was even an animated music video for a squirrel-knit zipper song. But then, yeah, this one came on that just blew me away. It was this is my spoiler alert for Billy's balloon. So if you've somehow made it this far and don't want to know what happens in the short film, this is your last eject point. Okay, okay, good, okay. So Billy's balloon starts out with a pretty simple drawing of a child holding a red balloon and a rattle. The movie proceeds to take its time, letting the child shake the rattle with a blank expression. After what seems like an eternity, the balloon strikes the boy in the head and I'll tell you, sitting in the audience, I did not know what I was expecting from this movie, but that absolutely wasn't it. What follows is a heightening of that initial bit. For the rest of the five minutes and 25 seconds, the balloon batters Billy and he looks helpless to do. Anything is like running around and just the menace of this completely unmenacing object battering this kid as he runs helplessly and Flails about I. It's completely absurd and it hit me at just the right point in my age or my demeanor, my mood for the afternoon. But the sound effects. The sound effects are tremendous. Whatever it was I can remember that maybe three or four times in my life a movie Getting me the right mix of me and the movie where I was laughing so hard that I'm crying. And this is one of those times. So, as the bit continues to heighten, we lift Billy into the air and drop him with just the perfect thud sound effect. The film gives us glimpses of hope and then dashes them away with a jumbo jet. The films world expands and we see what appears to be a global revolt of balloons against children everywhere. I Remember gasping for air, wiping away tears in my cheeks, just hurting. It was one of those laughs where something gets you laughing so hard and then while you're laughing you realize how hard you're laughing and that makes you like laughing Harder. It's an avalanche. Laugh, no, but a laugh. You remember for the rest of your life, or for me at least 20 years now, I guess. So the cartoon ended and I regained control of my lungs. I think we watched the rest of the films and probably the outro Afterward. Billy's balloon was the clear standout in my group of friends. This is pre YouTube, so I had no recording of it. We had no way to rewatch it. We just relived it several times in the car, highlighting different bits of writing, echoes of those laughs we enjoyed in the theater. But it would be a few years before I would actually be able to see Billy's balloon again, but I had this memory just seared clearly into my brain. So what is this cartoon? Billy's balloon is an animated film and it's made by Don Hertzfeld, the artist, the writer and animator. He actually released it in 1998, a year and change before I saw it, and it was one of the movies he made as a film student at the University of Santa Barbara in Santa Barbara, california. It was his fourth and last student film, actually, and the first one with this kind of like slapstick humor. Really, it's done well for itself, winning 33 awards and being nominated for best short film at Cannes in 1999. Now, clearly that's not all stuff I just had memorized. I did go and do some research, even after my big disclaimer earlier. I just don't want to be locked into doing that every time, but I enjoy it, so sometimes I will. Don continued to make movies professionally, like after Billy's Balloon, so he started with Rejected in 2000 and he's putting him out. He's put out a bunch ever since, but he's been able to make these movies independently and self-finance their production. So this way he's in complete control over every aspect of the films. And that's exactly what I want to see, because clearly watching Billy's Balloon but then also Rejected is a big one, and his recent ones, the three-part World of Tomorrow films they show the open mind of this guy and it is a weird, exciting place and I want it undiluted. I want to see it without. I want to see it as pure. I want to see that mind that gives me something as pure and ridiculous as Billy's Balloon. I want to mainline that, without interference. This is like I get the same sort of feeling when I see Charlie Kaufman type movies where I'm like this is so unique that it can only really come from one place and you know, like it or hate it. I really just want to see more of that because I find it so interesting. Yeah, so after having this experience with Billy's Balloon, I kept my eyes open for a way to chase it down to rewatch it. This is the thing that I do sometimes. I I get like I decide something is my white whale and then I go okay, now game plan, how are the different ways I could figure it out, to find this thing or to accomplish this task? That seems difficult, but at some point I'll probably share my journey of chasing down the out-of-print Quigley Down Under score by Basil Poladors. But yeah, back to Billy's Balloon. I I had a DVD player and discs by that point, but I there was no way to just buy the movie, that. It was not really a market for short films at Best Buy. It wasn't on a DVD by itself, it wasn't like a, a