James Y. Lee
This article contains minor spoilers for It’s Such a Beautiful Day and Paper Trail.
As of September 1, the near-complete works of independent filmmaker Don Hertzfeldt—arguably the single most influential working indie Western animator today—have been published on indie comedy streaming service Dropout, a collaboration spearheaded by the streamer’s CEO and owner, Sam Reich. The resulting Don Hertzfeldt Collection includes, in a non-exhaustive list: the post-Y2K-internet-defining Rejected cartoons, the entirety of his universally-acclaimed feature film It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012), all three installments of the sprawling World of Tomorrow dystopian sci-fi series, and the latest of Hertzfeldt’s work, the festival-dominating Paper Trail, a short film that tells the story of a man through the papers he writes and draws on over the decades. This is a partnership of unassuming yet surprising significance to anyone paying attention to either Dropout or Don Hertzfeldt; a merging of minds between two totemic fixtures in modern independent media, each with their confidently carved niches and faithful audiences. Even the attempt at overlapping these two audiences is an indication of what the people behind this partnership hope to gain from it, with potentially significant implications for both the future of Dropout’s niche, and the kind of independent animation that Hertzfeldt has championed for over a quarter of a century.
To tell the story of this astonishing partnership is to start with CollegeHumor—the internet comedy company and YouTube channel that produced extensive quantities of popular sketch comedy before suffering a brutal demise in pre-COVID-2020 via the bankruptcy of their former parent company, IAC. At the time, Reich, one of CollegeHumor’s longtime performers and eventual President of Original Content, was literally its last remaining defender. Recognized more for his business acumen at CollegeHumor than his performing (he had also started a CH-offshoot production company, Big Breakfast, which partnered with numerous TV networks for various comedy shows) it made sense why his devoted loyalty to the people running CollegeHumor translated to his eventual purchase of the company under his own name. After fifteen interested buyers dropped out, Reich’s purchase occurred on astonishingly grim terms; all but 7 employees from the company were laid off, which amounted to over 100 staff members who were now out of employment. At the end of Reich’s plea for support on a Twitter thread he posted following the purchase was a declaration of shaky confidence: “We dropped out once before; we can do it again. Independent comedy lives on—just now more independent (gulp) than ever before.”
Given the bleakness of the purchase, the ensuing meteoric rise of Dropout remains one of independent comedy media’s most astonishing success stories, in effect becoming that industry’s equivalent of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg’s premature exits from Harvard. During CollegeHumor’s lifetime, Dropout was merely the company’s peripheral streaming service. Comedy sketches were uploaded there as ad-free full series; bonus features and Discord access to its performers were granted with Dropout subscriptions; at the end of CollegeHumor YouTube videos, its talents were advertising the streamer as an alternative, more complete way of viewing their content. Reich’s grand gamble was converting Dropout from the bonus-features hub to the main product of his new company, investing nearly all of the company’s capital into advertising Dropout subscriptions and turning its supplementary improv shows into marquee multi-season TV series.
The wheel Reich spun with that choice led to Dropout striking the jackpot. The slate of shows that have emerged from Dropout—Game Changer, Dimension 20, Make Some Noise, Very Important People, among countless others—have led to a powerful media empire with one of the most loyal online followings of recent memory, and a nearly unparalleled live in-person impact. Sold-out touring improv shows at central urban venues featuring Dropout’s slate of in-house talent; a board game generating millions of dollars in Kickstarter donations; Madison Square Garden-filling Dungeons & Dragons live games—these are merely a sample of demonstrations for the totemic status that Reich’s company has reached.
If Reich has, at this point, surely developed an appetite for the mainstream, he has done a remarkable job of resisting its temptations. He’s been publicly championing all things independent out of reverence for his company’s internet roots, as well as the online audiences who make its work possible. Dropout’s grandiose success makes it all the more fascinating that Reich’s next major move is to expand the streamer from here into a tastemaker for contemporary, online, and independent Western animation. Toonout is a running show with biweekly episodes featuring independent animated shorts from a rotating collection of artists. This past February saw Dropout’s acquisition deal with the British animated horror series Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, which included all episodes of its original YouTube run from 2011 to 2016, as well as its higher-budget sequel series that released on Channel 4 in 2022. In the context of these developments, The Don Hertzfeldt Collection is a fitting continuation of Reich’s desire to platform independent animators—and it’s also perhaps the streamer’s most high-profile animation acquisition yet.
Don Hertzfeldt’s career took off, not unlike Reich’s, with crass internet comedy. As a Class-of-’98 student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Hertzfeldt was one of the only animators of his age receiving regular film festival exposure, defined mostly by his desire to create avant-garde film that wanted to amuse more than confound. As he described in a Reddit AMA earlier this year: “‘Experimental film’ was always flashing lights and people in masks going up and down staircases and footage of autopsies, making grand statements about things that didn’t mean anything to me… Joy is a pretty important human emotion that the experimental art world just seemed totally uninterested in.” What ensued from Hertzfeldt’s irreverent pursuit of joy was a series of bleakly funny short films—Lily and Jim, Wisdom Teeth, Billy’s Balloon, among others, all of which found festival premieres—that culminated in 2000’s Rejected, the satirical saga of a fictionalized Hertzfeldt descending into madness as he creates increasingly bizarre stick-figure advertisements that eventually lose their grasp on reality, and then viscerally collapse into themselves in deeply disturbing detail.
More than film festivals, however, Rejected would enjoy its greatest success under the spotlight of the early internet. Reich himself would stumble on the film, and never be able to forget it. As he would describe following Dropout’s acquisition of Hertzfeldt’s work: “One image stands out to me as illustrative of the era—a black-and-white image of a stick figure holding a spoon saying, ‘My spoon is too big!'” Reich is not alone in this sentiment. On the YouTube video for Rejected alone, countless elder-millenial commenters lamenting their age seem doused in nostalgia for a more irreverent era of media distribution where this short was shown in 120p-resolution at LAN parties. Almost unanimously, these commenters credit Rejected for having defined a generation of internet humor that popular online media like TomSka’s asdfmovie series would follow suit on. But Hertzfeldt’s work and image has changed since then, finding more success and acclaim among the arthouse-film crowd with increasingly existential and formally rigorous work.
The Meaning of Life (2005) was a transitional work for Hertzfeldt, a colossal feat of animation that saw him individually drawing, frame-by-frame, gigantic crowds of his trademark stick figures to unfurl a tale of evolution and progress over an incomprehensible span of time. Said fixation on memory over time seems to have followed Hertzfeldt’s work for the rest of his career. It’s Such a Beautiful Day charts out the tale of Bill, afflicted by a nondescript memory-loss ailment rooted in profound family dysfunction, and culminates in an ending that traverses years, then centuries, then millennia, and then eons beyond our understanding. Among the countless sci-fi elements retooled and deconstructed in the masterful, dystopian World of Tomorrow series of shorts is immortality via cloning; not just of our bodies and consciousnesses, but also lower-quality recreations of our bodies into backup clones, in case our immediate, primary-consciousness lineage might perish. Even the couch gag that Hertzfeldt created for the premiere of The Simpsons‘ 26th season portrays Homer, Marge, and their children demented into corporate-sponsored, catchphrase-relaying simplifications of their past selves, implied to be the result of memories lost and flattened over the course of hundreds of thousands of years.
All this makes Hertzfeldt’s latest short, Paper Trail, that much more astonishing. It is a legitimately shocking reinvention of Hertzfeldt’s style; instead of rooting its story in the dystopian future, Paper Trail‘s tale begins in the ’80s. And instead of featuring stick figure characters, we’re left to infer who Paper Trail‘s protagonist, Steven Richardson, actually is via his writing. Well, not just his writing; we almost certainly glimpse him in his infancy, doodling incomprehensible shapes and images on walls and on paper, before we start to move through his life over the years with formal fluidity and rapid-cut tapestries. All the while, Hertzfeldt’s “camera” seems fixed on Steven’s hand, trailing behind the writing utensils he wields, hanging directly over the paper he writes on.
We watch as Steven grows into a kid, and he starts drawing stick figures with crude shapes and imaginatively simplistic bodies. He misspells his own name, but we see how much he loves his parents (although he seems to prefer his mother), and the kinds of hobbies and dreams that excite his young mind. He enters school, and suddenly, the papers he writes on have questions, and lines, and delineated spaces for answers and drawings and essays and multiple-choice bubbles. And then he becomes an adult; he writes letters, scribbles grocery lists, solves crosswords, fills out his signature, and files taxes and bills. And then—all of a sudden, the utterly devastating conclusion of Paper Trail comes out of absolutely nowhere. At first, you don’t recognize the film’s final stretch as such, until suddenly, the years of Steven’s story aggressively slip by without any warning, and Hertzfeldt’s genius—his comprehension of immortality—returns like a looming shadow to crystallize into a different, more realistic, yet no less crushing form.
