Bitter Films Vol. 1 1995-2005 collects 10 years' worth of Don Hertzfeldt's sweet animation, including the never-before-seen Spanky the Bear and other goodies. All images are (c) 1995-2006 Don Hertzfeldt /Bitter Films.

At the Animation Show event at this year's Comic-Con, the show's producers screened some new shorts and some past favorites, and Don Hertzfeldt's Intermission in the Third Dimension and Rejected were greeted like old friends. They were also the biggest laugh-getters of the evening.

Don is a funny guy, but, like all smart comic personalities, he's not afraid to move beyond comic elements in a filmography that contains some wonderfully disparate extremes -- an alien father talks philosophy to his son in mutant dialogue with no subtitles in The Meaning of Life; a rabbit in a cowboy hat chants "Lo, I am ruptured" while doing an interpretive dance in Genre; a small child is raised high into the air and dropped, not once but four times, by a vindictive red balloon in Billy's Balloon.

The creator of the unmistakable yet intentionally generic fishstick/fluffy thing with the notoriously bleeding anus in Rejected could be directing his own series on Adult Swim right now. Instead, he's at home, making shorts for the festival circuit. And he's living off it, not just since he was nominated for an Oscar for Rejected in 2001, but since college: his senior year of which he had to take the unusual step of ducking classes at UC Santa Barbara for a week to take his latest film to Cannes.

Hertzfeldt pays the rent thanks to his webshop -- t-shirts, keychains and DVDs, including his new career-encompassing Bitter Films Vol. 1 1995-2005. But, unlike, for example, the Homestar Runner guys, he's produced less than one short per year on average for the last five years. I mean, what the hell? The hell is a combination of things -- mainly the crack timing, possibly the endearing stick figures, certainly the cartoon violence, perhaps that Swedish record of Christmas songs and, in no small part, his collaboration with actor Robert May (who's given the world such life-affirming slogans as "Tuesday is coming, did you bring your coat?" and "My head is now a giant egg!").

Young Don burst into prominence with his first 16mm animated short, Ah L'Amour, in 1995, an immediate cult hit. The next year he animated Genre, in which a put-upon rabbit is the star of an accelerating series of tiny genre movies. In 1997 he released Lily and Jim, in which Robert May and Karin Anger played the title characters in a dialogue-driven piece about the worst ever blind date; and, in 1998 he earned critical acclaim and controversy for the unsettling tiny-tots-in-hell pastoral Billy's Balloon, where balloons abuse small children, beating them, dragging them and strangling them with their strings.

Unacceptable corporate branding in Rejected.

Hertzfeldt's watershed short, Rejected, was released in 2000, and it told the story of one Don Hertzfeldt, animator, who had been hired by a certain Family Learning Channel, as well as the Johnson & Mills Corp. into creating some interstitials and ad campaigns. The piece purports to be a compilation of all of Don's ads and bumpers, which have been rejected, and are indeed unsuitable to the point of get-this-guy-some-Lithium. Despite the hyperbole of the oh-so-wrong-for-broadcast quality of the material, many viewers bought the premise completely: an amazing idea, considering that the animator depicted in Rejected thought it would be appropriate to advertise Johnson & Mills' Bean Lard Mulch with an ad where one stick-man rips off another stick-man's stomach, puts it on his head and does a wavy-arm dance while announcing, "I am the Queen of France!"

Rejected remains Hertzfeldt's signature short, and the pressure to create a killer follow-up may be the reason why it took four years for Don to complete his next opus. He began animating The Meaning of Life in 2000 and worked on it solidly through 2003, when he took time out to join forces with King of the Hill creator Mike Judge on The Animation Show, a touring theatrical program of animated shorts. That year he put aside The Meaning of Life to make three interstitial pieces for The Animation Show Year One, including Welcome to the Animation Show, Intermission in the Third Dimension and The End of the Show -- three goofy jubilees of insanity hosted by two fluffy things from Rejected.