28/07/2026 - The short animation by Don Hertzfeldt explores the bittersweet tragedy of growing up entirely through scraps of paper

Writer-director Don Hertzfeldt, who received two Academy Award nominations for his animated shorts Rejected (2000) and World of Tomorrow (2015), achieves a profound stylistic shift in his 14-minute Paper Trail. Having made its world premiere at Sundance – where it won the Special Jury Award for Creative Vision – then going on to land the highest honour at Annecy, and now screening at Fest Anča, this minimalist and experimental work builds an entirely different visual language, stepping away from the digital dystopias and familiar stick-figures of his prior filmography. It tells the entire life-story of a character named Steven Richardson, whose face we never see and whose voice we never hear, solely through the drawings, doodles and written words he leaves behind over the decades.

The film opens with a sense of pure curiosity and the joy of growth, starting with a child learning to make scribbles. This “paper trail”, initially shaped by infantile drawings, school assignments and heartfelt love letters, gradually gives way to grocery lists, bills and business documents as time marches on. Through mesmerising, rhythmic and rapid-fire cuts where editing and sound design reach a peak of intensity, Hertzfeldt presents how adulthood and professional life slowly flatten human creativity.

Paper Trail captures the profound heartbreak of witnessing a life journey that begins with a child’s pure creativity, boundless drawings and vivid imagination, only to evolve into the mechanical shading of standardised test sheets and, eventually, years of adulthood spent signing corporate documents without ever sketching or writing anything for pure joy again. By masterfully illustrating how a person loses their unique voice and the passion to create within that growing stack of paper, this high-concept work invites the audience to reflect on the mortality of our capacity for self-expression. Serving as flawless proof of how such a massive and universal story can be told with so little, this film stands out not just as a highlight of this year, but as one of the most poignant milestones in animation history.