After spending the majority of the 2010s working on hifs sublime sci-fi trilogy World of Tomorrow, animation genius Don Hertzfeldt hinted he desired to work on a larger scale: “I’m not getting any younger. You just want to work faster. I’m jealous of actors, of musicians, of people able to put out multiple things in one year. To take two years to make a short film is just absurd. I don’t want to use a Marvel term, but we’re expanding the universe,” he told The Guardian. “I don’t relish doing this alone! I can’t be drawing little round heads by myself for the rest of my life.”
While his large-scale animation Antarctica fell apart, it looks like he’ll get his crack another big project soon. At the Overlook Film Festival for the premiere of his latest short, the dialogue-free musical ME (which may have been an Arcade Fire collaboration that he hugely reworked), Hertzfeldt confirmed his tease from earlier this year that he’s working with Ari Aster on a new feature. Carlos Aguilar reports from the Q&A that the director said it’ll be a “big/expensive project that he had been developing and trying to get made for the last 15 years.” He described the project as a “horror film in the same way his existentialist shorts are often seen as horror films.”
No additional details are currently known, nor when we’ll see a wider release for ME, but Aster’s love for experimental animation is well-documented, recently popping up in Beau Is Afraid, a film which drew inspiration from Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León’s The Wolf House. Aster, who is currently in production on his fourth feature Eddington, also executive produced that duo’s subsequent short The Bones, which one can catch over at MUBI and see a teaser for below.