At the world premiere of Paper Trail at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, it wasn’t merely the film’s incredible quality that astonished me; it was also being able to witness the audience that showed up for Hertzfeldt, and also Hertzfeldt’s generosity as an artist. In line for the first showing of the Animated Shorts Program that Paper Trail premiered in, I spoke with numerous people who held It’s Such a Beautiful Day and World of Tomorrow high in their list of films that changed their lives forever. Following the kaleidoscope of talent in said program, I was able to talk with Hertzfeldt briefly about how powerful I found the film, and how it still distinctly felt like his work. He responded with genuine humility. He was grateful to hear people’s thoughts on Paper Trail for the first time; he considered making the film one of the smoothest animation processes of his career; he had wanted to return to depicting an era of pen-to-paper communication for some time, and assumed that must have resulted from how digital and dystopian his recent line of work had been. In the Q&A right after the screening, he took his share of time to uplift the endeavor that his fellow animators in the lineup had undergone to get their films made. It was an acknowledgement of both the fact that independent animation’s force is dwindling in the studio and streaming era, but also of the fact that artistry can still be championed and platformed by alternative means.
Thus, a question emerges: Will Sam Reich and Dropout prove to be among those alternative platforms? One of the most pivotal issues that plague independent animation is, indeed, a matter of distribution. The ever-growing prominence of sites like YouTube in the filmmaking scene has long been framed as a matter of democratization, but such a large platform brings with it near-insurmountable competition. Long have we heard fabled success stories of filmmakers hitting millions of views on the internet where they otherwise would have been contained to smaller audiences on the festival circuit. But buried beneath those success stories are those of millions of animators who fail to find the reach of either. A recent PR correspondence revealed to me that Daniel Zvereff’s Moonfish (2026) was the only animated film to be selected for this year’s Venice Film Festival, a legitimately shocking fact to read. And across the industry, we hear reports of mass layoffs at prestige studios like Pixar—while other animation studios are steadily growing preoccupied with the expansion of existing IP than original material.
But a place like Dropout, if it were to play its cards right, could serve as the beginning of a potential answer. The streamer occupies a unique place within the modern media paradigm; a TV service with demonstrated Emmy ambitions that still is greatly indebted to the indie-spirit advances of the internet and the droves of mainstream-adjacent, loyal audiences it brings. It also bears remarking that Hertzfeldt specifically agreed to his partnership with Dropout, almost certainly out of an acknowledgment that his indie ethos aligns with Dropout’s, but also likely because of the possibilities that Dropout’s scale could potentially lend him. In that same, aforementioned, Reddit AMA, Hertzfeldt noted that he had been looking for a streaming home for the remainder of the World of Tomorrow series after he had finished the third installment. Wanting to expedite the series’ production timeline—at which point he had been making episodes on a near-bi-yearly basis on his own—he said that he sought a place “that could finance the production of the rest of the episodes all at once, like a limited series.” Speculatively speaking, could Dropout potentially be that home for Hertzfeldt’s future work, if they’ve already been so willing to platform his existing films in a collection?
Any more guesswork on Dropout or Hertzfeldt’s intentions would likely be both moot and falsely prophetic. But the implications of this collaboration are still noteworthy and significant. Hertzfeldt might occupy a loyal niche within the arthouse-film scene, but it is still certainly a niche—even if it’s been enough to become Hertzfeldt’s living. And no matter what the turnout for his collaboration with Dropout winds up being, even the attempt at merging these two fandoms—as well as appealing to those who are already fans of both—is an act of great confidence. It is a demonstrable investment in Dropout’s future as a potential home for animators, as well as an expansion of Hertzfeldt’s work, showing that his profile has become so renowned that a popular streamer with Emmy aspirations earnestly desires to collaborate with him, and is unashamed to promote his work on their various social media platforms.
Even setting aside any implications, the wonder of Hertzfeldt and Dropout’s collaboration, on its own merits, cannot be understated. What a remarkable thing it is that an artist as pioneering as Hertzfeldt has found a streaming audience, and that more people have found the chance to comfortably access his work. How fantastic it is that Reich and his leadership of Dropout remains devoted to preserving indie art, even as Dropout is toeing the line with its growing mainstream appeal in a complicated balance. Perhaps the most admirable thing about this collaboration is the fact that it seemingly came about because of Reich’s earnest appreciation for Hertzfeldt’s work—so much so that Reich had sent, in his words, a “love letter” to Hertzfeldt as part of his licensing request. More than profit motive or audience growth, it was artistic respect that seemed to have spawned this partnership—respect for an indie veteran who, like Reich, learned what it means to scrounge for a grassroots audience and develop a living from independent artistry. It makes you wonder how many undiscovered artists we could learn about, be exposed to, and fall in love with, if that kind of respect was the foundation on which the industry would platform the underappreciated luminaries of our cinematic world.
