Shorts

'Paper Trail' (2026) by Don Hertzfeldt: Annecy Film Review

Vassilis Kroustallis 30 June 2026

Paper Trail animation short still Don Hertzfeldt

Don Hertzfeldt likes to make (micro) animated epics. The two-time Oscar nominee (for the 2000 'Rejected' and the 2015 'World of Tomorrow' shorts) US indie animation director has won the 2026 Annecy Festival Cristal for a short film, with the marvelously focused elegy of a life wasted, in the 14-minute animated 'Paper Trail'.

Meet Stevie Richardson, a boy in the 1980s who, like all children, likes to draw things. Going one step before the characteristic stick figures that populate Hertzfeldt's work, the film starts with brush and crayon strokes on a piece of paper and scratches in rapid succession, as if to offer us a genealogy of the director's trademark style. These strokes soon move into faces, human schemes, and letters. Hertfeldt will not go into the typography abstraction territory that Ryo Orikasa uses, but instead uses time as its own ruler. The film proceeds, as a matter of fact, into relationships, school education, aspirations in personal letters, and a first temp job as a clerk.

Then everything (including the screen) suddenly focuses on a single piece of a formal paper form (in its various close-ups). Flipbook-like repetition is here the tool for both the visual and narrative world of Stevie Richardson, and one of the cases (and a Kafkaesque synecdoche) in which a signature stands for the whole person.

Naomi Alligator is responsible for the music, a mix of synths and piano (with a well-placed addition of David Allred's 'Good Afternoon'), in an auditory style that has nothing of the grandeur and urgency of 'ME' (2024), the director's previous animation short and micro-epic. While 'ME" presents the narcissism of humans and their technological achievements, 'Paper Trail' goes back to the basics of the mundane (but still diverse) human experience, fabulously reconstructed in Hertfeldzt's own 'It's A Beautiful World'.

The film's subject matter is perfectly straightforward, but the way it unfolds makes it stand out like a treatment on lost hopes and aspirations. The space available in the early segments of the film is suddenly compressed, and clerical professionalism takes its toll, with the reddish 'Approved' signs being the only signal of differentiation. This is a no-dialogue film, which substitutes the spoken word with its written and drawn equivalent. As always, the significance of Hertzfeldt's artistry will not come from a single shot (even though the relationship part and the repeated signature segment still register after the film ends), but rather from the way he weaves the whole sequence in unison. Without an explicit chapter notation, the film proceeds as an even flow from past to present and even to a future Stevie Richardson who still writes (instead of drawing). And this prior knowledge the audience has of its character's eventual fate makes the film a poignant experience.

Less ambitious in scope than his previous animation films, but perfectly scaled to reveal the world of a character that simply learns to flow in an environment he didn't necessarily choose, 'Paper Trail' also pokes at the handwritten culture and our free-drawn experience, which needs to be in conformity with what ultimately becomes one's life work. The end credits (in typewriter mode) don't offer much hope for Steven Richardson, but at least they avoid having him deal with the 'are you a human' captcha of recent years.

Direct and visually eloquent in its transitions, 'Paper Trail' brings back memories of office environment conformity that today could even be celebrated (in the absence of standard, longtime office jobs). This feeling makes this almost airy elegy of lost creativity a mixed bag of emotions and a blast from the past, very welcome crayon brush stroke; as if the film tells you to somewhat feel joy in what was already a pain to begin with. And that has its own, distorted charm -like the film itself.