Me [2024] by Don Hertzfeldt

ME is an abstract, experimental musical described by Hertzfeldt as being about narcissism and pain. Originally produced as a special music film for a rock band's forthcoming album, ME lost its funding late in production. The finished picture - a musical now without music - reverted back to Hertzfeldt, who recut and rescored it with "new music and new ideas". Sight and Sound Magazine compared ME to the "broken-puzzle poetry of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive", describing it as a "socio-cosmic satire" about "communication breakdown and its upshots -- solipsism, abandonment, blight, fascism -- set in a contemporary landscape of high tech and low morality... the film is [Hertzfeldt's] most coded, gnomic, and perhaps intuitive; both on the nose and deeply cryptic." The Film Stage described ME as a "dialogue-free musical that pushes the animation extraordinaire's inventiveness to new heights. Starting as a small-scale family drama before reaching perhaps the widest scope of his work yet, it's a rhythmically captivating odyssey into the fabric of humanity." Indiewire called ME a "brilliant apocalyptic musical about narcissism," noting it "seems to explode from a cosmic collision between nothing and everything all at once... these films keep stretching toward the stars as they probe deeper into the pit of our souls." Polygon named it one of the best animated films of the year, calling it "the type of movie that sticks with you long after it's finished, the type that makes you look at yourself, the people around you, and the world differently for having watched it." Cambridge Day called Hertzfeldt "perhaps our most beloved and influential living animator not named Hayao." In 2025, ME advanced to the "shortlist", the final round of voting for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film at the 97th Academy Awards, but did not make the ultimate list of five nominees.