It's Such a Beautiful Day, a trilogy of animated shorts, uses photo/stock-footage manipulation and live-action film along with animated line drawing to tell the story of Bill, a career loser's life and death. Eternally wearing a porkpie hat a la that other stoically beleaguered Everyman, Buster Keaton, Bill is a likeable, sensitive soul, awake to visceral everyday sensations such as seeing a discarded woman's tennis shoe on the street, stuffed with leaves, which fills him, as he says, with "an inexplicable sadness."

Creator Don Hertzfeld has a wry, amusing purview which brings a lot of disarming surprise and likeability to this project. The narration is tonally perfect, lightly unstressed and fully serving the concept in a graceful way.

The stick figures Hertzfeld employs are ultra-simple, but nevertheless have a remarkable expressiveness in his hands. The use of music, which ranges from familiar extracts from Smetana and Wagner to the male duet from Bizet's The Pearl Fishers, is extremely canny and at times downright hilarious.

Trailer: