Good news for subscribers of Dropout: The comedy-forward service bursting with original series continues to prove it has the best taste in streaming.
Starting Tuesday, Aug. 4, the comedy platform announced it’s becoming the streaming home for a huge collection of filmmaker Don Hertzfeldt’s work, including the Oscar-nominated Rejected, the World of Tomorrow trilogy, and a stack of other shorts that have spent decades warping the brains of animation fans. Even better, Hertzfeldt’s latest film, Paper Trail, will make its streaming debut on Dropout after its theatrical awards run earlier this year.
If you’ve somehow never fallen down the Hertzfeldt rabbit hole, prepare yourself. His deceptively simple stick-figure animation has always been a Trojan horse for some of the funniest, saddest, most existential filmmaking ever put to screen. I mean, watch this sizzle reel.
Hertzfeldt has spent his entire career making fiercely personal films that refuse every convention of so-called “adult animation,” opting instead for something stranger and completely impossible to imitate. He’s a regular at the Sundance Film Festival and made one of the best Simpsons couch gags ever. Case in point: The image of a man holding a giant spoon next to a bug-eyed banana is one of the more mundane screenshots we could run with this story.
It’s also hard to imagine a better home than Dropout. After recently bringing Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared and a number of other toons into its catalog, the service seems to be striving to bring any and all singular comedy voices to the platform instead of chasing obvious recognizable brands. Hertzfeldt’s work is exactly the kind of uncompromising filmmaking that feels like it belongs alongside the rest of Dropout’s delightfully unhinged lineup.
“After seeing the films scattered across different streaming platforms for so many years, it’s amazing to finally bring them together under the same roof, for the very first time,” said Hertzfeldt in a news release. “I don’t know what Dropout is, but I hear it’s all game shows, and who doesn’t love a good game show?”
Here is the full list of films in The Don Hertzfeldt Collection that are now out on Dropout. I’d recommend one to watch first but, golly, you just gotta watch ’em all. Sorry.
- Lily and Jim
- Billy’s Balloon
- Rejected
- The Meaning of Life
- Watching Grass Grow
- Wisdom Teeth
- It’s Such a Beautiful Day (feature length)
- World of Tomorrow
- World of Tomorrow Episode Two: The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts
- On Memory
- World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime
- ME
Paper Trail, Hertzfeldt’s latest film, streams on Dropout on Sept. 1.