CD single where they would make DVDs of short films by themselves. So I remember searching for a way on the internet to own this short film, and this would have been pre-Google. I was probably searching on Yahoo or different whatever, asking chiefs, but I dove down some weird message board comment threads and finally found my solution. So I would have better info on this. But I really I haven't seen this part recorded anywhere. I don't find it on Wikipedia or recorded on Don Hertzfeld's website, but I and I sold the copy I had years ago. So I'm working totally on memory here, but Hertzfeld's website, which is bitterfilmscom, lists the bitter films volume one as the place where Billy's Berlin was first put on DVD, and I had that too. But before that was available I found a short film magazine that I think published quarterly and included a DVD with the films from each issue on it. So I remember somehow finding out about the existence of this thing and getting an order in for the issue. It may be 2001 or 2002, probably 2002, and being stoked when I finally got my hands on it, but the magazine was. I don't remember a lot about the magazine. I think they just wrote about the filmmakers or the films themselves, but I really wanted that DVD and the DVD was in. I remember it was in one of those cheaper covers where the only plastic part is like the clasp part on the right edge that holds down a wrap around cardboard cover. It was a black cover with like a cyberized pill on the front, probably very matrix influenced. Everything in that time period was. But I don't remember a lot about the disc other than a couple of things. The one is finally being able to relive the film that made me laughs to tears and being able to watch it a million times and that ruled. I still loved it. I don't think any viewing ever quite matched the surprise in relation to that first perfect one, but that's totally okay. Too. I've got to. I have gotten to experience that sort of sort of again by showing other people the the movie for the first time on the DVD copy. I had people who would come over and go into a cold, as I first did, and the response I get is usually pretty, pretty good. So oh, the other thing I remember about that short film magazine DVD was that it had a long looping track of just a fire in a fireplace, you know, like crackling fire with just. It would be on a loop and you could put it on for as long as you needed. And I pulled that disc. I pulled the disc out for that feature almost as much as for Billy's balloon, because this would have been a time before streaming where you could just pull up a pull up a long looping video like that. So it was pretty handy at times. Later on, as I said, I found Billy's balloon again on Don's compilation DVD Bitter Films, volume one, which appears to no longer be available, or at least the link doesn't work on the website, but more recently I found it on YouTube, where it's on Don. It's on Don Hertzfeld's YouTube channel and that's probably the best and easiest place to see it. Okay, and I think that's pretty much where I want to wrap up the talk on Billy's balloon, or at least what I had planned to say on it. And since I'm here by myself, there's no one else to just kind of weigh in or riff off of, so that'll probably be it. It rules find it and see it if you haven't. If you have seen it, then find it and see it again. And with that, billy's balloon takes its slot as the first item entered into the Perfectorium, the index of perfect things. So once again, the perfect show site website is at perfectshowsite that's S I T E, and find us on Twitter, instagram and YouTube under the name perfect show show. Oh, and I want to talk about theme music. I plan to put music or jingles at the beginning and end of the podcast, maybe places in the middle, like for transitions, but I haven't settled on anything yet. I'm not super musically confident myself, but you know I can get better. But I'm completely down to hear any listener submissions for the theme music or just short ending songs about perfect things. Yeah, whatever you got, email him to perfectshowshowatgmailcom. Thanks to Andy Valentine for the killer music on today's episode. You can find his link in the episode notes. This episode was recorded and mixed at Morena Studios in Oakland, california, and if you liked this and think someone else would like it too, then let them know that you found the perfect show for them. And yes, I partially picked the show name so I could do silly wordplay like that. And no, I don't think it'll get too old too quickly. And yes, I know I'm probably wrong about that. No, I wasn't thinking that if I am able to do a bunch of these episodes, then I can start being a guest on other people's shows and they will have to say this is Scott Moppin and he hosts the perfect show and I'll misunderstand them on purpose and be like oh, thank you for the lovely compliment. It'll be a whole thing that I do when everyone finds it adorable and endearing. But yes, it would rule if that actually ended up happening and I called it here. Anyway, until next time, I'm Scott Moppin. Thanks for listening to the perfect show. Bye.