Don Hertzfeldt, by no means a household name, is a figure venerated in certain film circles. A 38-year-old autodidactic animator perhaps best known for Rejected, his absurdist breakthrough nominated for an Oscar for best animated short in 2000, Hertzfeldt’s vision has remained uncompromised throughout his nearly 20-year career. Rendering his now-iconic stick figures frame by frame, by hand—see: carpal tunnel syndrome—his shorts truly run the gamut, whether the darkly comic horror of letting a friend overzealously yank stitches after surgery in Wisdom Teeth (2010), or the subject of memory loss and life itself in the greater context of the universe for his three-part opus It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2011). He recently made his 17-minute World of Tomorrow (Indiewire says it’s “one of the best films of 2015” and the Onion's A.V. Club, “possibly the best film of 2015”) available for rental on vimeo.com, which marks both his first foray into science fiction as well as digital animation.

Vanity Fair: How did World of Tomorrow come to be? How old is its genesis?

Don Hertzfeldt: The earliest bits of it appeared in a graphic novel I wrote in 2013 called The End of the World. I drew every panel of the story on yellow sticky notes. I’d been wanting to make a science-fiction film for a long time, I think, and my curiosity about finally trying out digital animation was a good excuse to take the plunge. I also kind of liked how it was “His first digitally animated film!! Behold the future!!” after 20 years of pencil-and-paper animation, and it wound up kind of looking at times like it could have been made on primitive software in the 1990s.

Is there any consistency to your process or does it vary entirely from project to project?

I guess there’s consistency in sitting in sad, lonely, dark rooms for long stretches of time? But every project has its own nuances and challenges. The hardest thing to do is never a creative thing, it’s just bringing yourself back to that desk every single day.

Still from World of Tomorrow. Courtesy of Don Hertzfeldt.

You’ve screened more of your films in competition at Sundance than any other filmmaker—yet you generally circumvent the distributor/studio systems. What is screening at Sundance and other festivals like, then, when stripped of financial objectives?

Ha, well unfortunately it’s the distributor/studio systems that tend to circumvent all short films, not the other way around. So in the long while I’ve been doing this, it’s been an expanding experiment in inventing my own rules of self-distribution. And somehow it works. So at a festival like Sundance, you’re not looking to sell the short as much as publicize it. You walk down Main Street at Sundance and see a parade of stressed-out dealmakers dashing around screaming obscenities into their phones . . . these people are definitely not involved with shorts.