"It's Such a Beautiful Day" (The Guardian 03/05/13)

It’s Such A Beautiful Day (nc) 62 mins ****

This may be the week’s biggest discovery, though you’ll have to venture to London’s ICA – where it plays until Thursday – to find it. American animator Don Hertzfeldt specialises in the kind of stick figure bored students dot the margins of maths textbooks with; it’s possible no-one has ever thought as seriously about the humble, vulnerable stickman, and what it might represent about us. Deploying a few deft pencil flicks, basic stopmotion and his own aptly spacey narration, Hertzfeldt’s hour-long debut surrounds its troubled hero Bill with a droll cosmology, in which eccentric, everyday detail – leafblowers, Lion King slippers – snuggles beside scratchy reminders of our place in the universe. The results are funny, oddly affecting and cherishably personal: in a better world, this would be on 300 screens, and filler like The Croods would have to be smuggled in under the radar.

It's Such a Beautiful Day plays at London's ICA until Thursday.