★★★★
Don Hertzfeldt abandons stick figures for a life told entirely in scraps of paper, and what begins as bewildering abstraction resolves into fourteen of the most devastating minutes of the year.
The opening couple of minutes are deliberately disorienting: crayon marks, brush strokes and scratches piling up in rapid succession, abstraction with no clear object. Then the strokes cohere into faces, into letters, into handwriting, and the film’s method announces itself.
Spoilers from this point on…
This is the life of one Stevie Richardson, born in the 1980s, told exclusively through the paper he leaves behind. There is no dialogue, no face, no voice. There is only what he drew and wrote and, later, what was drawn and written at him.
Hertzfeldt has spent a career finding new ways to stretch animation over the whole span of a human life, and Paper Trail may be the purest expression of that instinct yet. The early sheets are all space and invention, a child’s uncontained scribble filling the frame. What follows is a slow, exact evolution and reduction: the margins narrow, the penmanship tightens, the loose pages give way to forms, and the only flashes of colour left are the red stamps of approval that mark a life processed rather than lived. The tactile sound design does as much work as the images, every rasp of pencil and shuffle of paper amplified until the accumulation becomes unbearable.
The effect is cumulative rather than dependent on any single image, and it funnels its audience into the climax. Where It’s Such a Beautiful Day went at mortality head-on, this comes at it sideways, through bureaucracy and diminishment, the sheer administrative volume of an ordinary existence. By the time the film returns one last time to that recurring signature, the throat tightens. A superb, heart-annihilating achievement.
Paper Trail is playing Fantasia 2026 in Montreal