A Blue Room

Elephants Dream is the story of two strange characters exploring a capricious and seemingly infinite machine. The elder, Proog, acts as a tour-guide and protector, happily showing off the sights and dangers of the machine to his initially curious but increasingly skeptical protege Emo. As their journey unfolds we discover signs that the machine is not all Proog thinks it is, and his guiding takes on a more desperate aspect. Elephants Dream is a story about communication and fiction, made purposefully open-ended as the world’s first 3D animated “Open movie”. The film itself is released under the Creative Commons license, along with the entirety of the production files used to make it (roughly 7 Gigabytes of data). The software used to make the movie is the free/open source animation suite Blender along with other open source software, thus allowing the movie to be remade, remixed and re-purposed with only a computer and the data on the DVD or download.

A deer, disillusioned by the consumerism that defines his life. A lizard, ostracized from society, forever wandering. A chance meeting in the middle of a field. Who will survive? And who will transcend existence? Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2009.

Professor Owl gives a lecture on the evolution of Western musical instruments, starting with the advent of rudimentary brass, woodwind, string and percussion instruments by ancient cave dwellers at the dawn of history.

On a dark and stormy night, four bored ghosts decide to have some fun by calling the Ajax Ghost Exterminators.

In this clever and over-the-top satire of romantic rituals, a cartoon pickup artist is violently torn apart by the women he courts. Don Hertzfeldt's first student film, he plays the part of a mentally unwell animator who's losing his grip within his own movie; an idea he'd later revisit in other early "meta" shorts "Genre" and "Rejected". Despite being produced at the age of 18 and not intended for exhibition, HBO named it "The World's Funniest Cartoon" in 1998.